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

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

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

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

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? (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

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.

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. (GOVT-AM)

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

This course is a seminar focused on a service-learning approach to understanding the history of neoliberal transformations of the global economy through the lens of an island (Jamaica) and a community (Petersfield). Building on the success of previous year's global service-learning course and trip to Petersfield, and now bringing the course under the auspices of both the Engaged Cornell and Cornell Abroad administrative and funding capabilities. Students will attend class each week and will also take a one-week service trip over spring break to work with the local community partner (AOC) in Petersfield. We will also work with Amizade, a non-profit based in Pittsburgh, who is the well-established partner of the AOC and which works with numerous universities on global service learning projects. They have a close relationship with CU Engaged Learning and Research. (HIST-HTR)

Full details for AMST 2016 - Understanding Global Capitalism Through Service Learning

The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musical-and how in turn musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST, MUSIC-HC, PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 2105 - The American Musical

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

Full details for AMST 2106 - Introduction to Latina-o-x Studies

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

This course explores the wide variety of languages indigenous to the Americas. There were thousands of languages spoken in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans and hundreds of these languages are still spoken today. We will look at several of these languages in terms of their linguistic structure as well as from social, historical, and political perspectives. No prior linguistic background is required and no previous knowledge of any Native American languages is presumed.

Full details for AMST 2248 - Native American Languages

This course uses art and popular culture to provide a dynamic view of Black religion in the United States and the Diaspora throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Discussion topics include: religiosity in the visual art of Kara Walker, P-Valley's Hoodoo representation, and James Baldwin's Black Sanctified aesthetics. By engaging broadly with visual art, film, music, and television, students will gain a sense of the various religious and spiritual traditions that pervade contemporary popular culture and gain the ability to think critically about how religious themes show up on television, in music, and in the world around them.

Full details for AMST 2322 - Black Religion and Pop Culture

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

Full details for AMST 2350 - Archaeology of Indigenous North America

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. (HIST-HNA)

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. 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 environment). 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

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

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

While the march toward the Civil War centers race in our recollection of the nineteenth century, the question of slavery’s abolition was deeply intertwined with issues of gender and citizenship. One challenge of narrating these interwoven movements is accounting for the embodied intersection of these debates: Black women. This introductory course approaches the complexities of antebellum America through 5 prominent figures of the period bearing the same first name—Harriet Robinson Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson. Read together, these women illuminate the nuances of racialized and gendered belonging in the United States. Their literary and historical traces also invite engagements with Black feminist reading and archival praxes.

Full details for AMST 2507 - Reading Harriet: An Introduction to Race, Gender, and Belonging in the Antebellum United States

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. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2581 - Environmental History

The production of North American Indigenous literatures began long before European colonization, and persists in a variety of printed, sung, carved, painted, written, spoken, and digital media. From oral traditions transmitted through memory and mnemonics to contemporary genres and media, Native North American authors offer Indigenous perspectives on social, political, and environmental experience, through deft artistry and place-specific aesthetics. Our attention will focus on the contexts from which particular Native American literatures emerge, the ethics to consider when entering Indigenous intellectual territory, and close attention to common themes and techniques that frequently appear in contemporary Native American literature. Readings will feature a range of novels, poetry, short fiction, graphic novel/comics, and film. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 2600 - Introduction to Native American Literature

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

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

This survey course introduces students to key movements and figures in North American Art, Architecture, and Design across the twentieth century. Engaging with works of art and design from within the cannon as well as vernacular and everyday objects, students will explore the intersections of politics and visual culture, with particular attention to questions of race, gender, colonialism, and labor across geographic space. Questions we will consider include: How have art and material culture produced particular relationships to landscape and national identity? How have borders and the experience of migration forged unique forms of artistic practice and urban life? How have technological innovations transformed cities, spaces, and media? And what does it mean to engage critically with these historical forces through diverse forms of representation?

Full details for AMST 2652 - 20th Century North American Art, Architecture, and Design

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. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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.

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

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. (HIST-HNA)

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.

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

Why no socialism in America? Scholars and activists have long pondered the relative dearth (compared to other industrialized societies) of sustained, popular, anticapitalist activity in the United States. Sure, leftist movements in the U.S. have often looked and operated differently than those in other parts of the world. But many Americans have forged creative and vibrant traditions of anticapitalism under very difficult circumstances. This class examines socialist thought and practice in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present. We trace intersections of race, class, and gender while exploring the freedom dreams of those who have opposed capitalism in the very heart of global power. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2955 - Socialism in America

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

This is a class about the American criminal justice system-from policing to prisons, from arrest to reentry. In many ways, the operation of the modern criminal justice system is taken for granted, which frequently allows it to escape close scrutiny. But we will examine it in great detail, with a focus on how it came about, how it sustains itself, its many roles in society (only some of which involve crime and justice), and how and why it may be changing. In Spring 2027, the class will take a particular look at the use of the criminal justice system by the Trump Administration and reflect on whether, and to what extent, that use has been legitimate. NB: This class is designed to challenge your settled assumptions and dearly held myths about what is right and wrong with the system. Those who have made up their mind about criminal justice in America should not take the course. (GOVT-AM)

Full details for AMST 3121 - Crime and Punishment

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 is designed to introduce students to important theories, concepts, and empirical findings in the study of aging and policy, giving them a deeper understanding of the issues people encounter as they grow older. While the course will primarily cover current U.S. policies and trends, we will also discuss some historical aspects and compare to policies found elsewhere. (HCP-EL)

Full details for AMST 3230 - Public Policy for an Aging Society

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

This course asks a deceptively simple question: what do we mean by “American music?” This class explores how the idea of American music was constructed, debated, and contested from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than treating national identity as self-evident, the course asks by what criteria—and by whose authority—music has been claimed as American. Students will study historical and contemporary debates about folk music, art music, popular music, race, indigeneity, and cultural heritage, drawing from scholarly and journalistic sources. Through close reading, discussion, and short writing assignments, participants will learn to analyze nationalist discourse critically, developing tools to recognize how cultural identities are constructed, naturalized, and contested both within music and in broader political life.

Full details for AMST 3323 - How Music Became “American”

This popular course was introduced here at Cornell a decade ago. This year will mark the third time that we’ve been able to offer it, in light of all the moving parts and unique components that pulling it off requires. Beyoncé’s recent albums and related tours, namely Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, have taken her iconicity to new heights evidenced in contexts from the 2024 Olympics to advertisements for Levi’s Jeans. Her song “Freedom” from her Lemonade album was the anthem for the 2024 presidential campaign of Vice President of Kamala Harris. As a musical artist, Beyoncé emerged at the forefront of activism during the past decade, and helped to advocate for a more inclusive vision of the U.S. as a nation, while drawing attention to the long-overlooked contributions of African Americans to the genre of country music. All of these dimensions of her artistry and many more are important to study in order to understand her national and global impact. In this course, we examine her contributions, along with various figures connected to her, including her closest family. Beyoncé’s trajectory from Houston, Texas as a member of the group Destiny's Child to international fame and superstardom and a successful career as a solo singer, actress, clothing designer and entrepreneur holds important implications for critical dialogues on the U.S. South and national femininity. We will carefully trace Beyoncé's journey to global fame and iconicity and the roles of the music business, social media and technology, fashion, and film in her development.

Full details for AMST 3355 - Beyoncé Nation: The Decennium

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.

Full details for AMST 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education

Hardly a day passes that we do not encounter some reference to the idea of Conservatism in ordinary discourse, especially in the political sphere. And there is no dearth of claimants to conservative identity. Even a presidential candidate once described himself as “severely conservative”. I think it is time to put the phenomenon of conservatism under the intellectual microscope. But it is a particular sector of conservative thought that interests us in this course. It is that sector that is either overlooked or ignored, by design or default, it matters little, in the literature. It is that sector peopled by African American thinkers. The aim in this class is to explore the idea of conservatism, the core claims associated with it, its many variants, as well as what philosophical claims are made in its name and what philosophical arguments are offered in its justification. Who is a conservative? What is conservatism? How has conservatism evolved over time and what might we learn from this history both for our understanding of the idea during our own time and our assessment of its claims in social and political philosophy? This we do from the perspective of African American contributors to the discourse.

Full details for AMST 3406 - Conservatism in Black

Environmental Justice Studio is a space for engaged learning and research, giving students an opportunity to join ongoing struggles to seed more equitable environmental futures. Each semester, students learn by doing, partnering with community organizers and creating digital humanities resources of immediate use in contemporary fights for environmental justice. The course is highly collaborative in nature, as is all effective organizing work, and requires bright, creative, justice-minded students eager to learn in a non-traditional classroom environment. Through this work, they will become familiar with the history and theory of environmental justice work in the United States, gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce multimedia resources for a broader civic audience.

Full details for AMST 3418 - Environmental Justice Studio

Social Justice: Special Topics explores feminist, anthropological, and interdisciplinary perspectives on social justice. It connects domestic and international concerns and fosters active and engaged learning, research, and discovery.

Full details for AMST 3420 - Social Justice: Special Topics

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 second semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Maureen Mahon, Marla Frederick, Lynee Denise, and Deesha Philyaw and artists like the Clark Sisters, Aretha Franklin, Toni Braxton, and Beyonce. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between.

Full details for AMST 3422 - Gospel and The Blues: A Black Women’s History II, 1973-2023

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

How do we understand black home and black place? Are these stable sites? Black homes and black spaces are disproportionately interrupted by the racialized force of disinvestment, gentrification, redlining, eminent domain, and more. We will explore how this spatial instability affects the aesthetics and architecture of black place as well its forms of domesticity, gender, and familial relations. This will include the study of visual artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, popular culture like Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016-2022) and a spatial case study of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ll consider these in relation to work from scholars W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and more.

Full details for AMST 3515 - The Black Home in Theory, Art, and Architecture

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.

Full details for AMST 3565 - Black Ecoliterature

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. (HIST-HNA)

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. (HIST-HNA)

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. (MUSIC-PL)

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. (GOVT-PT)

Full details for AMST 3715 - Colonialism and Anticolonialism

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

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

This course invites students to consider how Black women interacted with material objects and how these artifacts informed the contexts of their daily lives. the history of Black women as creators, consumers, and collectors of artifacts tells a story about American society, culture, and the contributions of Black women's labors and ideas to the production and meaning of material culture across time. From the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, Black women experienced layered relationships to artifacts, some of which they were forced to create under the system of chattel slavery and others they encountered through the prisms of desire and liberation. these varied contexts that inform Black women's connections to material and visual objects shape how they assign meaning to these artifacts and their cultural significance. Students will engage with course themes through research-based curatorial projects that introduce them to public history and digital history methods. The course will conclude with the development of a digital archive focused on curating the history of Black women's experiences with material culture.

Full details for AMST 3752 - Black Women and Material Culture

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

Anchoring the East and West coasts, New York and Los Angeles have been celebrated and excoriated in films. On the edge literally and metaphorically, these cities seem to be about competing visions of urban form, culture, and modernity. The iconic forms of New York (tenements and skyscrapers) and of Los Angeles (highways and suburban homes) have fascinated film makers from the nineteenth century to the present day. We will both evoke and complicate the contrasts between New York and Los Angeles by mapping the intersections of each city with cinema. We explore how the urban experience gives rise to particular cinematic forms and how cinematic styles are translated or not into urban design. (PMA-HTC)

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

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

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.

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. (GOVT-AM)

Full details for AMST 4021 - American Conservative Thought

This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in hot wars as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will reckon with Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory. (ASIAN-SC, PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 4022 - U.S. Cultures of War and Empire

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. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)

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

Since the first live sporting event was televised in 1939, sports and television have enjoyed a privileged relationship. Sports coverage has driven technological advances in television production, while also serving as an economic linchpin for broadcast media. Meanwhile, the political activism and personal lives of athletes have generated controversy, captivating news media. This course will examine the medium of television from postwar to present, using sports to explore American politics, nationalism, identity, celebrity, and audiences, as well as media industries, consolidation, and the transition to digital streaming platforms. It will likewise engage with important narrative television centered around sports, including recent hits, Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, as well as the "sportification" of television more broadly, such as with the rise of competitive cooking shows.

Full details for AMST 4246 - Sports TV: Athletes, Industries, Audiences

American society has changed dramatically over the last century, arguably most profoundly in terms of gender and gender roles. This course examines changing interpretations of gender through film and sociology. Each week we watch a film that centers gender – typically a romantic comedy, family drama, or coming of age film – along with sociological discussions of gender from or about that period. The course progresses a decade a week. Films vary from semester to semester but may include Stella Dallas (1937), Now Voyager (1942), Gidget (1957), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Carnal Knowledge (1971), She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Good Will Hunting (1997), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Frances Ha (2012), Her (2013).

Full details for AMST 4290 - 100 Years of Romantic Comedy

This course focuses on the mutually constitutive relationship between media technologies and society, approaching media not as a set of technologies but as a set of practices, infrastructures, and struggles over meaning and power. Central to the course is a practice of reading one thing and/as another. We will read media objects in terms of their visual, aural, spatial, or informational registers, but also as sites of mediation structured by systems of power and difference. Throughout the course, we will think with artists and/as theorists, attending to arguments made through artistic gestures and to the creative, at times deeply experimental practices of scholars whose need and ability to hold two ideas in various forms of relation to one another mirrors an artistic practice.

Full details for AMST 4412 - Media Metaphors

Does abstraction free us from the burden of the racialized body? For some black artists and thinkers abstraction in visual art has that potential and for others it all enables exploration of blackness’s exclusion from normative bodily form. In this class we study the work of artists such as, Norman Lewis, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, Howardena Pindell, and Torkwase Dyson to consider the way that abstraction helps us understand blackness not as a stable visible identity but as something more complex. We will study these works through the lens of black critical theorists including Hortense Spillers, Rizvana Bradley, Huey Copeland and more.

Full details for AMST 4515 - Black Abstraction

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. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

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

Forced or chosen, migration exacts complex costs. How have writers from across the globe adopted and changed the novel -- a form associate with rise of imperialism -- to tell stories about migration and exile? How do these aesthetic challenges also dovetail with or diverge from the aesthetics of detention spaces and borders? Is there a useful aesthetic theory or creative practice for stories about migration when aesthetics have been closely tied to power? How do affective structures lean on or escape aesthetic habits to make new meaning, tell new stories that don’t simply end in acculturation or assimilation? We will engage with these questions by studying novels, art, and memoirs alongside recent theories of aesthetics and affect.

Full details for AMST 4640 - Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction on the Move

This course will explore the cultural, political and social ramifications of stand-up comedy through the lens of twentieth and twenty-first century stand up comedians. Because of streaming services, Stand Up is more accessible than ever to a wider audience. Too, streamed video is not subject to the censorship rules of broadcast television so the wider array of subject matter and the way that subject can be presented is direct and fearless, making comics not just entertainers, but cultural influencers in a much broader way that earlier cultural critics, such as Lenny Bruce and Moms Mabley could only imagine. This newfound influence makes Stand Up comedians and their comedy ripe for study, not only within a cultural context but also as a part of free-speech arguments. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 4672 - Funny Business: Stand Up Comedy and Its Social, Political, and Cultural Importance

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. (PMA-HTC)

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

In this upper-level undergraduate/graduate seminar, students will analyze the survival strategies employed by people (of color) assigned female at birth as they perform versions of queer masculinities—on stage, on screen, in literature, in visual culture, and in everyday life.

Full details for AMST 4712 - Performing Queer Masculinities

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 4792 - Latinx Education Across the Americas

Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a haven for the oppressed. We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 4851 - Refugees

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

Full details for AMST 6202 - Political Culture

This course explores the wide variety of languages indigenous to the Americas. There were thousands of languages spoken in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans and hundreds of these languages are still spoken today. We will look at several of these languages in terms of their linguistic structure as well as from social, historical, and political perspectives. No prior linguistic background is required and no previous knowledge of any Native American languages is presumed.

Full details for AMST 6240 - Native American Languages

This course explores the concepts of membership, belonging, citizenship and (im)migration with regards to the U.S. Latina-o-x experience. In this course, we will examine how historically, politically, socially and culturally, Latinas-os-xs have been construed as belonging or not belonging members of U.S. society. Given the multifaceted nature of the topics, our investigation of these topics will rely on an interdisciplinary approach. That is, we will draw from materials and knowledge in political science, sociology, history, public policy, and the law. The course will survey materials, concepts, and theories to investigate the ways in which race, immigration, gender, geography, politics and policy have defined how, when and under what circumstances Latinas-os-xs belong or do not belong in America.

Full details for AMST 6252 - Latino Politics and the Boundaries of Belonging

Abstract art poses generative problems and possibilities for thinking racial blackness. Some accounts posit a turn from figurative representation to visual abstraction of blackness/black experience as a move toward freer artistic expression, unburdened by confining cultural markings of race. We will question the supposed freedom of this turn to abstraction and explore the conditions of violent exclusion from normative bodily and representational form that confine blackness to abstraction. Modernist abstraction’s move to dismantle illusionism and emphasize materiality enables an understanding of blackness not as a stable, visible identity category but as free-floating trace, concept, formlessness, and obdurate materiality. This course analyzes practices and theories of abstraction in the twentieth century to the present, from the racialized contours of the Western avant-garde and black abstractionists.

Full details for AMST 6515 - Black Abstraction

This course will explore postwar US poetry through the lens of what might be called micro-periodization. Taking the decade as a privileged frame of reference, we’ll ask what recognizable shifts in style, institutional placement, and cultural value occur as we move from the 50s to the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. These temporal modulations will serve as an alternative to the spatial demarcations that have typically shaped accounts of postwar poetry—e.g., by region, school, movement, etc. We’ll consider, for example, how the loosely paratactic style that emerges in the 50s (Ginsberg, Lowell, Bishop) gives way in the 60s to a starker lyric mode that blends epiphany and epigram (Merwin, Wright, Creeley), yielding in turn to a more discursive style in the 70s (Ammons, Ashbery, Rich).

Full details for AMST 6631 - American Poetry, 1950-2000

In this upper-level undergraduate/graduate seminar, students will analyze the survival strategies employed by people (of color) assigned female at birth as they perform versions of queer masculinities—on stage, on screen, in literature, in visual culture, and in everyday life.

Full details for AMST 6712 - Performing Queer Masculinities

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. (GOVT-PT)

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

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