AMST110F Hawaii: Myths and Realities (FYS)

This course explores the symbolic myths of Hawai'i and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) in contrast to material realities relating to colonialism, land, nation, gender, race, rank, class, self-determination, and contests over indigenous and Western sovereignty. The course covers the pre-colonial period, examines Captain Cook's ventures in the Hawaiian Islands, the founding of the Hawaiian Kingdom, constitutional development of the Hawaiian Nation, the Kamehameha Dynasty, Calvinist missionization, the history of written literacy, the privatization of Hawaiian land use, gender transformations, the colonial regulation of sexuality, plantation labor, Kalakaua's governance, the reign of Queen Lili'uokalani, and the US-backed overthrow of the monarchy. From the US takeover, the class examines the unilateral annexation and 20th-century colonial policy to 1959 statehood with an emphasis on indigenous self-determination, decolonization, and indigenous nationalism through the contemporary period in relation to both US federal policy and international law with a focus on land struggles. Films will complement the course readings.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST115F Reproductive Politics (FYS)

This course explores the history and current status of reproductive politics in the United States. By prioritizing issues of difference, including race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class, the course will consider how scientific and bioethical concerns intersect with matters of cultural ideology and social control. Issues covered will include: the history and legacy of the birth control movement; the ideological construction of "infancy"; changing attitudes towards pregnancy and childbirth; gendered and racialized conceptions of parenthood; abortion rights; the fetal personhood debates; the regulation of pregnancy within incarcerated and institutionalized settings; genetic engineering; reproductive justice; and so on.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: FGSS113F, STS115F
Prereq: None

AMST117F Social Norms / Social Power: Queer Readings of "Difference" in America (FYS)

This American Studies FYS is an interdisciplinary exploration of the privileges and penalties associated with "the normal" in the United States. We'll be centrally concerned with the ways bodily difference and social identity interarticulate with "normalness," locating individuals within hierarchical power structures. What is "normativity," if not a statistical norm? How are regimes of normativity produced, reproduced, and challenged?



Our focus is on queer studies, which we will approach through an intersectional lens, paying careful attention to the ways race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, disability, gender, and sexuality intersect in social terrains of power. We will unpack and explore key concepts in American studies, including settler colonialism, compulsory ablebodiness, heteronormativity, biopolitics, neoliberalism, and ideology, drawing on a range of genres and disciplines, including memoir, ethnography, film, and theory in disability studies, queer theory, critical race studies, Marxist feminism, Native American studies, and trans studies. Along the way, we will encounter problematics ranging from disability and the "normal" to the American Dream, the "wedding-industrial complex," sexual "deviance" and desire, racialized state violence, the privatization of the public space, and the politics of queer/LGBT activism.



As a First Year Seminar, this course is writing-intensive and is structured to give you ample practice in core writing, reading, and presentation skills needed at Wesleyan. This course is part of the Queer Studies and the Disability Studies Course Cluster, and it is cross-listed in FGSS.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: FGSS117F
Prereq: None

AMST121F Are You a Feminist? (FYS)

Taking our cue from Beyoncé and the debates her music has produced, this First Year Seminar investigates the meaning of feminism by considering how writers, artists, activists, academics, and public intellectuals discuss the topic. Students' curiosity about feminism - as topic, politics, identity, and practice - will guide class meetings where we will discuss readings by prominent feminist writers, scholars, and critics. Students will leave the course with a clear sense of themselves as writers and thinkers, as well as an understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, and other social identities and of the multiplicities of feminisms in our contemporary moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: WRCT121F, ENGL121F, FGSS121F
Prereq: None

AMST122F Race and Identity in 21st Century Literature (FYS)

This course will center on race and identity in contemporary American literature by focusing on novels written by Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, Tommy Orange and Ocean Vuong as well as plays by Lynn Nottage, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Ayad Akhtar and Jackie Sibbles Drury. Extra readings will include poems and short stories. We will consider the portrayals of race, identity, class, ethnicity, religion, trauma, citizenship, migration and sexuality in these works, as well as the ways in which these authors conceptualize and problematize American identity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AFAM122F
Prereq: None

AMST125F Staging America: Modern American Drama (FYS)

Can modern American drama--as cultural analysis--teach us to reread how America ticks? Together we will explore this question as we read and discuss some of the most provocative classic and uncanonized plays written between the 1910s and the present. Plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Mike Gold, workers theater troupes, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Arthur Kopit, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Ayad Akhtar, and others will help us think about what's at stake in staging America and equip us as cultural analysts, critical thinkers, close readers of literature, and imaginative historians of culture and theater. This seminar will introduce first-year students to the kind of critical thinking developed in majors such as English; American Studies; African American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; College of Letters; Theater Studies; and the Social and Cultural Theory Certificate.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL175F, AFAM152F, FGSS175F, THEA172F
Prereq: None

AMST127F Christianity and Globalization (FYS)

This course focuses on recent developments in global Christianity. We will look at various interlinked dynamics: the rise of spirit-filled Evangelicalism, especially Pentecostalism, faith-based humanitarianism, child-sponsorship programs, and themes of militarism such as spiritual warfare. We will pay attention to the role of U.S. power in the world and how the narratives that various Protestant Christians tell through their writings and media shape life across international spaces. We will sample a variety of methods in how one studies the field of Christianity. These will include historical, sociological, and anthropological methods, all of which challenge traditional scholarly accounts (meaning those in the field of church history) in order to expand our understandings of Christianity in the modern period.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI279F
Prereq: None

AMST130F Wilderness or Paradise? The Colonial World in the Western Imagination (FYS)

What do William Shakespeare's Tempest, Karl Marx's Capital, Georgia O'Keefe's Ram's Head, Bob Marley's Redemption Song, and Sterlin Harjo's Reservation Dogs have in common? What about Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Frida Kahlo's Two Fridas, Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddam, and George Lucas's Star Wars? All these works offer critical reflections on the process of European colonialization of the Americas that started in the late fifteenth century and extends to our days. They all grapple with the question of whether the New World was (and still is) an Edenic utopia or a hellish dystopia. And they all offer provocative answers and difficult new questions.



This first year seminar will explore how different thinkers and artists have imagined and reimagined colonialism in the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. We will also investigate how the representations they created have contributed to reinforcing or upending colonial relations. We will study cultural creators belonging to different groups, including indigenous peoples, enslaved and free Africans and African Americans, metropolitan and colonial elites, and Asian and European immigrants.

This course will introduce students to different forms of intellectual expression in the Western world--from philosophical treatises to movie series, passing through novels, paintings, and songs. To better understand these works, we will read academic texts and address the practical and theoretical foundations of academic thinking. As we engage with primary and secondary sources on colonialism, the students will also learn practical skills ranging from formatting texts and citations to finding books in the library and articles on the internet to making a compelling argument in an essay or a research paper.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST132F Marxism and Abolitionism (FYS)

This course explores the historical encounter of Marxist revolutionary theory, with its roots in German idealism (Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel), and abolitionist causes. How have abolitionist movements historically informed, expanded, and challenged Marxist theory and its tactical playbook? What made Marx a touchstone for so many black revolutionary thinkers, including W.E.B. du Bois, Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Angela Davis? How have anticommunist, racist, security-statist ideologies been mobilized to undermine and defeat transformative social movements? We will begin with the Haitian Revolution and work our way through the abolition of slavery in the US and the anticolonial and civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century to the prison abolition movement today. In addition to the above mentioned authors, readings will include Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Ottilie Assing, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Max Weber, Martin Luther King, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, and the Combahee River Collective.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST232F, AFAM230F
Prereq: None

AMST137F The Black Atlantic, A Religious Interpretation (FYS)

The world as we know it is shaped by The Black Atlantic. This phrase centers the forced movement of enslaved Africans from Africa to the Americas and Europe as the center of a set of complex forces: European global expansion, land expropriation, indigenous extermination and, of course African enslavement. But Africans were not solely objects of dehumanizing subjugation and property. Africans co-created this world through material practices, traditions of knowledge, and meaning making summed up in the word religion. This course will both introduce students to the themes of Black religions formed in and through the Black Atlantic, and specific communities, for example, Rastafarianism, Islam, Buddhism, and Pentecostalism. Students will read scholarly articles and engage multi-sensory sources and first-person accounts of both themes and communities. All resources will be provided in class or via Moodle.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI177F, AFAM175F
Prereq: None

AMST150 Indigenous Middletown: Native Histories of the Wangunk Indian People

Students will be introduced to the new field of settler colonial studies, the rapidly transforming field of critical indigenous studies, along with Native American history and historiography addressing southern New England. Taking up a decolonizing methodological approach, the class will focus on the sparsely documented history of the Wangunk Indian Tribe, the indigenous people of the place we call "Middletown," also known as Mattabesett. The Wangunk people, part of the Algonquin cultural group, historically presided over both sides of the Connecticut River in present-day Middletown and Portland, while their traditional territory reached as far north as Wethersfield and Chatham. Although regarded as "extinct" by settlers in the aftermath of King Philip's War, 1675-1678, the Wangunk continue to live into the 21st century.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ANTH150
Prereq: None

AMST170 Solidarity Forever: An Introduction to American Studies

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. We will explore how American Studies scholarship engages "solidarity" as a subject of study and as a practice. We will consider how conversations in the field relate to resistance and activist movements across time and space, from the US/Indian Country to the transnational and the global. By covering vast topics and themes such as settler colonialism, carceral politics, labor organizing, the war on terror, and more, we will examine the questions, methods, and frameworks that animate and shape American Studies. We will reflect on the role of knowledge production in movements and struggles for justice.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST171 Magick and Her Practices, of Late

In this course we ask why paganism and Goddess worship have become "the fastest growing American religion," examining the tensions between science and society that so often provoke magic-infused social resistance movements. We explore the rise of Goddess worship in the Americas since the 1970s, considering its ties to ecofeminist, womanist, indigenous, and environmentalist movements. We examine the force of agency and its relation to ritual magic.

We then dive into the purported roots of several modern magic traditions, including Wicca, Dianic witchcraft, Feri traditions, and Haitian Vodou, among others, and ask how these cosmovisions define and/or transcend our gendered personhoods.

As we find our way back to a renewed understanding of modern paganisms, students will design individual or small group projects wherein they experience, ethnographically consider and/or perform extant manifestations of magic and ritual, bringing peoples lived experiences into conversation with course readings. This class is taught as a twice-weekly seminar designed around written assignments and engaged discussions, while inviting but not requiring students to engage in phenomenological experiences outside of class that may inform their written work. Students will produce ethnographic essays that are both analytical and personally reflective.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI277, FGSS278
Prereq: None

AMST172 Magick and Her Practices, of Late: A Digital Humanities Course

As soon as you step foot into this course, you will become an active member of a podcasting production team, and the teaching modalities and weekly DH seminar format of this course are designed to promote small team engagement, pre-and post-production workshops, and an approach to aural argumentation that moves from written reflective essay to effective audio storytelling intended for public engagement.

In this course we ask why paganism and Goddess worship have become "the fastest growing American religion," examining the tensions between science and society that so often provoke magic-infused social resistance movements. We explore the rise of Goddess worship in the Americas since the 1970s, considering its ties to ecofeminist, womanist, indigenous, and environmentalist movements. Student teams will then dive differentially into case studies that explore the purported roots of these reclaiming traditions, including Wicca, Dianic Witchcraft, Feri traditions, and Haitian Vodou, among others, and produce podcast episodes for the broader University community that ponder where our human practices of magic originated, and why.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI278, FGSS279
Prereq: None

AMST174 Popular Culture and Social Justice: An Introduction to American Studies

This course explores the interlocking histories of popular culture and social justice in the 20th- and 21st-century United States, with particular focus from mid-century to the current moment. By focusing on the ways in which social justice movements and ideologies have utilized and been informed by trends in art, film, television, music, and commercialism, we will interrogate critical concepts in the field of American studies, such as citizenship, belonging, difference, and equality. Topics covered will include feminism(s), antilynching, civil rights, labor and poverty, pro-choice, disability rights, queer liberation, leftism and countercultures, environmentalism, and animal rights.

Questions addressed will include, How has popular culture both advanced and hindered the progress of social justice movements? How has the idea of "social justice" changed over time? Which groups are included? What aims are articulated? How has the media portrayed and influenced social and political problems, and how has the rise of new media (from radio to television to the Internet and beyond) created new spaces for debating power and inequality?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST176 Critical Race Theory: An Introduction to American Studies

This course is intended as an introduction to the interdisciplinary field American studies.Turning to the entangled histories of settler colonialism, slavery, imperialism, immigration, racism, and disenfranchisement, the class will examine how different peoples become American and how differently situated people(s) negotiate state-structured systems of racial exclusion and assimilation in relation to democracy, equality, and self-determination. How has he field of American Studies taken up questions of indigeneity and race? How has the field of ethnic studies challenged American Studies? What are the current linkages between American Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, and Critical Race Studies? How have nationality and citizenship in the United States been structured by white supremacy? What are the differences between indigeneity, race and ethnicity? What is "color-blind" ideology? What can we make of pervasive assertions that we are living in a "postracial" America? How can American Studies provide the necessary frameworks for understanding the Trump era with regard to race, indigeneity, and citizenship?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST177 American Movies as American Studies: An Introduction to American Studies

Our aim is to see how movies from the 1930s to the present can help us grow as critical (and self-critical) American studies thinkers (and have fun--even as we question the effects and implications of this fun--doing it). Talkies appeared as a complex mass-cultural form of American studies, exported all over the world, precisely when the academic field of American studies emerged in the early 1930s. From the get-go, movies involved in mass-disseminating America's inventions of power have made available, in very entertaining ways, critical insight that can blow the whistle on how the reproduction of Americans and American ideologies are pulled off. Together we will explore the modern Americanization of power (hard power, soft power) and focus our exchanges on four intersecting concerns that movies can be particularly good at illuminating: (1) how culture industries (including movies) shape consciousness, needs, desires, incentives, values, and sense of belonging, and frame--limit--our vision of what constitutes problems and solutions; (2) how social critique (even movie critiques of movies) can be mass-popularized; (3) how America makes Americans, especially, into workers (even if they hate what they do and wonder about what and who they are working for) and weapons of various sorts (even if they are frightened and wonder about what and who they are fighting for and against); and (4) how and why America constructs difference (e.g., class, gender, race, individuality, national identity). This lecture/discussion course is a thinking-intensive and imagination-intensive critical project designed to engage compelling big-picture concerns--systemic matters--vital to American studies critiques.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST178 Sites of the Self: Maps, Gardens, Houses: An Introduction to American Studies

We are where we are. We make ourselves out of the places we create and inhabit. This course examines three of the artifacts/sites central to culture: maps, gardens, and houses. Each attempts to reveal an immaterial ideal in a material form. Maps give a "god's eye" view of the world's totality; gardens recreate lost paradises; and houses embody their inhabitants. Using literature, images, and film, we will discuss global maps--from medieval mappamundi to satellite imagery; visions of paradise, celestial and earthly; private and public gardens, emphasizing the central role of Frederick Law Olmstead; and ideas about houses, ranging from the 19th century designer and horticulturalist Andrew Jackson Downing to the 20th century Buckminster Fuller, often credited as the originator of the geodesic dome, one example of which is Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center, in Walt Disney World. We will end with an examination of the recent proliferation of design shows on Home and Garden TV.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST179 Contemporary U.S. Politics: An Introduction to American Studies

This course will focus on contemporary politics in the United States. We will cover topics such as populism and the Trump presidency, current political narratives concerning immigration, the rise of the "alt-right," debates over free speech, race and civil rights, state violence and the prison system, sexual assault and the abuse of power, religious freedom and freedom from religion, the workings of late capitalism, and the possibilities of environmental justice. 
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST180 Entertaining the Masses: An Introduction to American Studies

This course will explore the ways in which people living in the United States entertained themselves from colonial times to the present. From the circus to movie theaters, from pubs to video games, from hunting expeditions to football matches, from church choirs to hip hop battles, we will use mass entertainment as a window into American culture. We will question what American society has considered fun, how leisure became separate from labor, how capitalists have commodified and authorities have disciplined entertainment, how different groups created and/or appropriated different forms of entertainment. Through these questions, we will study classic and new topics of and approaches to American Studies.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST200 Colonialism and Its Consequences in the Americas

Why does colonialism matter to the fields of American Studies, Latin American Studies, and Caribbean Studies? What have been the consequences of colonialism for peoples of the Western Hemisphere? This course offers a transnational approach to the study of colonial modernity through a comparative analysis of colonial ventures and their far-reaching consequences. With a focus on the interactions of Indigenous, European, and African peoples, the course introduces a diverse range of issues and topics, such as the organization of production, including chattel slavery, indenture, and free labor; imperial competition and state formation; emancipation struggles; and Indigenous sovereignty.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: LAST200
Prereq: None

AMST201 Queer Theories: Junior Colloquium

This junior colloquium will give you a solid foundation in queer studies.



Although "queer" is a contested term, it describes--at least potentially--sexualities and genders that fall outside normative constellations. This theory-based, reading-intensive seminar considers multiple genealogies of queer theory, from foundational texts and authors in queer theory, queer of color critique, trans theory, and crip theory, to lesser-known but critically important interventions. Structured as a series of conversations, we explore multiple locations of theory and notions of "queer." Rather than understanding queer studies as a singular school of thought, we will continuously problematize queer studies as a mode of analysis, asking: What kinds of bodies or desires does queer describe? What are the politics of queer? What are the promises of queer theory, and what are its failures? What is the future of queer?



This course is excellent preparation for a queer studies concentration in American studies. Students should expect to end the semester confident of their ability to read and draw on a range of queer theories.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: FGSS201
Prereq: None

AMST202 Representing Race in American Culture: Junior Colloquium

This junior colloquium offers an introduction to several key critical issues and debates concerning the representation of race in American culture. In addition to reading several accounts and critiques of how racial minorities have been represented by the dominant culture, we will also consider how racial subjects have theorized ways of representing themselves in response to the burden of such stereotyping and objectification. The course is organized around two case studies. The first of these will focus on one of American culture's "primal scenes" of racial representation: blackface minstrelsy. Considering a variety of critical, literary, and visual texts, we will examine how African American images and culture became a way for working-class and other whites to negotiate their own identities and how African American artists and intellectuals have responded to this troubling legacy. In the second half of the course, we will turn our attention to questions of cultural representation that originate from the racial context often deemed to be the opposite of the African American experience: that of Asian Americans. If African Americans have long been the target of overtly negative stereotypes, Asian Americans have been subjected to what one critic has called "racist love"--that is, a tradition of putatively positive stereotypes that have produced a different set of representational problems for Asian Americans. Together, these case studies will allow us to explore a wide range of models for thinking and writing about race in American culture.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST203 Biopolitics, Animality, and Posthumanism: Junior Colloquium

This course asks what it would mean for the field of cultural studies to begin to include the category of the "human" within investigations of more traditional categories of social difference (including race, gender, sexuality, and so on). Historically, the category of the human has been taken for granted, as a biological marker imbued with particular intellectual and physical capabilities. Relatedly, the discourse of the human is often invoked in movements for political equality, inclusion, and enfranchisement (i.e., the call to "human rights"). Yet recent literature within the field of American studies broadly, and, more specifically, within the area of critical animal studies, has called these assumptions into question. In this junior colloquium, we will explore these critical turns in the field by considering the boundaries between the animal, human, and technological realms.



Important concepts addressed will include the utilization of animals as research subjects, food, and labor; the "nonhuman personhood" movement; intersectionalities between ideas of social difference and the posthuman; concepts of disability, debility, and capacity; technological enhancements of the human body; and cybercultural identities. Students will have the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of materials, including writing from the areas of critical race studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory. (Note: Students need not have familiarity with biopolitical theory; rather, the course will provide a primer in this area during the beginning weeks of the semester.)
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST204 Saving America from Itself? Movie Interventions (Moore, Lee, DuVernay, Kopple): Junior Colloquium

We will convene four interventionist filmmakers--Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Barbara Kopple--in a strategic dialogue to consider the American studies whistleblowing and anti-bamboozling potential of movies. Their movies have tried to sway elections, empower social movements, inspire protest, popularize national self-critique, study the tactics of top-down power (including scapegoating) and bottom-up resistance, and, perhaps, save America from itself. The many cultural-theoretical payoffs of their movies include moving us beyond any oversimple checklist tendency simply to observe representations of gender, race, and class. They help us question why these categories were produced in particular ways and help us interrogate (intersectionally and dialectically) how they interact with, rely on, and sometimes mask one another. Our four independent filmmakers--in trying to be changemakers--dare us not only to take a hard look at what kind of an America we have had and now have, but prod us, at times seduce us, to imagine more expansively what kind of America we might want to create. We will also put their movies in dialogue with related movies by D. W. Griffith, Boots Riley, Robert Reich, and others. And to establish a longue durée historical perspective, we will read Howard Zinn's epic classic A People's History of the United States. In terms of fields, our colloquium integrates movie studies, cultural studies, premises studies, resistance studies, and social transformation studies.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST205 Interdisciplinary Research Methods: Jr. Colloquium

This course will introduce students to interdisciplinary research methodologies and practices, with particular attention to critical themes within the field of American studies, including race, gender, and sexuality. Methods and practices covered will include (but are not limited to): close textual analysis, archival research, quantitative data procurement, interviewing tactics, ethnographic observation, the application of diverse theoretical frameworks, the Institutional Review Board, research ethics, and so on. Students will complete a variety of short assignments throughout the course of the term that will culminate in a final research paper. The class will be held in a seminar format that requires weekly reading, writing, and discussion.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST206 New England and Empire: Junior Colloquium

Using history and literature, this Junior Colloquium focuses on the role of New England in the transformation of the United States from colony to world power. Major forces effecting this metamorphosis have their roots in this area. Mercantile entrepreneurship and the drive of commerce and trade, such as the slave trade, the ivory trade, and the West and East Indies (China and India) trades, opened the larger world to merchants and consumers in New England. Discourses of race, religion, civilization, and science created universities, produced missionaries and merchants, explorers and colonizers, writers and artists who went to the far corners of the world--the Caribbean, Hawaii, China, and Japan--and brought the world back home. The vaunted mechanical and technological ingenuity of the Yankee peddler, seen in a grandiose version in the eponymous inventor of the famous Colt revolver, backed territorial expansion and insinuated New England culture in to those newly acquired territories. A developing sense of racial entitlement and racial confidence legitimated expansion--into Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines--and produced military and cultural imperialism. The domestic, woman-centered "parlor" culture of New England both displayed the wealth of empire and hid its existence.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST207 Primitive Accumulation: The Beginnings of Capitalism

Karl Marx wrote in Capital, Volume I, "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production." This course will address the violent beginnings of capitalism from the perspective of the Americas and their connections to other parts of the world. By addressing class struggle, imperial expansion, and environmental degradation, we will analyze the emergence of an unprecedented mode of production that now dominates the world and threatens human existence. But this will not be a simplistic history of good and evil, a moralizing tale. We will unpack the complex historical process and the overwhelming historical forces that go beyond the moral choices of individual human beings. We will look into the interactions between society and nature to reflect on how capital has made an indelible mark in human lives and the rest of living beings on our planet. We will study primary and secondary sources to reconstruct the history of extraction and exploitation that gave birth to the modern era.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST208 Visual Culture Studies and Violence: Junior Colloquium

In this course, students will gain important foundational knowledge of the field of visual cultural studies. We will cover theories of the gaze, photographic sight, film and media, spectatorship and witnessing, museums and exhibitions, and trauma and memory, among others. Particular attention will be paid to issues of power, complicity, and resistance as we consider what it means to be "visual subjects" in historical and contemporary contexts. We will address how different media--from photography, to television, to film, to the Internet--transform our understanding of images and what it means to both "look" and "be seen."



As a primary case study, this course will interrogate the politics of violence, focusing on the relationship between the production of visual culture(s) and acts of individual, collective, and state aggression. We will ask, How have images served to propagate climates of violence against marginalized persons? What are the ethics of looking at pain, torture, and exploitation? Do such images help us to work toward social change or create attitudes of indifference? How do images of war, prisons, pornography, death, crimes, famine, and disease shape our understandings of citizenship, nationality, and identity? Finally, how does the representation of difference--race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability--inform and/or transform conceptions of violence and its place in the visual field?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: STS207
Prereq: None

AMST209 Cultural Theory and Analysis: Junior Colloquium

In this course, we will interrogate the ways in which we come to understand cultural representation and theories of social and political power within the field of American studies. We will analyze forms of representation using an array of theoretical and textual methods, from economic and class theories, to visual theory to feminist studies and critical race analysis, to theories of virtuality and freakery. We will engage with highly dense theoretical pieces as well as more popular cultural texts, such as film, documentaries, and websites.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST210 School Days: Junior Colloquium

Educational systems are crucial to the creation of national citizens, cultural actors, and individual souls; they are, in Althusser's terms, Institutional State Apparatuses. "School Days" range from the Puritans' New England Primer to the debates over critical race theory. The course aims to examine the formation and development of the educational system in the United States, primarily through fiction--novels and movies--supplemented with historical documents and scholarly articles.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST211 History of American English: Junior Colloquium

What is American English, and how did it get to be what it is? This course will begin with the general history and development of the English language, looking at central issues such as sound (e.g., the Great Vowel Shift, Grimms Sound Change laws), sense (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, usage), and standardization (e.g., orthography, dictionaries). What makes our particular kind of English "American"? We will learn about the role of different groups in its development: Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrant languages of various kinds, including Yiddish and Spanish. In addition, we will analyze the workings of class, youth culture, and gender. Throughout, the class will examine questions at the heart of our language debates: a "national language," "Ebonics," and bilingual education. If English is today the international "lingua franca," is American English particularly the language of power? What are the different kinds of power exerted by, for instance, business English and slang?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST213 African American History, 1444-1877

This course examines the historical interactions between peoples on three continents--Africa, Europe, and the Americas--and the consequences of European colonization, trans-Atlantic slavery, and racial capitalism. Focusing on a period from the Antiquity to the late 19th centuries, we will explore how European notions concerning Africa its peoples evolved over millennia in response to shifting political, economic, and demographic circumstances. We will chart how Africans and their descendants in the Americas experienced and responded to colonialism. And we will analyze how debates concerning enslavement and freedom, indigeneity and civilization, and pan-Africanism and national citizenship played out across the African Diaspora and in the United States.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM203
Prereq: None

AMST214 Performing Property: Legal Experimentation and Activism in Contemporary Art

Who owns works of art-artists, buyers, museums, or the public? Who is granted the privileged status of author? Do artworks comprise a special category of things? Such questions underlie attitudes concerning art and cultural artifacts, and they also inform intellectual property laws. Since the 1960s, conceptual and performance artists have taken up these queries to investigate the nature of authorship and ownership generally, experimenting with aesthetic strategies as well as legal tools like contracts to ask: How do social and visual cues communicate boundaries, shape territories, and perform property into being? What happens when materiality and ownership are contingent? Can artists model alternate property relations through their work? How might art expose fissures and failures in law? Recent calls for decolonization and the restitution of looted objects have also pushed museums and archives to reconsider whether they are the outright owners of cultural artifacts, or stewards responsible for their care. Furthermore, as surveillance technologies increasingly pervade daily life, and digitalization leads licensing to supplant ownership, the future of privacy and property norms is unclear. These developments render contemporary art fertile ground for attending to the ways in which property structures are conceived, take shape, are reproduced, and how they might be reformed, calling upon us to pay attention to intent, consent, and the needs of others.



Seminar readings will be drawn from the burgeoning subfield of Art and Legal Studies with texts by key scholars including Joan Kee and Martha Buskirk, complemented by legal theorists such as Sarah Keenan and Cheryl I. Harris whose work has influenced artists. Alongside, we will closely examine the work of artists who challenge traditional ownership relations to problematize law, such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jill Magid, and Cameron Rowland. Class meetings will be complemented by screenings and visits to local collections, as is feasible. Assignments include a brief paper on an artwork, as well as a final research paper or digital exhibition requiring students to examine a particular theme or artist in-depth.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM313, ARHA261, CSPL313
Prereq: None

AMST217 Carcerality and Colonialism in California and Beyond: Junior Colloquium

This course explores the expansive history of surveillance, policing, and incarceration in the territory now known as California. Engaging Indigenous critiques of settler colonial power, we begin in the late 18th century when Spanish Franciscan priests and imperial soldiers enslaved Native people in missions along the Alta California coast. We will move through crucial sites, such as the first California legislature's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, to the establishment of the US border patrol in the early 20th century, and the criminalization of mobility of Indigenous, Latinx, and mixed-race people from both sides of the US-Mexican border, considering how these cases illuminate Kelly Lytle-Hernández's insight that "mass incarceration is mass elimination." Reading across scholarship, archival sources, activism, and news coverage, we will discuss the relationship between militarization and carcerality locally and globally, from the American occupation of California during the Gold Rush (1849), to post-WWII racialized urban policing, to the current construction of the "security fence" along the US-Mexico border that cuts through Kumeyaay lands.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST218 Introduction to Queer Studies

This course will examine major ideas in the field of queer studies. Relying upon theoretical, historical, and cultural studies texts, we will consider the representation and constructions of sexuality-based identities as they have been formed within the contemporary United States. We will explore the idea of sexuality as a category of social identity, probing the identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender to try to understand what they really mean in various cultural, social, legal, and political milieus. In doing so, we will ask, What does it mean to study queerness? What do we mean by "queer studies"? How do institutions--religious, legal, and scientific--shape our understandings of queer identities? In what ways do sexuality and gender interact, and how does this interaction inform the meanings of each of these identity categories? How do other social categories of identification--race, ethnicity, and class--affect the ways in which we understand expressions of queerness? Moreover, what does studying queerness tell us about the workings of contemporary political, cultural, and social life?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: FGSS218
Prereq: None

AMST219 Introduction to Native American Studies: Paradoxes of Indigenous Life

What does it mean to be Native American today? The term Native American collapses many tribal nations into one category and describes Indigenous peoples within the United States as Native to a continent that existed long before it was called America. This course will look at various paradoxes of Indigenous life under settler colonialism through the approaches of Native American studies, an inherently multidisciplinary field drawing from history, anthropology, and critical and ethnic studies. Reading across classics of Native studies as well as contemporary research, we will unpack the various movements and moments when Indigenous peoples arose to the challenges of continuing their life ways in the United States, Canada, and beyond. How have Indigenous people navigated colonial judicial systems to defend their land? What is the relationship between Native and Black peoples under settler colonialism? In what ways are ancient Indigenous traditions also future-oriented? In addition to scholarly texts, we will also delve into various forms of Indigenous-produced media from film, music, and literature to explore the dynamic ways Indigenous peoples continue to assert claims to life and land.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST220 Currents of Post/Minimalism, 1960-1979

This course examines visual production made in North America between the 1960s and the 1970s with attention to Minimalism and its antecedents. Since its inception, Minimalism has been a measure and benchmark for twentieth century artistic practice. A primary focus will be artistic interpretation of form and to the challenges posed to its political exigency during a period marked by global warfare, new technologies, fierce protest, and economic shift. Each lecture will be anchored by a discussion of an artist whose practice will be the basis for course themes--energy, distance, education for example. With artists as our guides, we will revisit the development of the aesthetic boundaries, (sculpture, film, performance, institutional critique) which were asserted as well as challenged by attuning to exhibition histories and interdisciplinary practices. As this moment of artistic contribution is actively under consideration by curators of contemporary art, this course will also feature practical insight into the methodology and concerns of contemporary exhibitions dedicated to this period.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA259
Prereq: None

AMST221 Nationalism and National Identity in the United States: Jr. Colloquium

After decades of (seemingly) hegemonic globalization, recent events brought the issues of nationalism and national identity to the fore again. In this course, we will explore classic and new approaches to the nation state and the cultural phenomena associated with it. We will study the institutions, symbols, rituals, myths, and other elements that make up nationalism and national identity in the United States. We will investigate how different groups and communities in North America reinvent national culture, often creating clashing ideas of what the nation should be. From sports to literature, from holiday celebrations to federal legislation, from culinary to military operations, we will use a wide array of case studies to survey national culture. Our goal is to develop intellectual tools that will allow us to understand nationalism and national identity as contested, ever-shifting, and highly consequential parts of reality.



This course will take transnational and comparative approaches. We will investigate American national culture from the perspective of outsiders such as immigrants and colonized populations. We will also compare American nationalism with other nationalisms, including those of Western empires, non-Western nations, and even peoples without a nation state. These perspectives will help us better understand how global forces such as capitalism and imperialism shape national culture in the United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST222 Secrets, Lies, and Fictions in the Americas

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter underlined the spread of a "paranoid style" in American politics. Although Hofstadter's description seems more appropriate today than ever, in an increasingly interconnected global order the role of misinformation, uncertainty, manipulation, and conspiratorial imaginaries in shaping and limiting democracies and public spheres cannot be exclusively assigned to any particular locale. From a continental standpoint, this course offers analytical tools to explore the political complexity of lies, secrets, and fictions in both the United States and Latin America since the mid-twentieth century to this day. By studying a series of cases--including the Guatemalan civil war, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. intervention in the Middle East, the "dirty war" in Latin America, censorship in socialist Cuba, the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London, Wikileaks, hacker practices in the early days of internet, or Cambridge Analytica--we will address the relations between surveillance, spectacle, and conspiracies (both factual and imagined) in the contemporary techno-political landscape. Moreover, the course emphasizes the speculative and theoretical potentials of art and literature when it comes to understanding socio-political phenomena. Beyond distinctions between truth and falsehood, fictional constructions are key to our collective capacity to imagine alternative worlds. By mapping out the ways in which fictions circulate as such or rather as truthful versions of reality, we will problematize the limits and uses of truth, lies, and official and alternative narratives, as well as the power of states, corporations, individuals, and collectives to direct attention and frame information.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM321, LAST321
Prereq: None

AMST223 Technologies of the Self

Where does the idea of an authentic self come from? The desire to represent the authentic self informs the narrative genres of the confession and memoir and visual ones of the selfie and self-portrait alike. Yet both the memoir and the selfie "self" are mediated, first, via the technologies of print and screen, and second, via the conventions of particular genres that make these legible as a memoir and selfie, as opposed to, for example, an interview or a portrait. In this course, we will examine how different technologies not only represent but produce the self. These technologies include "writing" technologies: print and digital; genre and medium (autobiography, the slave narrative, memoir, self-portraits, and selfies); and technologies of the state, which produce citizens, subjects, and humans.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL250, AFAM237
Prereq: None

AMST225 Latinidad: Introduction to Latina/o Studies

This course will introduce major themes within the field of Latinx studies, using an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the experiences of Latinx people within the United States and throughout the Americas. Employing a range of historical, theoretical, political, and cultural texts, this class will ask students to think about a number of issues central to the field of Latinx studies, including migration, language, nationalism, indigeneity, education, labor, assimilation, and cultural imperialism. This course will also look at the ways in which intersectional identifications, including race, sexuality, and gender, operate within frameworks of Latinidad.

Methodologically, this course will draw from such diverse fields as ethnic studies, history, political science, border studies, gender theory, sexuality studies, critical race theory, and urban studies. As we utilize a broad range of texts and synthesize diverse perspectives and ideas, students will be asked to interrogate formative concepts, such as the border, America(s), and the nation. Central class queries will probe the boundaries of Latina/o identity, the working of intersectional identities, patterns of migration, and the ways in which institutional power shapes the contemporary Latinx experience.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST226 20th-Century Franco-Caribbean Literature and the Search for Identity

This course investigates how 20th-century Francophone literature from the Caribbean defines Caribbean identity. Through a study of literary texts, films, and paintings from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Guyana, and Louisiana, we will explore the evolution of Caribbean self-definition, focusing on the major concepts of Negritude, Antillanite, Creolite, and Louisianitude.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL225, AFAM223, LAST220
Prereq: None

AMST227 English Language Learners and US Language Policy

This course explores how explicit and implicit language policies in institutions of power affect businesses, schools, and the legal system. More specifically, the course investigates how language choices, translations, and the policies regarding both affect ESL programs in K-12 education, bilingual businesses, immigration policies, and the US legal system. We will also discuss the recommendations of scholars for increasing multilingualism in business and education, improving education for English-language learners, and efforts to improve non-native English speakers' ability to navigate the legal system. The course is recommended for non-native speakers of English and anyone considering working with English-language learners such as teachers, tutors, NGO personnel, and legal or business professionals.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT205, EDST205
Prereq: None

AMST228 Cancelled, Blocked, Banned: Junior Colloquium

This seminar focuses on ideas, texts, and debates that have come to be considered politically and culturally provocative, perilous, or particularly acrimonious. We will read, think about, and discuss a host of issues that inspire discord, passionate debates, and a range of complex perspectives. Students will be asked to consider multiple, often conflicting, arguments and come to class ready to engage in good faith discussion.



The class focuses on diverse topics and examines multiple perspectives surrounding each issue. Course discussions will include debates over reproductive healthcare, the legalization or prohibition of sex work, carceral politics and the drug war, nature vs. nurture narratives and sex differentiation, challenges to free speech, diverse perspectives on best practice education policies (including affirmative action and standardized testing), as well as arguments as how to best achieve racial equity, equality and justice.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST229 An Ordered Commonwealth: Race, Gender, and Power in Colonial New England

This course examines the intersection of gender and race and their role in creating social hierarchies in colonial New England. The course will explore the lived experiences of women and people of color and the central role that their presence played in the politics and economies of imperial encounters and nation-state formation within the local context of colonial New England. We will examine how Puritan anxieties regarding the place of women, Indigenous, and Black peoples within their godly commonwealth structured their worldview and fostered both violent Indian wars and dramatic witchcraft trials.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST253
Prereq: None

AMST230 Italian and Italian American Cinema: Not Just Mafia Movies

The entanglements of Italian and Italian American cinema date to the medium's silent era. If the Taviani Brother's 1987 film Good Morning, Babylon is to be believed, while filming Intolerance (1916) D.W. Griffith lauded and lamented the genius of Giovanni Pastrone's colossus Cabiria (1912), doubting that his own epic film would be able to match the virtuosity of the earlier Italian example. Flash forward to 1931-32 and the trio Little Caesar (1931), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) sear into the American imaginary the cinematic representation of the Italian mobster. Beyond Italian artistry and aesthetics of the sort Griffith ostensibly applauded, and the numerous examples of the violent, lawless gangster of Italian descent, what are some other (stereo) typical intersections between Italian and Italian American cinema?



Mapping the Transatlantic transmissions of representations, stereotypes, and aesthetic values reveals how these two cinematic traditions co-articulate and condition each other, with "Hollywood on the Tiber" offering a chief example of the ways Italian and American industrial contexts invoke and implicate each other. How do Hollywood's glamorized gangsters inform Italian representations of organized crime? How do American cinematic "Latin lovers" draw on Italian models? How have representations of masculinity, men, and fathers; femininity, women, and mothers; (large) families, food, religion, class mobility, questions of race and racism, and immigration unfolded in their respective contexts and what do intersections among them reveal?



Two non-fiction films from Scorsese help draw our parameters for our discussion: Italianamerican (1977), for socio-cultural codes; for cinematic contexts, My Voyage to Italy (1999), in which the director reviews his Italian influences and which also serves as an introduction to Italian cinema. We subsequently investigate the indicated themes and topics as they range across a corpus of texts which includes, on the Italian American side: Scarface (Hawks, 1932), Not Wanted (Lupino, 1949), The Godfather (Coppola, 1972), Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973), Rocky (Avildson, 1977), Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980), Moonstruck (Jewison, 1987), Married to the Mob (Demme, 1988), True Love (Savoca, 1989), Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989), The Freshman (Bergman, 1990), Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990), My Cousin Vinny (Lynn, 1992), Household Saints (Savoca, 1993), The Sopranos (Chase, 1999), The Departed (Scorsese, 2006), Wendy and Lucy (Reicherdt, 2008), The Miracle at St. Anna (Lee, 2008). Alongside these, we examine Italian films drawn from this list: Cabiria (Pastrone, 1912), Umberto D. (De Sica, 1952), I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953), Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti, 1960), Eclipse (Antonioni, 1962), Amarcord (Fellini, 1974), Kaos (Taviani Brothers, 1984), Mediterraneo (Salvatores, 1990), Johnny Stecchino (Benigni, 1991), Lamerica (Amelio, 1994), Gomorra (film Garrone 2008, series 2014), The Young Pope (Sorrentino, 2016), and The Confessions (Andò, 2016). The films for group presentations will also be drawn from these lists.



This course has no prerequisites. We will work on students' capacity for formal film analysis as we go along and, at the beginning of the course, some students may have greater proficiency in this area. At the same time, other students may initially have a broader knowledge base of Italy and Italian society. Everyone has something to learn. Conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L242
Prereq: None

AMST231 Guns and Society

Students will discuss some of the key questions that animate the emerging interdisciplinary field of gun studies, considering guns as objects and symbols and as sites of both shared and contested meanings in everyday life. Readings will include recent scholarship about the evolution of gun technologies and the changing place of guns in U.S. society, from the colonial era through to the present day, exploring how the history of guns in U.S. history is relevant to other histories, including studies of race, gender, class, labor and capital, social movements, and military and civilian life. Special focus will be put on visual studies, museum studies and public history, science and technology studies, public health, and legal history. Assignments include four shorter (2-page) papers and a 15-page final research paper. Each student, working in small groups, will also deliver a 10-minute presentation and have opportunities for site visits to local museums and gun violence memorials such as the Coltsville National Historic Park (Hartford), Springfield Armory National Historic Site (Springfield, Massachusetts), and the Connecticut Gun Violence Memorial (New Haven).



(This course is a prerequisite for individualized humanities "labs" designed for students to delve into a particular aspect of the topic of guns and society in a more applied way in the spring semester, through special projects that can include an individually designed research paper, a museum/archives project, a theater sketch, a podcast, a high school teaching module, an art project, an exhibit in a local museum, an oral history project, or a syllabus, among other possibilities to be discussed with the instructor.)
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST231, STS231, FGSS252
Prereq: None

AMST232 American Architecture and Urbanism, 1770--1914

This course considers the development of architecture and urbanism in the United States from the late 18th through the early 20th century. Major themes include the relationship of American to European architectures; the varied symbolic functions of architecture in American political, social, and cultural history; and the emergence of American traditions in the design of landscapes and planning for modern cities, especially Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The course considers houses for different sites and social classes, government buildings, churches and synagogues, colleges, and commercial architecture of different kinds includes the origins of the skyscraper. Urban environments include cemeteries, public parks, streets, and civic centers. Movements include neoclassicism, the Gothic and Romanesque revivals, the Chicago School, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the City Beautiful movement. Major figures studied include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Furness, Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene and Greene, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, and McKim, Mead and White.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA246
Prereq: None

AMST233 Global Queer Studies

This course explores global experiences of LGBT/Q life, bringing an explicitly transnational lens to a field too often dominated by U.S.-centered perspectives.



Drawing on queer ethnography and film, we will explore the contours of queer and trans life around the globe, from the lives of gay men in Indonesia to Muslim yan daudu in Nigeria, gay tourism in post-Revolutionary Cuba, queer mati work among working-class Afro-Surinamese women, lesbian activism in India, LGBT asylum claims in Canada, the queer art of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, the everyday lives of lalas (lesbians) in China, and and the transnational lives of Filipino gay men in New York. Our aim is to challenge and expand Western categories and concepts of sexuality, gender, identity, and desire (both hetero- and homo-normative) and to center the ways sexual/gendered identities, cultures, and politics are shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racialization, migration, transnational media, and global capitalism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ANTH233, FGSS233
Prereq: None

AMST235 American Literature, 1865-1945: The Americanization of Power

Together we'll explore not only the complexities of American literature from the 1860s to 1940s, but also how this literature is usable today and excels as critical equipment that can advance our understanding of the modern Americanization of power (put narrowly, we'll develop insights into a "democratic" capitalism, what some called a "Robber Baron" plutocracy, that pulled off and contrived to maintain systemic class, gender, and ethnoracial hierarchies to reproduce its power). As we unpack the relationship of literary form and social form, we'll trace connections between historical developments such as the gothic genre and gender ideologies, domestic romance and the social reproduction of labor, realism and mass-urbanism, naturalism and immigration, modernism and imperialism, and narrative experimentation and anti-racism. The creative works of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston will help teach us to be more imaginative readers of literature, ourselves, and what America was, is, and might be. While pooling ideas about this, we'll savor the pleasures of reading inspiring and transformative writing. This is very much a thinking-intensive course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL204
Prereq: None

AMST236 Ethnography of the American Rural

The rural stands as a fraught American symbol, positioned in stark contrast to its corollary: the urban and its cosmopolitan subjects. The American rural is variously represented as vulnerable, disappearing, backwards, regressive, slow. In this course, we elucidate the texture of the American Rural by engaging with ethnographic writing from the early 20th century into the contemporary. In exploring the rural as a meeting place of working-class expressive cultures, an atmosphere of slow or strange time, a dramatic history of industry and agriculture, a notoriously tense racial zone, an icon of severity, and a place of exuberant stories and poetics, we uncover the vital ideological function of the rural as the urban's dark twin in American myth throughout history and today.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH206
Prereq: None

AMST238 Place, Belonging, and Sound in the 20th c. Latina/o/x, Black, & Caribbean Imaginations--NYC

Throughout the latter 20th century, various aesthetic renderings of New York City have positioned it as a site of voyeuristic allure and racialized excess and pleasure--simultaneously posh, unfriendly, tourist-trapped, "seedy," "gritty," and segregated. Through select literary, cinematic, and performance optics of Latina/o/x, black, and Caribbean writers and artists, especially queer and bisexual writers and artists, this course will focus on memory, representation, form, sound, and the imagination in the layered and shifting site of mid-20th- to 21st-century New York City--and even more specifically, of Harlem, the Bronx, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Elizabeth, N.J. Fictionalizations, poetizations, and performances of first-person memories and reimaginings of overheard stories from older generations about life in the U.S. South and life in the Caribbean will feature in the works that we will study in this course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL215, FGSS225
Prereq: None

AMST239 Critical Race and Art History: Theories and Methods

How does the study of art shift if we begin with questions of race, power, and colonialism, rather than treating them as secondary? Concepts such as mastery, familiarity, strangeness, taste, and beauty are formed by conditions of domination and subjugation. Moreover, the histories of material production and cultural expression are fundamentally entwined with the circuits of enslavement, forced migration, and the extraction of resources, people, goods, and "styles."



For the bulk of the semester, we will focus on a series of case studies drawn from the 15th to 20th centuries, a period of intense European contact and conquest in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Topics will include: representations of Africans in Renaissance Germany; African depictions of the Portuguese circa 1492; the appearance of parrots, kraak (Chinese) porcelain, and other goods from "exotic" locales in 17th-century Dutch still lifes; the taxonomies of racial difference in Spanish casta paintings; debates about sculptural polychromy and the "whiteness" of marble; the relationship between expansionism, empire, and the genre of landscape; "primitivism" and European artists' "discovery" of African artistic forms; the critical interest in "racial art" in the interwar U.S.; and contemporary conversations about museums and restitution, among others.



Throughout, works of art are primary sources with which to study the specificities of periods, places, and their social arrangements. While we will emphasize difference and historical contingency, our longue durée approach will enable us to draw connections about art's role in processes of primitive accumulation, dispossession, and racial capitalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA295, AFAM263
Prereq: None

AMST240 Hipsters

This course will focus on the contemporary hipster subculture after examining a critical genealogy and racial history of the origins of the concept. From black jazz artists and zoot-suitors in the 1940s who defined "hip" and "cool," to the post-World War II burgeoning literary scene of the Beat Generation that codified the figure of the hipster as an American bohemian strangled by social conformity, there has been a cultural politics of being "in the know." Derived from the term used to describe these earlier movements, the term "hipster" reappeared in the 1990s and became especially conspicuous in the 2000s to the present. Today's hipsters are generally associated with whiteness, indie music, a vintage fashion sensibility, liberal political views, organic and artisanal foods, as well as racial gentrification in urban neighborhoods in Brooklyn and select cities such as Portland, OR and San Francisco. Perhaps curiously, members of this subculture typically disassociate themselves from this cultural category, as outsiders often use the term hipster as a pejorative. In an attempt to understand why hipsters differentiate their actions from the hipster stigma, students will study the contemporary discourse about hipsters, along with a historical analysis of the term and its use in popular culture to get a better understanding of race, class, gender, and the commodification of style. Other topics for exploration include stereotypes, authenticity debates, hipster racism, so-called "blipsters," the death of irony, hipster chic, "hipster run-off," the resentment of hipsters, and forecasts of "the end of the hipster."
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ANTH240
Prereq: None

AMST241 Childhood in America

Probably the first literature we fall in love with, children's literature shapes individuals and cultures in profound ways, investing us with important mythologies and guiding our identities and behaviors. This course will examine fairy tales, some works from the "golden age" of children's stories, and some contemporary works. We will enrich our reading of the fiction with some of the central theorists of this genre, including Bruno Bettelheim, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-EDST, SBS-EDST
Identical With: EDST241, ENGL235
Prereq: None

AMST242 The United States in the Long 19th Century

This survey course will introduce important themes in the history of the United States during The Long 19th century (the early Republic to WWI), a period of rapid displacement, settlement, and migration. With a commitment to teaching and learning "history from below," we will examine topics such as territorial expansion; development of capitalist enterprises; African, African American, and Indigenous enslavement and freedoms; overlapping migrant diasporas; and contestations over the meanings of democracy, by uplifting the perspectives of historically marginalized peoples. In doing so, we will come to recognize how formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricable from the formation of the nation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST239
Prereq: None

AMST243 American Literature to 1865

This lecture course charts a selective path through the English-language literatures of conflict in North America. Our optic will be double: one eye on history, the other on literary form, and we will experiment with ways of dialectically combining these two lines of vision. The scope of the course is wide, but we will proceed in the style of an anti-survey. Rather than unifying America through a gathering of textual parts, we will attempt to understand how literary forms supply an important index of historical evidence even as their pleasures and contradictions refuse the stabilities of the evidentiary. We will close the course with a late-20th-century speculative fiction that gives an alternative history of the continent after a successful anti-slavery revolution in 1859 (resulting in the formation of the socialist Black republic of Nova Africa), which will incite us to revisit the materials and the historical record we will have constituted during the semester.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL203
Prereq: None

AMST243A American Literature on Fire: Conquest, Capitalism, Resistance: 1492-1865

We begin with a 1938 Langston Hughes poem, a north star shining light on American unexceptionalism and then move back in time: from Columbus's dismemberment and enslavement of the Arawaks when demanding gold; to Cabeza de Vaca's feel-good handbook for the conquest of indigenous peoples; to Puritan inventions of a "God" that pulls the trigger; to Franklin's blowing the whistle on a mercantile capitalism he supercharged with a secular work ethic; to a Declaration of "Independence" in 1776 that provoked alternative declarations written by workers, women, and formerly enslaved persons in the 19th century; to Poe's readings of a Divided States of America (race, gender, domesticity) as gothic; to Douglass's representations of the tactical artfulness and subversions of "slave" culture; to Hawthorne's deconstruction of the Americanization of power; to Thoreau's entwining of collective protest and what he hoped would be an individualized escape route; to Melville's attacks on imperialism, racism, and class domination; to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's critique of domestic slavery; to Stowe's socially transformative antislavery novel (whose sentimentalization recirculated stereotypes). Along the way, we will draw on Howard Zinn's classic A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES to help historicize the Americanization of inequality. During our literary-intellectual time travel, we will engage some of America's most "on fire" writers who make possible insights into the ideological foundations of American cultures, identities, and hegemonies that provocatively illuminate America's situation today (and offer some lessons for how to change it). And, not least of all, we will have critical fun throughout.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL203A
Prereq: None

AMST244 The Invention of America: Remapping 19th-Century US Cultural History

The 19th century was a period of great transformation, and the United States experienced it in a dramatic way. Nineteenth-century Americans witnessed the birth of the nation-state, the emergence of a global market, the multiplication of industrial enterprises, the apex and the downfall of slavery, the consolidation of wage labor, the intensification of imperial expansion, the upsurge in mass migration, the organization of revolutionary movements, the eruption of civil wars, the creation of brutal color lines, and other seismic processes. This course examines how the inhabitants of the United States reinvented their cultures within this most turbulent context. But American culture did not exist in isolation then. In this course, we will go beyond national borders, reexamining the history of the 19th-century United States from a hemispheric perspective and placing American culture in conversation with other cultures of the Americas.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST245 Personalizing History

How much are we shaped by our historical times and places? How much power do we have to make our historical conditions respond to our needs and desires? These questions and others are at the foundation of this course, which includes both memoir writing and memoir reading. We will construct narratives about our times and selves in a series of writing workshops. There will be some exercises where you will be asked to research specific aspects of your times and places. For example, you might be asked to research and write about such questions as when and where were you born, what were the major cultural or political currents of that time, and how was your early childhood influenced by them? Or you may be asked to bring in a photograph of someone important in your personal history and write about that person.



The memoir is a distinct genre, with topics/themes particular to it. Some of the most important are memory itself, childhood, place and displacement, language, loss/trauma/melancholia/nostalgia, self-invention or transformation, family, and generational differences. The class will engage with these topics in the analysis of the readings and also in the writing of memoirs. Specific techniques will be highlighted for writing practice: the catalog, diction, dialogue, metaphor, description, point of view, and narrative structure, including temporal organization, the doubled narrative, and the narrative frame.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ENGL246
Prereq: None

AMST246 Trump-Evangelicals: the History of Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism in America

This course examines the history of American evangelicalism, seeking to understand the nature of its support for the presidency of Donald Trump. Beginning with a brief overview of religion in the colonial and revolutionary eras, the course examines revivalism, slavery, and the emergence of fundamentalism during the 19th century. Special attention is paid to the re-emergence of evangelicalism after World War II, the establishment of the religious right, global evangelicalism, and the core evangelical support for the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. Students will be challenged to consider the ways issues of gender, race, and economics have shaped 21st-century evangelicalism, and reflect on how the movement's view of American history contributes to its own sense of identity and purpose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST308, CSPL308, RELI308
Prereq: None

AMST247 Caribbean Writers in the U.S. Diaspora

The Caribbean cloaks a complex history in a Club Med exterior. While white sands and palm trees proclaim it the "antidote to civilization," Caribbean writers undertake to represent a fuller picture of the individual in a world shaped by colonialism, slavery, nationalism, and cultural striving. This course will examine selected literary texts as part of an ongoing dialogue among the region's history, mythology, and aesthetics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: GSAS247, AFAM243, ENGL243, LAST247
Prereq: None

AMST248 History of African American Art

This course will introduce students to a history of African American artistic production from the late 18th century to the present, in a range of media and styles. While we will focus primarily on the visual arts--looking at sculpture, painting, photography, collage, film, performance, and installation--we will also consider the deeply interdisciplinary nature of Black cultural production, highlighting the important role of music, poetry, dance, and theater.



We will explore how African American artists, both individually and collectively, have negotiated the terms made available to them by cultural institutions, whether by struggling for inclusion, acknowledgement, and validation; actively protesting racist and exclusionary policies; or by forming alternative institutions, communities, and spaces in which to work and share support. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement and "post-Black" exhibitions, art works will serve as a primary source to ask, is there such a thing as a "Black aesthetic" and if so, how would one define it? Why might an African American artist reject such an idea? Other key questions will include: What is the role of visual representation in political struggle? How have artists mobilized portraiture as a tool of liberation? What does it mean to turn away from figuration, toward abstraction or opacity? How have artists grappled with questions of nationhood, belonging, and diaspora?



Together, we will trace how artistic forms, techniques, and motifs have served both as sites of collective history and as speculative propositions to envision new futures, articulating what Robin D.G. Kelley calls "freedom dreams."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA269, AFAM208
Prereq: None

AMST249 Art After 1945

This course examines artistic production in the United States between 1945 and 1980, with a primary focus on the United States. The historical conflicts of that tumultuous period presented new challenges for artists as they attempted, in their work, to respond to the "caesura of civilization" brought about by the Holocaust and World War II, to contend with the consolidation of postwar consumer capitalism and mass culture, and to situate their work in relation to the far-reaching social upheavals of the 1960s and '70s. Practices linked to the historical avant-gardes (such as abstraction, the readymade, Dada, and surrealism) echoed in these years as attention shifted from the canvas and studio to greatly expanded contexts of reception and public experience. The boundaries of the art object transformed in turn as artists developed new models of spectatorship to confront a world that had placed enormous pressure on traditional concepts of humanist subjectivity. Topics include New York School painting, pop art, minimalism, process art, conceptual art, performance, institutional critique, and site-specificity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA253
Prereq: None

AMST250 Incorporation of America: Corporate Capitalism and the American Way of Life

This course will examine how corporations have shaped and continue to shape American society and culture. Moreover, we will investigate how corporate capitalism has influenced U.S. relations with other countries. The course will extend from the mid-nineteenth century, when corporate capitalism clashed with alternative ways to organize the economy, to the present, when the neoliberal project faces a major crisis. We will read academic and fictional works, watch movies and TV shows, and analyze works of art that illuminate the history of corporate capitalism. We will explore how corporations have fostered class conflict, imperial expansion, technological change, structural racism, environmental degradation, ideological fundamentalism, among other things. In addition to writing individual papers, we will engage in collaborative and creative works to reflect on how corporations impact our lives.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST252 Histories of the Caribbean: New Questions, Methods, and Vantage Points

This course explores some of the most exciting new trends in historical scholarship on the Caribbean. We will consider how recent scholars of the Caribbean have turned a critical eye to existing methods and reimagined "archives" as they have crafted new stories about gender, sexuality, race, the environment, and the rise of modern capitalism. In this way, we will question how these new directions in Caribbean studies have reshaped the study of history more generally. We will use a wide geographic lens in order to gain an expansive vision of the circuits of the Greater Caribbean, stretching from Antigua, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Martinique, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti into the wider Atlantic world.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Identical With: LAST242
Prereq: None

AMST253 American Modernisms, 1900-1945

Focusing on three case studies--the Stieglitz Circle, the Harlem Renaissance, and Mexican Muralism--this course examines the specifically pluralistic and diverse contributions of American artists to the development of modernism from 1900 through the Second World War. During this period, the United States began to be a terrain on which artists with roots in Europe, Africa, and the Americas developed advanced language in the visual arts and experimented with new mediums and formats for art. Topics we will explore include the relationship between art and industry in painting, sculpture, film, and photography; relationships between cosmopolitan and indigenous cultures; primitivism and its appropriation; interrelationships between the visual arts, music, and poetry; constructions of gender and the emergence of the female artist; racial pluralism; and the articulation of hybrid American (and Pan-American) modernisms.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA243
Prereq: None

AMST254 Intersectionality and Identity (FGSS Gateway)

Intersectionality has emerged as a central motif within both social analysis and political debate. We will examine the origins of this framework within black feminism and women-of-color activism, as well as the way this framework traveled to, and is used within, sociology and other disciplines. The course will also address critiques of intersectionality that have emerged within and outside of feminist theory, and extends the concept of intersectionality to think through intersections between various social identities and social institutions such as capitalism and colonialism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: FGSS245, SOC245
Prereq: None

AMST255 Anarchy in America

In the summer of 2020, Trump effectively declared war on anarchists, casting them as "outside agitators" who had taken over widespread protests of police violence. Anarchism as a political philosophy and practice is an important but little-known aspect of American culture and society. This lecture/discussion course will introduce students to select aspects of anarchist political thought and praxis in the United States and the ways that anarchism has been represented positively, vilified, or dismissed. The class will have three parts: histories; philosophies and theories; and activism. In the history section, we will examine key events and periods from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. In the philosophy and theory segment, we will examine anarchist theory as radical critique and review various political traditions including individualist anarchism, socialist anarchism, anarcha-feminism, Black anarchism, queer anarchism, Indigenous influences and critiques, and additional schools of thought. In the activism section, we will examine the diverse ways, including blac bloc tactics and the overlap between antifa actions, by which people mobilize and organize for political change.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST256 Race and Medicine in America

This course will trace ideas of race in American medical science and its cultural contexts, from the late 19th century to the present. We will explore how configurations of racial difference have changed over time and how medical knowledge about the body has both influenced and helped to shape social, political, and popular cultural forces. We will interrogate the idea of medical knowledge as a "naturalizing" discourse that produces racial classifications as essential, and biologically based.



We will treat medical sources as primary documents, imagining them as but one interpretation of the meaning of racial difference, alongside alternate sources that will include political tracts, advertisements, photographs, and newspaper articles. Key concepts explored will include slavery's medical legacy, theories of racial hierarchy and evolution, the eugenics movement, "race-specific" medications and diseases, public health politics and movements, genetics and modern "roots" projects, immigration and new technologies of identification, and intersections of race and disability.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: STS256
Prereq: None

AMST258 Black Religions in the Americas

This course will focus on the African-based religious systems that cultivated traditional ways to survive slavery, white supremacy, and state violence. We will focus on Vodou in Haiti, Regla de Ocha (Santeria) and Palo Mayombe in Cuba, Obeah in Jamaica, and aspects of Black religions in the US. We will discuss questions of method and themes of political resistance, orality, secrecy, magic, "authenticity," commodification, and the ethics of representation. We will also look at the Black church and especially the rise of the Pentecostal movement in African and Afro-Caribbean spaces, as well as visionary Black religious thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI268, AFAM387, LAST268, ANTH267
Prereq: None

AMST259 Discovering the Person

This course surveys major developments in psychology and psychiatry from 1860 to the present. Through readings and lectures, the course introduces the major schools, theories, and systems in the American "psy" sciences. We examine the kinds of persons who were "discovered," the techniques of discovery, the extensions of psychological ideas to institutions and policy formulations, and the consequences of these discoveries for public as well as private life. We examine phenomena that were located, catalogued, and explained by these sciences, including rationality, gender, cognition, personality, race, emotion, psychiatric disorders, development, intelligence, and the will. Attention is given to the scientific grounds of investigations and the empirical evidence sought in the century-long process of discovering and naming psychological kinds. Readings include primary source documents, histories, and philosophical analyses.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PSYC
Identical With: PSYC259, STS259
Prereq: PSYC105

AMST260 Bioethics and the Animal/Human Boundary

In this course, we will explore the construction of the animal/human boundary through the lens of bioethics. We will define bioethics as the study of the ethical consideration of medical, scientific, and technological advances and their effects on living beings. At the same time, we will pay close attention to the cultural contexts in which these advances emerge, imagining the realms of scientific progress and popular culture as mutually constitutive. We will consider topics such as cloning, organ transplantation, pharmaceutical testing, and gestational surrogacy, with a focus on the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We will begin by interrogating how ideas of the "animal" and the "human" are constructed through biomedical and cultural discourses. We will ask, How is the human defined? By intelligence or consciousness levels? By physical capabilities or esoteric qualities? Similarly, how has the human been defined against ideas of the animal? Or, what ethical justifications have been cited in the use of animals in biomedicine? What makes certain species "proper" research subjects and others not? What do these formulations tell us about our valuation of animal and human life, and what kinds of relationships exist between the two? To answer these questions, we will consult a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, from authors in the fields of animal/ity studies, bioethics and medicine/science history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. Students will also be exposed to the basics of biopolitical theory.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: STS260, ENVS238
Prereq: None

AMST262 Beyond the Talking Book: Reading African American Literature in the Newspapers

The majority of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century African American writers, such as Frances Harper, Martin Delany, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Cyril Briggs, published their work in African American periodicals. In this course, we will examine the works of these canonical authors (as well as some lesser known ones) in their original publication context, the magazine archives of The Christian Recorder; The Anglo-African Magazine; The Colored American Magazine; The Crisis; The Crusader; Opportunity; and Fire!! The guiding question in our readings is this: how does our understanding of these canonical texts change when we read them in their original context--as either serial novels, or as components of a larger composite magazine, consisting of multiple different texts and images? In addition to honing students' literary close-readings skills, this course aims to teach students how to do original research and critically engage with multi-genre, mixed forms like the magazine.



Authors we will read include: Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois. In order to get a better understanding of the literary conventions of the serial form, students will read one of the assigned serialized novels (Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood) in its original installment-format, week-by-week. Reading these works serially will also enable them to play closer attention to each installment's relationship to its surrounding texts and images.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL262, AFAM261
Prereq: None

AMST263 Post Cold War Narratives of Migration to the U.S.

In this course, we will study post-cold war U.S. immigrant literature. Published in a period of shifting politics, particularly for racialized migrants, these texts illuminate new iterations of what it means to be and belong in a world where capital, labor, materials, products, and people were experiencing new forms of global im/mobility. We will read a variety of diasporic fiction from a range of localities to consider the ways imperialism, colonialism, militarism, religious proselytizing, and racial capitalism are in dialogue with the murky experiences of family, desire, loss, home, mobility, culture, trauma, and belonging. In doing so, we seek to understand how macro, micro, interpersonal, and intrapsychic experiences and institutions shape migratory routes and the stories that emerge across them. We will address literature through an interdisciplinary lens by reading fiction alongside sociology, history, economics, political theory, and more in order to consider what the world of the fictive can tell us about migration that other disciplines may not be able to articulate with such emphasis and attunement as literature.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT303, ENGL331
Prereq: None

AMST264 Introduction to Asian American Literature

This course introduces students to Asian American literature, culture, and literary criticism. In addition to exploring narratives concerning Asian American migration, exclusion, citizenship, and intersectionality, we will also focus on newer critical trajectories. These include Asian Americans and the U.S. and Global South, genealogies of violence, recent trends in Asian American and diasporic popular culture, climate change, and critical refugee studies. By examining a range of genres and critical methods, this course will advance understanding of how Asian America has shaped the making of American culture and history.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL230
Prereq: None

AMST265 Theorizing Religion with Zombies

This course introduces students to theories in religious studies in order to investigate the intellectual and cultural histories of two highly influential and essentially religious ideas: the zombie and the apocalypse. We will critically trace their representations in popular culture in order to explore writings in biblical narrative, history, modernity, monster theory, alterity, gender, capitalism, race, epidemiology, film theory, and media studies. We will begin with ancient texts, move to the history of the concept of the zonbi in Haiti, and then trace the trope of this modern monster and its various meanings into the contemporary moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI264
Prereq: None

AMST266 New York City: Architecture and Urbanism

This course considers the history of architecture and urban development in New York City from colonial times to the present. Emphasis is on major landmarks of each historic period, with attention to related planning, parks, land and water transportation, housing trends, and urban infrastructure. Conditions of settlement, growth, decline, and renewal will be examined from a political, economic, and social perspective in varied neighborhoods. Contemporary topics include neo-liberal policies for urban development, green buildings, gentrification, and planning for the city's future in the era of impending climate change. While the focus will be on architecture, every effort will be made to see built environs as points of intersection between competing ideals and interests that shape the city we see.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA256
Prereq: None

AMST267 Jazz Avant-Gardes

What is an avant-garde and what does it mean in the context of jazz? This course will explore this question focusing on the 1950s and 60s and beyond. We will take a holistic approach, examining the music and its surrounding community within the broader social and cultural currents of the times. These currents include European-inherited avant-garde aesthetics, the increasingly urgent civil rights movement and changing conceptions of freedom, artist collectives, and Afrofuturism. Three key artists will provide a focal point: Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra. Others will expand our view, including Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Yoko Ono (a non-jazz artist who contributed to an experimental sensibility in NYC), and others. We will immerse ourselves in a combination of reading, listening to recordings, viewing videos, discussion, and some in-class performances. Throughout the semester we will pursue the parallel goals of using this movement in jazz to expand our understanding of avant-garde movements in general and using historical avant-garde movements to expand our understanding of how the phenomenon has played out in jazz. The first two weeks will function as a Jazz 101 boot camp, so no prior experience in jazz is necessary.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC277
Prereq: None

AMST269 New World Poetics

God and money, love and beauty, slavery and freedom, war and death, nation and empire: The themes of early American poetry will carry us from London coffeehouses to Quaker meetinghouses, from Philadelphia drawing rooms to Caribbean plantation fields. Our texts will range from pristine salon couplets to mud-bespattered street ballads, from sweetest love poems to bitterest satire. Digging deeply into the English-language poetry written, read, and circulated after the first English settlement in North America, we will trace the sometimes secret connections between history and poetic form, and we will listen to what these links can tell us about poetry and politics, life and literature in our own time. Our poets ignored false divisions between art and society, and so will we.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL258
Prereq: None

AMST270 Criminalization, Regulation, and Resistance: Introduction to Native North American History

This course explores Indigenous politics and US settler colonialism across the long 19th century, from the Constitution's Commerce Clause to the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. We will examine how the US state relied on both criminalization and regulation of Native peoples' gender, sexuality, religion, social relations, and cultural and economic practices to expand and consolidate power on the continent. Readings will address how Native nations sustained their sovereignty and negotiated settler encroachment, covering conflicts around the liquor trade, allotment policy, the Ghost Dance, conservation's consequences, salvage anthropology, Progressive-era activism, and American citizenship.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST271 On Evidence: Archives, Museums, and Prisons

This course introduces an interdisciplinary study of the idea of evidence in connection to the modern development of archives, museums, and prisons, by setting this in a contemporary dialog with the discourses on state violence, incarceration, and refugeetude. This course will firstly establish historical and theoretical connections between carcerality, Western archival record-keeping practices (e.g., scientific grids, mugshots, taxonomies, and forms of surveillance), and museological frameworks developed during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century.



Furthermore, it considers how records, artifacts, digital data, bones, sites of "memories," oral traditions, embodied knowledge, or intergenerational trauma can become evidentiary material. Such inquiries are central to decolonial archival studies as they are critical for historically marginalized, racialized, and gendered subjects, whose claims to social justice, human rights, and cultural heritage are tied to the aftermaths of slavery, genocides, and colonialism. Our readings and discussions will specifically draw upon decolonial archival studies, digital humanities, visual studies, human rights discourse, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Indigenous studies, which have continuously challenged what constitutes evidence.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST270, AFAM260
Prereq: None

AMST272 Unsettling American Art, 1600-1900

This course examines developments in American art from roughly 1600 to 1900. Core objects in this class will range widely: quilts; maps; baskets; paintings across genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life; engravings; public monuments; daguerreotypes; and more. We will seek to understand the particular concerns and traditions animating objects across this heterogeneous span of materials, forms, and techniques. In so doing, we will also ask how artists and makers--including those whose names were never recorded--variously internalized, articulated, or examined the historical contradictions of their time, including the consolidation of settler colonialism and racial capitalism; rebellion, revolution, abolition, and civil war; industrialization and its ever-expanding and often violently lopsided acceleration of communication networks, labor relations, travel, and exchange; and the contested aim of defining a distinctively American aesthetic tradition in a land born of migration, encounter, forcible displacement, and polyphonic hybridization. Visits to area museums and collections will complement in-class work.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA250
Prereq: None

AMST273 South Asian Literature in the American Diasporas

The South Asian diaspora spans the world; communities are located in Africa, the Middle East, England, North and South America, and the Caribbean, as well as Southeast Asia. Using novels, poems, short stories, and film, as well as scholarship on history, this course will focus upon the literary and cultural production of the South Asian diaspora in the Americas, focusing especially on the United States. We will examine the conditions of historical arrival and identity-making under shifting regimes of politics, economics, and culture. What does being in the United States mean for the claiming of "Indian" and "American" identities, and how is this inflected by relationships with other ethnic or racial communities? The relationship with an often romanticized "India" is a central question, expressed through the concepts of diaspora, exile, and transnationalism. Consequently, what are the conditions of "authenticity," and of cultural authority? What aesthetic forms, questions, and issues express or preoccupy the artists of the South Asian American community?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GSAS
Identical With: GSAS273, ENGL276
Prereq: None

AMST274 Economics of Wealth and Poverty

Who are the very wealthy and how do they acquire their wealth? Why is poverty still with us after almost 50 years of antipoverty programs? What explains rising inequality in the distribution of income and wealth? These are just a few of the questions that we address in this course. The problem of scarcity and the question of production for whom are basic to the study of economics. Virtually all courses in economics give some attention to this topic, yet few study the distribution of income in depth. This course takes a close look at evidence on the existing distribution of income and examines the market and nonmarket forces behind the allocation process. Our investigation makes use of U.S. economic history, cross-country comparisons, and fundamental tools of economic analysis. Topics include normative debates surrounding the notions of equality and inequality, analytic tools for measuring and explaining income inequality, determinants of wage income and property income, the importance of inheritance, the feminization of poverty, and the economic analysis of racial discrimination. A central subject throughout the course is the role of policy in altering the level of poverty and inequality.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ECON
Identical With: ECON213
Prereq: ECON101 OR ECON110

AMST275 Introduction to African American Literature

This course will introduce students to African American literature. It will be divided into two parts. The first will pay particular attention to the experience of enslavement by focusing on several unique primary and secondary textual couplings, including (but not limited to): Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845) and Saidiya Hartman's "Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America" (1997); and Harriet Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (1861) together with Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987). In addition to these classic 19th-century slave narratives and contemporary sources, then, the first part will also include supplementary readings by Kenneth Warren, David Blight, Angela Davis, Alexander Weheliye, Spillers, Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, Jennifer Morgan, and Frank Wilderson. The second part will focus on 20th- and 21st-century African American literature and literary criticism. It will bring together a wide range of readings from across genres and disciplines, attempting to sketch out the major aesthetic and political features of the black literary project. Authors here will include W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Michael Rudolph West, Hazel Carby, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Alain Locke, Shane Vogel, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Asia Leeds, Roderick Ferguson, Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Teju Cole, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, Claudia Rankine, Warren, and Fred Moten.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM202, ENGL240
Prereq: None

AMST276 God & Guns: The History of Faith and Firearms in America

This course examines the history of firearms and religion in the United States, ultimately seeking to understand the significance of gun culture within American Christianity and the powerful "God & Guns" story at the core of many Americans' identity. Beginning with an overview of colonial and revolutionary-era views of firearms and violence, the course examines the influence of slavery, gender, and the wars of the 20th century, paying special attention to the emergence of a masculine, warrior Jesus within evangelical and fundamentalist communities during the Cold War. Students will be challenged to consider the ways in which this story helps explain one facet of popular support for Donald Trump and to reflect on how firearms are central to the identity of many conservative American Christians.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST289, RELI263
Prereq: None

AMST277 Digital and Visual Storytelling

During this seminar, we will develop a digital group project that addresses the question of remembering and denying pasts through the historical and critical relationship between carcerality, race, and storytelling in Connecticut. By engaging with contemporary forms of digital and visual storytelling (ArcGIS StoryMaps), this group project will work with the modalities of archival studies and digital humanities, accompanied by readings in critical race studies, visual and literary theory, and decolonial theory. We will first explore "remembering the past" through two post-Civil War Connecticut landmarks: The Church of the Good Shepherd (1867-69), dedicated to Samuel Colt, and the Mark Twain House (1874), now a museum. Both architectures exist as pivotal markers for a new modern American narrative intertwined with legacies of slavery, manufacturing, firearms, and storytelling. We will then consider how to make visible denied "pasts" by conducting archival research on the formative period of the 1860s and 1870s and in respect of the Connecticut context. Centrally, valuable insights for the project development will be provided by the in-class meetings with scholars, artists, and archivists, whose work rethinks and challenges the bond between carcerality, race, and storytelling.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST208, AFAM209
Prereq: None

AMST277Z Thinking with Octavia Butler's "Wild Seed"

Blend: Monday and Thursday class time synchronous; additional class hours asynchronous.



Black speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler's novel "Wild Seed" (1980) begins on the African continent in the 17th century amid the rise of transatlantic slavery and concludes on a plantation in Louisiana on the eve of the 19th-century American Civil War. "Wild Seed" was the last published book in Butler's Patternist series, but it relates the earliest segment of that epic story, which follows a shape-shifter named Anyanwu and a body-jumper named Doro across geographies, centuries, classes, corporealities, genders, races, and even, in Anyanwu's case, across species. To quote one student: "It's the weirdest novel I've ever read." This seminar takes up the myriad and interwoven provocations Butler offers in "Wild Seed" by reading her novel alongside a wide range of scholarly literature in the fields of African and African diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, gender & sexuality studies, animal studies, history, disability studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, as well as visual arts. Rather than "apply" the syllabus texts directly to Butler's novel, we will attend to how her novel not only reflects--indeed, anticipates--such scholarly and artistic production, but also produces its own aesthetics and epistemologies.



The seminar unfolds part-synchronously (via Zoom) and part-asynchronously (via writing assignments, screenings, and research project check-ins). Twice-weekly virtual meetings will be centered on presentations of research projects that students will develop over the course of the month, engaging a particular theme or question that they will identify in Butler's work. As such, the syllabus texts are subject to change. Students will be expected to read "Wild Seed" in its entirety in advance of the first class and to have begun thinking about topics they might explore for their presentation and research project (the former being preparation for the latter). The seminar's asynchronous component will consist primarily of weekly writing exercises asking students to reflect on how the assigned texts converse with Butler's novel and vice versa and to comment on one another's analyses. Shared annotatable pdfs will be used to generate conversations about the readings outside of class and to identify questions and topics for discussion. The professor will consider proposals for a creative final project, but it, too, will require substantive research.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS229Z, AFAM228Z
Prereq: None

AMST279 Asians and Pacific Islanders in U.S. Empire

This course forefronts the diversity of experiences between and within the Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the U.S. empire both on the North American continent and in the Pacific. While political and social categories place Asians and Pacific Islanders within the same group, the groups' vastly varied experiences under U.S. empire makes it necessary to challenge the historical narratives that gloss over key contexts that continue to influence Asian American and Pacific Islander American experiences today. Thus, we will engage in an integrated, not conflated, history of Asians and Pacific islanders, paying attention to the specificities of imperial experiences and their effects on race, class, gender, migration, and diasporic patterns. We will explore topics of immigration and migration, labor and trade, citizenship and belonging, race and indigeneity, gender and sexuality, war and militarism, religion and culture in various contexts, including cities such as San Francisco and New York, regions such as the Pacific Northwest and the American South, countries of the Pacific Rim including the Philippines and Vietnam, and the Pacific islands such as Guam, Hawai'i, and American Samoa.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST259
Prereq: None

AMST280 Frank Lloyd Wright: Myth and Fact

This course considers the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright in the context of his own life and development as an artist and in the context of the broader history of modern architecture, of which Wright's work was a part and to which it contributed. The seminar also considers the relationship of Wright's achievements to the social, economic, technical, and ideological history of the United States from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries. A major theme will be critical reading of Wright's own statements about his life and work in relation to other sources, later accounts, and his buildings and projects themselves. Both Wright's residential and public architecture will be considered in conjunction with his designs for landscapes and urbanism. Architectural drawings will also be examined as a medium in themselves, along with textual and physical evidence, as a means of generating maximal insight into Wright's built and unbuilt works.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Prereq: None

AMST282 Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of the first modern African American literary movement, known today as the Harlem Renaissance. Students will learn about the national and global contexts of this movement as well as the various debates that it generated, many of which still reverberate with Black writers today. These include the relationship between Black art and propaganda, the burdens of racial representation and the constraints of respectability politics placed on the individual Black artist, the right to opacity, and the relationship between race and form.



In this course, students will become familiar with some of the key texts of the Harlem Renaissance, its national and international contexts, and its recurring themes and debates. Furthermore, by reading and writing across a wide range of texts from this movement--including poems, short stories, novels, essays and manifestos--students will learn how to engage with a variety of genres. The assignments for this course are thus designed to teach students to write about not only specific genres, but also recurring themes in works from the Harlem Renaissance. By the final project, students will be able to pivot from writing about discrete forms and themes to writing to specific audiences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL286, AFAM286
Prereq: None

AMST283 History of Jazz in American Culture

This course will provide students with a broad-based literacy in the history of jazz while examining its significance and impact within American culture. As a musical style, jazz has been a staging ground for working out some of the most defining issues and aspects of American culture, including the dynamics of race relations, the articulation of gender roles and class distinctions, artistic expressions of freedom and democracy, the creative possibilities of the encounter of European- and African-based cultures on American soil, assimilation versus appropriation, and an extraordinarily influential aesthetic of cool. Jazz was the dance and listening music of choice for most Americans from the 1920s through the '50s, until it was displaced and pushed to the margins by rock and soul in the 1960s. But it has remained an inspiration for diverse artists in rock and rap up to the present day, including Kendrick Lamar's jazz-drenched "To Pimp A Butterfly" and Janelle Monae's 21st-century Afrofuturism deeply indebted to Sun Ra.



We will explore the early 20th-century origins of jazz in New Orleans, its rise as America's popular dance music in the 1920s and '30s, a shift to a more concert art-oriented form in the 1940s and '50s (representing the epitome of cool and hipness), avant-garde expressions of the 1960s (representing a new kind of universal spirituality), its move into rock and the growth of artist-based collectives of the 1970s, and its emergence in hip-hop samples in the 1990s. We will learn about major artists and their classic recordings, including Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, among many others, as well as new directions from recent generations (bringing in guest music department faculty). We will immerse ourselves in a combination of listening to recordings, viewing videos, reading, discussion, and in-class performances. Throughout the semester we will pursue the parallel goals of using jazz history to understand American history and vice versa. This is a jazz history course with a difference, able to accommodate curious newcomers as well as aficionados and those interested in social and cultural dynamics as well as the musical materials.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC272, AFAM272
Prereq: None

AMST284 Making New Worlds: Encounters on Turtle Island

From before the arrival of the earliest fishing ships off the coast of Newfoundland to the fall of New France at the close of the Seven Years' War, Turtle Island (North America) was the site of entangled encounters. Overlapping imperial claims and the construction of new societies took place on Indigenous homelands with deep histories. This course will examine North America as a contested and negotiated territory in which imperial plans were subjected to local contexts and contingencies. Using primary and secondary sources, we will examine major events (explorations, encounters, and wars), the rise and fall of imperial powers (French, British, Dutch, and Spanish), and the daily realities that shaped experiences in North America (trade, religion, sex, forced migrations, and disease). Throughout, we will focus on the persistence and resistance of Indigenous nations who protected (and still protect) their homelands and lifeways.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST237, RL&L237
Prereq: None

AMST285 Indigenous Anthropology

In this course, we will explore what anthropology looks like from an indigenous perspective. Focusing on four significant texts by indigenous anthropologists, we will explore concepts of indigeneity, mobility, gender, DNA, and indigenous rights and sovereignty as they are articulated between anthropology and indigenous studies. At the same time, we will examine how anthropological research and writing can be conducted from the perspective of the historically colonized as opposed to the colonizers, navigating the ambiguities of anthropology's own legacy as it is rearticulated by scholars from diverse positionalities and perspectives.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH213
Prereq: None

AMST286 Queer Activism and Radical Scholarship: Beyond Theory vs. Practice

This course explores the relationship between scholarship and activism, with a focus on intersectional radical queer scholarship and activism--queer left, black radical, trans, immigration, prison abolition, and sex work--in the United States. We will aim to connect the too-often bifurcated realms of academia and activism, theory and practice, research and action, so that we might think through the political stakes of knowledge-making in and outside the so-called "ivory tower," explore interdisciplinary methodologies we might use to study and learn from (and with) activists (including ethnography, oral history, and community archive), and gain insight into the histories and current realities of social justice movements, campus activisms, the work of a radical imagination, art and activism, and the impasse of the political present. To put their theory into practice, students will undertake a semester-long radical research project on a queer issue or activist organization--past or present--of their choice.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: FGSS286, ANTH286
Prereq: None

AMST287 Contemporary Art Since 1980

This historically-rooted introduction to contemporary art sets an anchor around 1980 and moves through the major debates of the last 35 years. This period gave rise to a bracing range of historical transformations: a post-communist Europe; an economically prominent China; queer and antiracist activism; increasingly molecular degrees of technological mediation in everyday life; assymetrical consolidations of a globalized network of travel, communication, and capital; climate and refugee crises; and a state of seemingly perpetual war, to name only a few. This course attends to the changing vocabulary of approaches by which artists intervened in these conditions and positioned their work in relation to a longer view of the history of art. Far from a comprehensive survey, the course acknowledges the inherently recursive and unstable condition of contemporary art history, a field of research and inquiry defined as a work in progress. The course is nonetheless structured in a loosely chronological fashion, sequenced according to formal techniques that emerged as timely responses to specific historical moments (photographic appropriation, moving image projection, social practice, painting, institutional critique, web-based art, etc.). Our work throughout will attend to theoretical frameworks that have remained influential in recent practice (postcolonial, feminist, poststructural, etc.).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA252
Prereq: None

AMST289 Insular Borders of Latin(x) America

Before and at the same time the United States established itself throughout the 19th century as a major power in the Americas and the world, various Latin American republics inherited and acted upon a similar imperialist agenda to expand their borders not only to neighboring territories but also across oceans. In this class, we will study and compare these imperialist gestures, among them the Spanish Empire's control of its remaining insular colonies in the 19th century (e.g., Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam) and the United States' successive claim to these very same islands. We will analyze literary works and films that interrogate these imperialist claims as well as the trajectories of islanders: for instance, the forced migration of the Rapanui (Easter Island people) in the second half of the 19th century (first as slaves to Peru and then to the town of Hanga Roa in Easter Island) and the island-to-island "intra-colonial" (Joanna Poblete) recruitment of Filipino and Puerto Rican laborers in sugar plantations in Hawai'i at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the questions we will explore are: Why are islands so coveted by old and new empires? How have Rapanui, Filipino, and Puerto Rican migrants and their descendants resisted authorities on the insular borders of empire? How do writers and artists tell these silenced histories? Can we speak of Latinidad and Edouard Glissant's concept of Poetics of Relation in a Pacific Ocean context? Readings will be in Spanish and English. All discussions and assignments will be in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: SPAN274, LAST274
Prereq: SPAN221

AMST290 Color Lines: The U.S. South and the Colonial World

The American South has always been a unique society. But it has never been exceptional or isolated from the world. Although located north of the equator, it shares many features with the Global South. Its history of conquest, slavery, patriarchy, rebellion, and white supremacy makes it similar to many tropical and semitropical countries that have been colonized by Western powers in modern times. In this course we will study the American South from the times of European colonization through the Civil Rights era. We will establish comparisons between the history of the American South and the histories of the Global South. How did the displacement of Native Americans in Georgia compare to the treatment of Indigenous populations in Australia? How did slavery in Virginia compare to slavery in Brazil? How did the emergence of the oil industry in Texas compare to that of Iran? How did Jim Crow in Mississippi compare to apartheid in South Africa? How did the struggle for civil rights in Alabama compare to struggles for decolonization in Vietnam?



In addition to a comparative approach, we will look into how Southerners engaged with people from the Global South. We will study primary and secondary sources that illuminate encounters between Southerners and foreigners. International trade, religious missions, infrastructural enterprises, political activism, and military operations, among many other events, put the American South in touch with the Global South. These encounters remade modernity, placing questions of racism, regionalism, and colonialism at the forefront of political and intellectual debates.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST291 Afro-Asian Intersections in the Americas

This course explores a range of historical, cultural, and political intersections between African and Asian diasporic people in the Americas from the late 19th century to the present. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will examine key moments in the history of Afro-Asian encounters in the Americas, including the importation of slave and coolie labor in the 19th century, the formation of anticolonial and antiracist "Third World" movements in the United States and abroad, and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. We will also study forms of cultural interracialism, from African Americans' mania for kung fu in the 1970s, to interracial buddy films like Rush Hour (1998), to the contemporary fiction of writers such as Patricia Powell and Charles Johnson.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ENGL293, AFAM291
Prereq: None

AMST291Z Afro-Asian Intersections in the Americas

This course explores a range of historical, cultural, and political intersections between African Americans and Asian Americans from the late nineteenth century to the present. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will examine key moments in the history of Afro-Asian encounters in the Americas, including the importation of slave and coolie labor in the 19th century, the formation of anticolonial and antiracist "Third World" movements in the U.S., and the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992. We will also study forms of cultural interracialism, from African Americans' mania for kung fu in the 1970s, to the interracial buddy film Rush Hour (1998), and from the contemporary fiction of writers such as Patricia Powell and Charles Johnson to the sounds of hip hop. As this brief overview suggests, we will be examining a diverse selection of texts including history, fiction, ethnography, cultural studies, and film.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AFAM291Z
Prereq: None

AMST292 New Worlds, Indigenous Futures

Indigenous Futurism describes a cultural turn to emphasizing not only the presence of Native peoples in contemporary settler colonial societies but to declaring their resurgence in a transformed future. Since the 2010s, Native American and First Nations writers, artists, and online communities have increasingly used "futurism" to invoke de-colonial horizons and also to describe long-standing tendencies to use science fiction vocabulary and imagery to explore themes of displacement, alienation, and survival. This course will explore these themes in 20th- and 21st-century Indigenous culture in the United States and Canada and consider why the future is a temporal terrain of struggle for Indigenous peoples. In the progress-obsessed orientation of colonial time, Indigenous peoples are often assigned to the past, yet Indigenous political and cultural movements continue to insist on their role in shaping our planetary futures. We will begin from an understanding of Indigenous Futurism's influence from and conversation with Afrofuturism and then pursue topics such as: Indigenous uses of digital technology, the ethics of land stewardship in outer space, and the political implications of nonlinear time.



The course will have an emphasis on speculative literature and theoretical texts by Indigenous authors, including two anthologies of Indigenous speculative fiction, and we will also delve into films (ex. "Black Panther"), music (ex. A Tribe Called Red), and visual cultures by contemporary artists (ex. Jeffrey Gibson).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST293 Reenacting Justice: Guns in America

This seminar, developed in collaboration with visiting guest instructor Glenn LaVertu (Parsons), combines readings, discussion, archival research, storyboarding, project-based learning, legal analysis, and filmmaking in presenting new takes on an old genre: Westerns. We will read and watch Westerns alongside study of the development of the American legal system, considering the aesthetics of justice, narrative, and guns. Students will work on film and theater projects related to the manufacturing, use, and mythologization of "Old West" in popular culture, television, and film. Film projects will be screened and discussed at the Center for the Study of Guns and Society's annual undergraduate conference on Thursday, April 25, and Friday April 26, 2024, and at the presentation of "Stories of Carceral Connecticut," a celebration of student projects for the Mellon Foundation project, "Carceral Connecticut," on Friday, May 3, 2024. (Both events are required). The course will consider the aesthetics of storytelling, guns, and justice, as well as be a lab for creating and narrating new stories. Engaging with contemporary debates about Westerns as manifestations of American gun culture, the purpose of the project is to draw parallels between the way in which gun violence is portrayed in film, particularly period, Western movies, and the realities of gun violence today. The final project is an opportunity to expose multiple points of view regarding gun violence and justice and their socio-political effects, and to write and develop new scripts, storyboards, and film scenes, as well as study old ones.



Assignments and Grading System:

Grading is based on weekly assignments and participation, an in-class midterm on the readings, and a final project.



Requirements:



- Class Participation (20%): Regular attendance, submission of weekly 1-2 pg written critical reflections on assigned topics (e.g. a primary source, an advertisement or magazine article, a report about a field trip or movie, etc. ) Participation in the April 25 evening student mini-film festival and April 26 all-day undergraduate research conference is required.



- Midterm (40%): In-class midterm on the readings and discussions (in class; Thursday before break).



- Final project (40%): (20% for the project; 10% on the written artist's statement; 10% for the presentation at the April 25 mini-film festival night and April 26 panel).





Required Texts

(Available for purchase at the bookstore, and available for free reading on Olin e-reserve through the Course Moodle).



- *Joyce, Justin A. Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law (Manchester Univ. Press 2018).

- Densley, James ed. The Conversation on Guns (JHU Press, 2023).

- Light, Caroline E. Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press 2017).

- McKevitt, Andrew C. Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America (Univ of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2023).



Additional writings (e-reserve at Olin Library and on Moodle) are by Kelly I. Aliano, The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture through Play (2022); Vanessa Agnew et al, Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms (2023); and Priya Satia; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Richard Slotkin; Gillian Rose; Carol Anderson, Jennifer Carlson, Terrence H. Witkowski, Lindsay Livingston, Peter Boag, Joan Burbick, Jelani Cobb, and more.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST209, STS209
Prereq: None

AMST294 Pleasure and Power: An Introduction to Sexuality Studies (FGSS Gateway)

This course seeks to denaturalize some of what are often the most taken-for-granted aspects of daily life: our bodies and genders, our erotic desires, and our sexual identities. To this end, this course will provide a critical-historical overview of dominant Euro-American understandings of sexuality and their embodied legacies.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: FGSS293
Prereq: None

AMST294Z Mapping Culture

What is a culture, how can it be intimately wrapped up in a location, and how can that be mapped out to better understand its inner workings? In the face of globalization and pervasive online communities, what can conventional wisdom--"Location, location, location" and "All politics is local"--tell us about the importance of actual places in cultural formations? We will first orient ourselves with a wide range of music mapping projects, as well as projects that directly address the significance of a location (Nile Project, Playing for Change). From a base in the interdisciplinary field of ethnomusicology, we will then examine how scenes and subcultures can congeal in particular places and times, mapping them in New York City's Lower East Side (punk), Greenwich Village (urban folk revival), and South Bronx (early hip hop). Deploying a broad conception of culture, we will cover other art forms (e.g., graffiti and other street art) and social formations. Haight Ashbury (SF) 1960s counterculture, Laurel Canyon (LA) 1970s singer-songwriters, Chicago 1980s post-disco house, and London 1980s post-punk goth and early 2000s grime will provide complementary case studies. These examples will provide models before students embark on their own to map out a culture of their choice as their final project, using either Google maps or Story Maps. Readings on theories of place and of subcultures will provide blueprints for issues to be explored, including how group identity and a sense of community can be locally constructed and the significance of physical in-person contact in a world of increasingly virtual relationships.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC293Z
Prereq: None

AMST295 Kill Anything That Moves: The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

This course examines various forms of literature and film to understand the legacies of one of the most transformative events in American culture and history: the Vietnam War. "Kill anything that moves" was the order that American soldiers reportedly received while on the ground in Vietnam, yet, to a large extent, the historical focus on the American experience of the conflict has overshadowed other perspectives. Thus, this class will take a comparative approach, exploring works by canonical and noncanonical American, Southeast Asian, and Southeast Asian American authors and directors. Among the diverse genres we will study are prose, poetry, graphic narrative, and narrative and documentary film. To think about the Vietnam War's broader relevance, we will situate the works under study within current debates concerning refugees, genocide, human rights, and the complex politics and aesthetics of war representation. Students will have the opportunity to investigate an under-studied aspect of the Vietnam War toward the end of the semester.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL244
Prereq: None

AMST298 From Seduction to Civil War: The Early U.S. Novel

This course examines the relationship between nation and narrative: the collective fantasies that incited reading and writing into the 19th century. We will study the novel as a field of literary production both in dialogue with European models and expressive of changes in national culture, a form that both undermined and reinforced dominant ideologies of racial, gender, and class inequality during this turbulent period of national formation and imperial expansion. We will consider the ways the pleasure of novel-reading depends upon, even as it often disavows, the world outside the story. Throughout our reading, we will trace the ways these novels both reflect and participate in the historical development of the United States during a period that spans national founding, the consolidation of northern capitalism and an exacerbated North/South division, expansion into Mexico and the Pacific, and civil war. Through close attention to literary form, we will continually pose the question, What is the relationship between literary culture and historical change? We will examine who was writing, for whom they wrote, and the situation--political, commercial--in which the American novel was produced and consumed. We will begin with the novel of sentiment and seduction and conclude with reflections on slavery and racial revolution on the eve of the Civil War, all the time asking about the ways the novel might seduce us into either tolerating or resisting the way of the world.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL209
Prereq: None

AMST299 Christianity and Globalization

This course focuses on recent developments in global Christianity. We will look at various interlinked dynamics: the rise of spirit-filled Evangelicalism, especially Pentecostalism, faith-based humanitarianism, child-sponsorship programs, and themes of militarism such as spiritual warfare. We will pay attention to the role of U.S. power in the world and how the narratives that various Protestant Christians tell through their writings and media shape life across international spaces. We will sample a variety of methods in how one studies the field of Christianity. These will include historical, sociological, and anthropological methods, all of which challenge traditional scholarly accounts (meaning those in the field of church history) in order to expand our understandings of Christianity in the modern period.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI279, LAST279
Prereq: None

AMST300 The American West in the Age of Capitalist Transformation

This course examines the transregional and transnational forces that converged into the locations that, throughout history, American society has called "the West." It also explores how the occupation and development of the American West inspired similar expansionist projects in other parts of world. We will investigate the transformation of vast territories previously inhabited by Native groups into a booming agro-industrial empire controlled by white men. Within this context, we will study the cultures that developed and clashed in the West. We will use academic texts and primary-source material such as travel narratives, letters, ethnographies, novels, drawings, photographs, and film. We will delve into the lived experience in the West and the images, myths, and visions that different groups produced about it. During the semester, students will write a research paper on a topic of their choice related to the American West in global perspective.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST301 Immigration and the Politics of Fear

This course will examine the role of fear in shaping ideas about immigrants. We start from the notion that emotions are social formations with particular histories and political significance. Therefore, we will refrain from assuming that fear is nothing more than a feeling or an automatic response and instead take it as a site that allows us to examine how psychological and legal discourses together define and dispute what is normal, reasonable, credible, plausible, real, appropriate, and timely. The seminar will cover themes such as risk and threat, race and origin, pain and injury, confession and testimony, fiction and figuration, and personhood and representation. We will look at newspaper articles, social media content, legal opinions, case law, court transcripts, and psychological evaluations, as well as texts in politics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, comics, and films. Students will write a short essay on the politics of fear. Throughout the course, they will develop their toolkit to critically reflect on an emotion of their choice.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ANTH301, STS308
Prereq: None

AMST302 Lyric Poetry and Music: The Color and Politics of Cry, Sound, and Voice

Lyric poetry may be the most musical of literary forms. In one of its basic definitions, the lyric poem begins after the overhearing of a sound. This sound may be familiar and pleasant, like the timbre and cadence of a lover's voice. Or it may be unrecognizable and terrifying. It may be imbricated with other senses and feelings, provoking a memory that stimulates a sense of touch or smell. Or it may stimulate a sense of horror at the inevitability of death. In any of these cases, sound is thought to reveal an attachment, a memory, and to give rise to composition in the poet's effort to reshape memory and feeling in lyric form. But such articulations do not always come out as evenly as this description may imply. Indeed, moans, screams, stutters, cries, and the madness of possession by the Muses are part of lyric's history and practice. In this course, we will read from African American, African diasporic, Caribbean, Latina/o/x, and Indigenous poetics, and we will consider their relation to myth and musical forms, such as the blues, son, bomba, biguine, jazz, reggae, hip-hop, salsa, among others. The dynamics between lyric speakers and musicians, sound and story, seen and voiced language will play out.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL304, AFAM305
Prereq: None

AMST303 Afterparty: End Times, Pleasure, and Clean Up

What do we do in end times, or "after the party" as Joshua Chambers Letson would have it? Already exhausted, with streamers and confetti scattered on the ground, what happens after the party is over? How do we pick up the pieces and move on? Can narratives of perpetual end times create new beginnings and new horizons? Beginning at the end, this course will engage conversations in science fiction, Black studies, art and performance, Indigenous studies, queer of color critique, and environmental justice to explore the work of endings and beginnings, of hope and hopelessness, of destruction and desire. We will pay particular attention to questions of futurity and pleasure as they are manifest in the aesthetic. Writers and artists to be discussed will include N.K. Jemisin, Sylvia Winter, Ursula Le Guin, Katherine McKittrick, Ohan Breiding, Franny Choi, Saeed Jones, Calvin Warren, Joshua Chambers Letson, Dana Luciano, David Wojnarowicz, adrienne maree brown, Autumn Brown, José Esteban Muñoz, Nick Estes, Dionne Brand, Samuel Delany, Tourmaline, Allison Akootchook Warden (AKU MATU), Jordan Peele, and M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi. Students will be invited to craft both creative and theoretical responses to class assignments.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM393, FGSS395, THEA393
Prereq: None

AMST304 The Senses and the Subject in Cinema and Poetry

In this course, we will study a mixture of emotionally stimulating and structurally difficult contemporary cinema and lyric poetry, as well as select philosophical and theoretical approaches to the senses and the subject. Do theories and notions of the senses assume the subject, and/or subjectivity? If so, then how? What is the relationship between embodiment, the senses, the world, racialization, blackness, and being? How do select Western theoretical, aesthetic, and poetic frameworks represent and think as such? While cinema and lyric poetry might seem like strange neighbors, this course specifically foregrounds them as "repositor[ies] of synesthesia," where not only the reconstitution of the subject after some disturbance (i.e., sensorial, physiological, social, historical, etc.) will be relevant to how we read, but also when that either does not happen or constitutively cannot happen. (Note that some short fiction may also be part of the course readings.)
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL320, FGSS310
Prereq: None

AMST305 On Monsters: Race, Sex, Gender and the Other

The class will consider the category of the monster as a cultural site of meaning. We will explore narratives of the monstrous both literally and metaphorically, working from Jeffery Jerome Cohen's understanding of a monster as "as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment--of a time, a feeling, and a place." In situating the monstrous, we will consider Derrida's reminder that monstrosity is, at its heart, concerned with hybridity, border crossing, and miscegenation. In resisting clear categorization, the monstrous becomes terrifying, improper, and disorienting. As such, we will look at contested sites of American life, such as migration and the US/Mexican border, forms of racial hierarchy and social control, manifestations of postcolonial despair, the violence surrounding gender and sexual difference, as well as biopolitical and technological fears regarding the almost-human. The course will ask students to consider monstrosity as always already interwoven with cultural notions of racial and sexual deviance, which then contend with otherness through the guise of the supernatural. The course will also explore more literal manifestations of the monstrous, including the zombie, the doppleganger, the vampire, and the witch. In doing so, the monstrous takes shape as a way of facing what Cedric Robinson calls the "recovery of human life from the spoilage of degradation," or the idea that monstrosity centers on a politics of purity, a mode of analysis that thinks through the vulnerability of the corporeal self, the ravages of contamination, and the horror of existence despite, and in defiance of, necropolitical state praxis. This course requires students to watch weekly films in the horror/monster genre.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST307 LAND BACK! Indigenous Sovereignty Politics

This advanced research seminar will feature a look at the contemporary LAND BACK movement through current case studies with a focus on tracing the historical and legal genealogies of settler colonial land dispossession, indigenous land title, and self-governance issues bounded to territory (recognized and otherwise). We will examine different historical periods, moments, geographical sites, and case studies to explore the complexities of life for Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Islands and North America subject to the authority of the United States in relation to land as a central part of exercising sovereignty. In relation to these themes, the course will also examine: Indigenous peoples' varied political statuses in settler colonial context; self-determination; structures of domination and resistance; Indigenous agency; Native nationalism and decolonization. Readings will focus on the recognition and assertion of collective land rights, treaty rights, as well as land claims, land recovery, and land reclamation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ANTH307
Prereq: None

AMST309 Theories of Capitalism

Capitalism has profoundly shaped world history, acting as one of the primary drivers of social change, and working to shape a tremendous variety of social institutions ranging from colonialism to our sense of time. This course takes a critical approach to the study of capitalism, looking at the ways capitalism has intersected with and transformed the nature of social oppression (particularly in relation to nation, race, gender, and sexuality), as well as the ways it works to shape everyday consciousness. Historical changes within capitalism will be explored, considering particularly the rise of corporate capitalism and of contemporary neoliberalism. We will examine a wide variety of theoretical approaches to capitalism, taking Marx's thought as a jumping-off point for elaboration and critique. We will conclude by considering alternatives to capitalism that have been proposed in both historical and contemporary contexts, together with an examination of practical efforts to implement these possibilities.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: SOC319
Prereq: SOC151 OR AMST174 OR AMST178

AMST312 Americans Abroad: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives

In this course, we will explore international travel in the long 19th century. We will focus on narratives published by Americans who had the opportunity to travel beyond the United States. Through individual and collective activities, we will survey the trajectories of activists, diplomats, doctors, entertainers, entrepreneurs, journalists, missionaries, sailors, scientists, soldiers, students, teachers, tourists, and many others who engaged with foreign societies. By analyzing travel narratives, we will delve into a globalizing new order of expanding empires and integrating capitalist economies.



The main product of this course will be digital humanities projects. Throughout the semester, we will conceptualize, design, build, and improve StoryMaps. Each student will develop their own individual project focusing on a set of travel narratives. Classes will alternate between historical and conceptual discussions about travel in the 19th century and technical matters related to digital humanities. Our goal is to reflect on the broad history of American foreign relations and the use of new technology to produce and communicate knowledge about the past.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST313 After Orientalism: Asian American Literature and Theory After 2000

From early articulations of cultural nationalist pride to today's transnational, intersectional, deconstructive, feminist, and queer critiques, Asian American studies is a field that has radically expanded and transformed since its original emergence out of the Third World and student strikes of the late 1960s. This course seeks to take the temperature of Asian America today by exploring a range of contemporary works published after the millennium, more than 30 years after the field's inception. Alongside a selection of novels, poetry, short stories, and graphic novels by some of the most acclaimed contemporary writers in America, we will also consider critical and theoretical texts that offer different perspectives on our contemporary historical moment, exploring frameworks of modernity, postmodernity, neoliberalism, and the university as ways of situating contemporary Asian America's aesthetic innovations. Though not required, it is strongly recommended that students have taken ENGL230 Introduction to Asian American Literature or a comparable substitute prior to enrolling.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL361
Prereq: None

AMST315 Entertaining Social Change

"Our problem," Tom Frank writes, "is that we have a fixed idea of what power is, of how power works, and of how power is to be resisted." This is especially true of "entertainment." Power that may not seem like power--only, say, like "fun" or "amusement"--can be especially powerful. A thread that connects all of our texts will be: how has the systemic critique of social contradictions been popularized as compelling and fascinating in modern times? A related concern: what are the seductions and violence built into "enjoyment---"enjoyment" that reproduces "Americans"? We will "entertain" the diverse strategies that progressive moviemakers have developed to entertain Americans--to teach, persuade, seduce, provoke, upset, anger, and move them through laughter, tears, and not least of all ideas--so that Americans will be more inclined to "entertain" social critique that inspires and envisions social change.



Our critical focus will be on the popularizing (and sometimes the selling) of social critique in movies including Straight Outta Compton, Malcolm X, Medium Cool, Network, El Norte, Smoke Signals, Before the Flood, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Salt of the Earth, Matewan, and The Big Short. We will place special emphasis on self-reflexive movies about "entertainment" and about labor/social movement organizing. Entertainment, we will see, plays a key role in organizing and reorganizing Americans. In doing so, it can place limits on our vision of what--and who--needs to be changed. By putting our movies in conceptual dialogue and making these limits more visible, we will help one another think, see, and feel beyond these limits. As we are "entertained" (and we will be) we will consider the stakes of being "entertained."
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ENGL309, FGSS315
Prereq: None

AMST316 Television Storytelling: The Conditions of Narrative Complexity

This course examines the industrial and cultural conditions for the development of relatively complex forms of storytelling in commercial U.S. television. Narrative complexity is a cross-generic phenomenon that emerged over the 1980s and has proliferated within an increasingly fragmented media environment. In class discussions and individual research projects, students will analyze particular programs in-depth, with attention to their industrial and social conditions of production, their aesthetic and ideological appeals, and the cultural tastes and viewing practices they reflect and promote. We will also consider how television studies has responded and contributed to the increased prestige of certain types of programs.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH308, FILM319
Prereq: None

AMST317 Human Rights and Spiritual Ecologies of Indigenous Peoples

This seminar will explore the social, legal, and metaphysical aspects of indigenous spiritual ecologies and their relation to United Nations discourses, indigenous community media production, and land rights movements. We will consider how indigenous peoples both respond to legal frameworks and press their positions into national and international human rights standards, on issues ranging from governance to cultural survival, from environmental management to language policy.

A particular emphasis will be put on the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America, the Mesoamerican highlands (Chiapas, Guatemala), the United States, and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, but students are encouraged to pursue their research projects across Abya Yala (the Americas).

This course focuses on developing critical thinking skills and places a special emphasis on writing and thoughtfully responding to the materials presented in class. Classes will not only consist of framework lectures and discussion questions, but also a combination of student panel presentations and writing in a collaborative environment. Participation in these activities is crucial to success in this course. Opportunities for student engagement in Manhattan at the April 2024 United Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues are currently in development.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI316, ENVS328
Prereq: None

AMST319 "The History that Hurts": Reading Saidiya Hartman

This course will introduce students to the major works of the black literary theorist and cultural historian Saidiya Valarie Hartman (b. June 25, 1961), who was named a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow in Literary History and Criticism and American History. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1984, Hartman earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1992; she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Students enrolled in this course will read and write about Hartman's trilogy of scholarly monographs: SCENES OF SUBJECTION: TERROR, SLAVERY, AND SELF-MAKING IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA (Oxford University Press, 1997); LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: INTIMATE HISTORIES OF RIOTOUS BLACK GIRLS, TROUBLESOME WOMEN, AND QUEER RADICALS (W. W. Norton, 2019). Finally, if her new book project is published before the syllabus is finalized, then students enrolled in this course will also read and write about Hartman's fourth scholarly monograph (tentatively titled "N Folio: An Essay on Narrative and the Archive").
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM219, ENGL218, FGSS219
Prereq: None

AMST320 Asian American Posthumanisms: Biopolitics, Ecopoetics, and Literature

From 19th-century anxieties concerning subhuman coolies to 21st-century celebrations of suprahuman cyborgs, U.S. discourses have always figured people of Asian descent as peripheral to the category of the human. While Asian Americanist scholarship has often responded by asserting the humanity of Asian Americans, a number of scholars and writers have begun to explore and even embrace the inhuman character of the Asian American. Drawing from recent scholarship in science studies, political ecology, anthropology, and literary studies, this course will consider what it looks like to shift the scale of analysis from the individual, organismal human to the social logics, biopolitical infrastructures, and ecological entanglements that supersede the human, or conversely, to the body parts, molecular processes, and fragments that subtend the scale of the human. We will pay particular attention to the question of what consequences decentering the human has for the ethnic novel, a genre often valued for its ability to affirm the humanity of racialized subjects. For instance, what kinds of aesthetics and politics emerge from an imaginary centered not on the human individual but on systems, landscapes, entanglements, and other imaginative forms and social practices? What does a novel centered not on a human protagonist but on an object, a clone, or an ecosystem look like? To explore these nonhuman centered logics and forms, we will read a selection of theoretical texts by Asian American and other authors, alongside a selection of contemporary (and capaciously defined) Asian/American novels by writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Larissa Lai, Ruth Ozeki, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ENGL319
Prereq: None

AMST322 Visions of the Future: Capitalism and Colonialism in the World's Fairs

This course will explore the history of the world's fairs from the 1851 Great Exhibition in London to the 1939 New York World's Fair. These events showcased the newest technologies that would revolutionize life and labor for millions of human beings around the world. They also presented to the public new consumer goods and forms of entertainment such as music, dances, and sports. Moreover, they were sites of competition for rising nations and empires. Each participant country brought artifacts that demonstrated their (often idealized) national characteristics and development. Western powers displayed colonial products and peoples to show how they had been advancing in their expansionist enterprises. The students will read works on the humanities and social sciences that delve into the meanings of the world's fairs. They will also analyze primary sources (texts, paintings, film, songs, cartoons, and more) which will allow them to ask their own questions about these events.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM322, HIST398
Prereq: None

AMST324 Biopolitics, Blackness and Spirit Baptism: The Birth of American Pentecostalism

American Pentecostalism is a conservative, Protestant, Evangelical revival movement that emerges in and through Black practices that constitute an exclusion in the racialized religious, social, cultural, and political formations of early 20th-century United States. Rather than examining Pentecostalism through a single lens called "religion," this course will use the themes of Biopolitics and Blackness to examine Pentecostalism through its most commonly known feature--an experience called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Pentecostals were narrated in popular and critical accounts in the late 19th and early 20th century as exhibiting criminality, insanity, and raced, gendered, and sexed Black pathology. These marks of abnormality were all part of a formation of power in America known as biopolitics. As an idea, biopolitics is popularized by French historian/philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault's concept attempts to explain how different intellectual and professional disciplines emerge in nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to best create a thriving population, which could be made to live. The power of the nation-state had traditionally been expressed in and through the power to kill. As a revival movement, Pentecostalism rehearses these themes, as early adherents fight over what it means to be made alive when racial Blackness is almost often seen as a mark of and for death. The course will study original accounts and sources from the historical period, read critical, interpretive accounts, and use a variety of media. All resources will be provided in class or via Moodle.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI324, AFAM327
Prereq: None

AMST326 Queer and Trans Aesthetics

This seminar will consider contemporary trans and queer theory foregrounding race, class, disability, migration, diaspora, indigeneity, and colonization alongside the work of BIPOC queer and trans artists in particular. The course's animating (and unfixable!) questions include: How do artists produce and intervene in understandings of gender and/or sexuality through their work? What does it mean for an artist or viewer to describe an image, object, or performance as "queer" or "trans"? What constitutes a "queer" or "trans" reading of visual culture? How might various formulations of "queer" and "trans" relate to, put pressure on, and/or resist "aesthetics"? What is the relationship between an artist's self-identification and/or their resistance to categorization (e.g., in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, nationality) on the one hand, and audiences' efforts to engage and interpret their art on the other? Put another way: What, if anything, does an artist's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with their art? And what does a viewer's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with how they approach and interpret visual culture? Several artist talks and/or class visits (all virtual) are being organized in conjunction with the seminar.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS331, THEA311, SOC300, AFAM331
Prereq: None

AMST329 Issues in Latina/o Politics and Culture

This course explores the ways in which Latinas/os become legible as subjects in contemporary U.S. political thought and cultural life. We will consider struggles for Latina/o legal rights, the relationships between the Latina/o workforce and issues of global labor patterns, the workings of transnational economies and power, and popular cultural narratives depicting Latinas/os and U.S.-Latin America relations. This course offers the opportunity to explore, analyze, and decipher the ways in which Latinas/os inhabit a global world, built from a legacy of a colonial past and heading toward a neoliberal, globalized future. We will use an interdisciplinary approach, addressing a range of texts from various scholarly disciplines, including history, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, American studies, and political science, as well as popular cultural texts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST330 Economies of Erasure: Exploring the Violence Concealed by the Liberal Promise of Care

This course will aid students in understanding and recognizing the processes of erasure that maintain ongoing regimes of domination. In particular, we will attempt to understand how the twinned promises of equity and tolerance made by seemingly liberal, multicultural democracies work to conceal the ongoing--and specifically targeted--violence that in fact constitute and continue to subtend these nation-states. How, we will ask, do these regimes make violence disappear through the promise to "care" for their citizens, even as they wield spectacular violence to maintain domination? How are we as subjects of these regimes conditioned to pay attention to certain events, ideas, and systems, and what is made to disappear through such selective forms of attention? What communities, bodies, and individuals are sacrificed by the liberal promise of care? To answer these questions, the course will juxtapose readings in philosophy and social theory with ethnographic and historical case studies, giving students both the conceptual tools to analyze erasure and a set of examples through which to understand how these forms of erasure operate in the world. Crucial to our tool kit is the concept of disavowal, best understood as an active deflection from attending to the obligations of what one knows or should know. Disavowal, as we will see, makes it possible for subjects to imagine the political, social, and cultural spaces in which they live as moral, legitimate, and ethical, taking violence as an aberration rather than as the normative maintenance of an order of domination. This disavowal, the course contends, grounds itself in the ideologically charged embrace of a liberal sense of care that is, in turn, abstracted away from actual and ongoing histories of power and domination. In order to manage the potential scale of this exploration, we will primarily examine examples from North America, examining how white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler colonial domination operate in tandem in order to legitimize regimes of power by disavowing their violence.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM330, ANTH330
Prereq: None

AMST333 Race, Colonialism, and the Nonhuman

This course responds to growing scholarly attention to the entwinement of racial slavery and settler colonialism as foundational forces in U.S. society as well as to the relationships between colonial, racial, and ecological violence. Through materials from anthropology, Black studies, Indigenous studies, environmental history, and critical animal studies, this class will explore the entanglement of human and nonhuman difference--primarily in North America--both historically and in the present. Students will become familiar with conversations about racialization, settler colonialism, and the figures of the human/nonhuman that are increasingly prominent in anthropology as well as adjacent fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: ANTH331, ENVS331
Prereq: None

AMST334 Black Power and the Modern Narrative of Slavery

The historical moment immediately after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements saw an explosion of African American writing about slavery. In the past half-century, black writers wrote award-winning novels that gave unprecedented attention to the intricacies of the life of people who are enslaved and to slavery as a system that they suggested could help us better understand late-20th-century American culture. We will read some of the most important works written by contemporary African American writers to see how and why they transformed the first autobiographical form for black writers--the slave narrative--into a fictional form that has served them as they dissect their own cultural moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL324, AFAM324
Prereq: None

AMST334Z Black Power and the Modern Narrative of Slavery

The historical moment immediately after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements saw an explosion of African American writing about slavery. In the past half-century, black writers wrote award-winning novels that gave unprecedented attention to the intricacies of the life of people who are enslaved and to slavery as a system that they suggested could help us better understand late-20th-century American culture. We will read some of the most important works written by contemporary African American writers to see how and why they transformed the first autobiographical form for black writers--the slave narrative--into a fictional form that has served them as they dissect their own cultural moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL324Z, AFAM324Z
Prereq: None

AMST337 Missionary Mysteries: the Objects and Archives of Wesleyan's Missionary Past

This course examines the history of Wesleyan University's connections to missionary work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as seen through the university's archival and object collections. Students will spend the bulk of classroom time in hands-on learning as they engage with the archives of the Wesleyan Missionary Lyceum and cultural heritage collections obtained by missionaries and brought back to the University. Beginning with an overview of historical, archival, and museum methods, the course then will examine objects and written records from the Americas, West Africa, East Asia and the South Pacific. Students will be challenged to consider the ways in which Wesleyan has been engaged in colonialism, imperialism, and global evangelism. Topics of investigation will include: gender, linguistics, museum ethics and repatriation, the use of objects as educational tools.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST337, RELI337, ANTH337
Prereq: None

AMST350 The Law, the Citizen, and the Literary and Cinematic Imaginations

In this course, we will study several major legal events that highlight the contradictions and injustices in the history of U.S. citizenship and the ways this history has been reimagined in literature and cinema. Among the topics discussed will be the slave codes, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Jim Crow order, the Bracero program, sodomy laws, and SB 1070. We will consider theories of citizen, state, race, and sexuality implicit in these legal structures, with an eye for who may be incorporated into the body politic and who is unassimilable by design, and on what terms. In addition, we will consider the way literary and cinematic texts engage the rhetoric and psychic effects of the law and the way they present different imaginaries of human bodies, communities, and temporalities. Our focus will be on African American, African diasporic, Latina/o/x and Indigenous literatures and cinemas, as they reveal the rifts and conjunctions among the categories citizen, "savage," "gente sin razón," slave, illegal, pervert, and deviant.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL350, AFAM350
Prereq: None

AMST351 Queer of Color Critique

This course will examine and interrogate the field of queer studies with particular focus on the ways in which queer scholarship and queer political movements function alongside critical race theory, ethnic studies, and sociopolitical antiracist efforts. Students will be asked to consider the history of queer studies and queer politics, the contemporary state of queer movements, and future visions of queer life. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, and we will rely upon a diverse range of theoretical, historical, and cultural studies texts. We will explore the normative parameters of both sexual and racial identities, probing the terms of identification to consider their meaning in the contemporary moment and in relationship to various cultural, social, legal, and political milieus. Throughout the course we will consider, What does it mean to study queerness and to study race? How do institutions--religious, legal, and scientific--shape our understandings of both queer and racial identities? In what ways do sexuality and race interact, and how does this interaction inform the meanings of each of these identity categories? Furthermore, how have queer movement and scholarship both supported antiracist efforts and, also, how have they been complicit in cultural and institutional forms of racial oppression? How do other social categories of identification such as gender, ethnicity, and class, shape the ways in which we understand expressions of race and queerness?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: FGSS351, AFAM351
Prereq: None

AMST352 Settler and Native Ecologies of Power in North America

This course examines how settler colonial dis/possession, resource extraction, and spatial domination have generated ecological catastrophes in North America while at the same time shaping discourses of environmental "protection" and "preservation." Reading the work of historians, anthropologists, critical theorists, knowledge-keepers, and activists and examining sites such as national parks and infrastructure projects in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, we will learn how efforts to define, manage, regulate, and exploit "natural" resources occur/red simultaneously with assaults on Native nations' sovereignty. We will explore how Indigenous people(s), in spite of continuous settler state violence and violations, have cared for and defended their lands and human and nonhuman relatives, drawing from a wealth of traditional knowledges and tribal political practices. We will end the course by bringing these critiques to current "environmental issues" such as wildfires, toxic contamination, and pipelines.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST353 Health, Illness, and Power in America

In this class, we will explore the interlocking histories of health, illness, and power in America. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which discourses of the healthy body have undergirded notions of citizenship and belonging in the nation. We will consider how processes of disease, disability, and contagion have been imagined through the lenses of social difference, including race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will address civil institutions designed to manage individual and population health, and we will consider theories of political power in the making of the "modern" body.



Sample topics covered will include immigration policies and contagious disease scares; STDs and the politics of public health campaigns; physical fitness and the value of bodily labor under capitalism; the management of diseases that are symptomatic and those that are not; race- and gender-based approaches to medicine and medical difference; clinical trials and the ethics of human experimentation; regulations surrounding blood and organ donation; changing rituals of bodily hygiene; preventative medicine and the call to personal responsibility; mental health policies and institutions; and pride movements surrounding the "unhealthy" body.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: STS353
Prereq: None

AMST353Z Health, Illness, and Power in America

In this class, we will explore the interlocking histories of health, illness, and power in America. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which discourses of the healthy body have undergirded notions of citizenship and belonging in the nation. We will consider how processes of disease, disability, and contagion have been imagined through the lenses of social difference, including race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will address civil institutions designed to manage individual and population health, and we will consider theories of political power in the making of the "modern" body. Sample topics covered will include immigration policies and contagious disease scares; STDs and the politics of public health campaigns; physical fitness and the value of bodily labor under capitalism; the management of diseases that are symptomatic and those that are not; race- and gender-based approaches to medicine and medical difference; clinical trials and the ethics of human experimentation; regulations surrounding blood and organ donation; changing rituals of bodily hygiene; preventative medicine and the call to personal responsibility; mental health policies and institutions; and pride movements surrounding the "unhealthy" body.



In its iteration as a Summer Session course, class instruction will be provided as a combination of interactive lecture, discussion, and small group work. On a daily basis, students will be asked to complete and discuss reading assignments, short research activities, and written responses.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: STS353Z
Prereq: None

AMST354 Destroying the Audience: Limits of Performance and Representation in the Theater of (Non) Being

Young Jean Lee's Theatre Company, active between 2003 and 2016, is most known for a series of "racial-identity plays," written and directed by Lee, which adopt an experimental approach to the critique of racial politics, driven by the motto "destroy the audience." On the one hand, this course will explore literary and artistic works that express an ambivalent, if not antagonistic, relationship to the presence of an audience. On the other hand, this course will consider the role and function of the audience as a social category by considering how the concept of audience (broadly understood) contributes to cultural production about race and gender as a potentially active element in the creative process. Students can expect to read and/or view drama, visual art, performance, film, and self-writing (autobiography and memoir) which, explicitly or implicitly, address the presence of the audience as a way of tackling larger social and cultural problems related to race and ethnicity. The goal will be to foster an understanding of the politics of gender, sexuality, ability, language, and class that determine how these issues are conceptualized and articulated. This course will employ an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of primary and secondary texts, engaging audience studies, performance studies, ethnic studies, and disability studies, in addition to queer/trans of color, postcolonial, and legal theory, to historically contextualize and theoretically ground a cultural understanding of the relation between audience and racial performance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS353, THEA353, ENGL364
Prereq: None

AMST355 Between Asia and Asian America

In this seminar, we will critically examine the relationship between East Asia and Asian America, and explore the disjunction and connection between the two as geopolitical entities, historical concepts, academic fields, and sites of cultural expressions and political identity. Inquiring into key issues such as colonization, diaspora, race and ethnicity, Pacific and the transpacific, etc., this seminar seeks productive engagement between the disciplines without erasing their differences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CEAS
Identical With: CEAS355
Prereq: None

AMST361 Thresholds of Art and Activism Since the 1960s

Since the 1960s, a period marked by war and social upheaval, artists have navigated the contested boundaries of art and activism by turning to the street and inventing new strategies of performance, distribution, and collaboration. Exploding the familiar protocols of agitprop, they advanced a politics of representation as much as a representation of politics. Philosophical texts (e.g., Adorno, Benjamin, Debord, Habermas, Ranciere, etc.) support our engagement with recent debates in art historical scholarship (e.g., Bishop, Bryan-Wilson, Lambert-Beatty, McKee, etc.) as we consider contexts as diverse as the social movements of the 1960s, queer liberation, eco-critical activism, and Occupy Wall Street. Extending the 20th-century avant-garde's project to break down the division between art and life, our case studies (focused primarily but not exclusively on the Unites States.: Emory Douglas, the Art Workers Coalition, Gran Fury, Women on Waves, etc.) provoke this seminar's central questions: Where is the line between art and activism? What value might that boundary continue to hold, and why? How must we assess the efficacy, ethics, and aesthetics of such practices? And what historical conditions have made them timely for artists?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AMST
Identical With: ARHA361
Prereq: None

AMST362 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: The Dark Turn in Television Storytelling

This course, offered in association with the Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing, examines a certain tendency in contemporary television storytelling. Taking the debut of "The Sopranos" in 1999 as a benchmark, we will explore the emergence in dramas and comedies of a dark, uncertain, pessimistic, or disillusioned address within a medium long known for its reassuring tone. We will consider the industrial and social conditions for this tonal shift, as well as the role it has played in elevating public perceptions of television's cultural value.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: ANTH361, FILM362
Prereq: None

AMST375 Black Global Cities

In this course, we will analyze representations of cities and Black urban modernity in Afro- diasporic literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Placing special emphasis on the global hubs of London, Cape Town, Kinshasa Lagos, New York, Marseilles, and Kingston, we will ask what makes these former imperial sites Black global cities? We will read literary works on and from Black Global Cities alongside sociological texts on urbanization, globalization and discuss the extent to which literary representations either collude with or challenge dominant national and transnational narratives about Black urban modernity. Although each week's readings will focus on a different location, we will approach these locales as nodes in larger global networks of people, texts, and goods rather than as discreet, bounded places. To this end, we will trace how histories of racial formation move across borders and are transposed onto different spaces, and to what effect. Authors we will read include: Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Gabeba Baderoon, Petina Gappah, Kei Miller, and Teju Cole. We will also watch films such as Girlhood (2014), Black Panther (2018), The Harder They Come (1972), Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens (2011), Welcome to Nollywood (2007).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL375, AFAM375
Prereq: None

AMST378 Decolonizing Indigenous Gender and Sexuality

This seminar focuses on the politics of decolonization in Indigenous contexts with regard to gender and sexuality. The seminar examines a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania. Beginning with an historical exploration of gender and colonialism, students will examine how colonial processes, along with other forms of domination that include racializing technologies, have transformed gender and sexuality through the imposition of definitions and models of normative (often binary) gender subjectivity and relations, "proper" sexual behavior, preoccupations with "sexual deviance," sexual expression as a territory to be conquered, legacies of control, legal codification, and commodification. We will then assess how diverse modes of self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual decolonization, including feminist interventions in nationalist productions that sustain masculinist and homophobic agendas. In relation to these dynamics, we will study the growing body of work on Native feminisms and decolonial feminisms, as well as Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous studies.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM378
Prereq: None

AMST381 Unsovereign Elements, Caribbean Poetics

This course aims to study and question sovereignty, begin to theorize "unsovereignty," and stake out what may be meant by "anticolonial imagination" in literary and other aesthetic forms, as well in the theories of history that it arranges under its name, "Unsovereign, Caribbean." Unsovereignty and the anticolonial will not be imagined as exact and liberated opposites of sovereignty and colonialism, but rather as epistemically and linguistically entangled therewith, and inviting further thought from Afro-Caribbean historical and deconstructive vantages. By reading richly symptomatic, primary, historical documents about race, geography, and slavery in San Domingue/Santo Domingo, as well as contemporary fiction, art, and criticism that re-narrate and theorize Caribbean history, we will focus on the historical frame of ~1492 into the 19th century. This frame holds with specific reference to Sara E. Johnson's notion of a foundational "state of war" against black people in the Americas and Frank B. Wilderson III's notion of when the "gratuitous violence" of the Middle Ages begins "to mark the Black ontologically." The 19th century will be studied comparatively, and not as the era of heralded "emancipation," but of abduction, re-enslavement, "travestied freedom" (Hartman), anti-emancipation (Eller), and white psychosis. We will read sometimes for imperial notions of sovereignty, force, race, property, and labor, and other times for Caribbean notions and narratives that are sometimes at war with and sometimes in bed with said imperial schema and this episteme. In the face of some contemporary critical theoretical tendencies to use terms like "fugitivity," "resistance," "freedom," "abolition," "the commons," etc., as ones that are equally at stake for all, or that signify one shared known, fixed, and agreed-upon meaning, we will, rather (and especially), attend to the historical specificity and signifying work of marronage in the Caribbean region and the complex tropology of unsovereignty and "unruliness" in the Caribbean. Conceptually, the course thinks from and about Caribbean studies, Black critical theory, Black studies, Enlightenment thought, and Deconstruction. Students who want to nerd-out on critical theory, history, and Caribbean aesthetics are encouraged to apply.



We will study digitized versions of imperial naval and commercial maps held at the John Carter Brown Library, Archivo de Indias, and in other archives, as well as primary texts of different genres (e.g., pilotes, ledgers, letters, legal documents), including the writing and thinking of Christopher Columbus, Moreau de Saint Mery, Baudry des Lozieres, María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel. We will also read selections from some of the following scholars, artists, writers: Colin Dayan, Sara E. Johnson, Evelynne Trouillot, Jacques Derrida, Robin Derby, Maryse Conde, Alejo Carpentier, Demetrius Eudell, Anne Eller, Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo, Ronald Mendoza de Jesús, Frank Wilderson III, Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, Aimé Césaire, Beatriz Santiago Munoz, Joiri Minaya, Jean Rhys, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM391, ENGL391, AFAM391
Prereq: None

AMST390 The Redeemed Narrative: Microhistories in Early America

This course will guide students in thinking about American social history, the efforts by historians to recover the lived experiences of those who did not leave substantial archival documentation, through a close examination of examples of microhistory in early America. Microhistory, situated between the New Social History, influenced by the Annalistes and British Marxists, and the Cultural Turn, influenced by critical and linguistic theory, offers a unique opportunity to analyze the ways that early American historians creatively utilize evidence. We will pay particular attention to the ways that microhistory recovers histories of race and gender despite the paucity and problematic nature of archival sources. While students will receive a grounding in the theories of archival source interpretation, emphasis will be placed on the ways that historians have put those theories into practice. The course is designed to be an upper-level seminar, preparing students with the research tools to write their senior thesis or major capstone paper.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST390
Prereq: None

AMST391 Difficult Women: Post/Feminism in Television Comedies and Dramedies

Although postwar family sitcoms represented women as homemakers, one of the first and most popular sitcom wives also articulated discontent with domestic femininity. Lucy Ricardo became the prototype of the "unruly woman," a figure with feminist potential whose desires exceed and disrupt dominant gender norms. As those norms have shifted, so have TV's unruly women. Second-wave feminism, anticipated in I Love Lucy, was incorporated into a 1970s cycle of comedies centered on single working women whose career aspirations were rewarded. Over the following decades, a postfeminist sensibility dominated television comedies and dramas and became central to a gendered neoliberalism in which energetic individuals "empower" themselves. In recent years, a new type of female protagonist has emerged. Alongside the can-do optimism of single-women comedies from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Sex and the City to 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, a stream of comedies and dramedies, made largely by and for women, have depicted a variety of flawed, difficult, unruly women coming of age under conditions of socioeconomic precarity, whose less focused energies seem to articulate a more uncertain, downbeat, post-recessional mood. In this course we will situate the latter cycle in relation to both the longer history of televisual representations of women and to the current state of feminist politics. Among the shows we will look at are: I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girlfriends, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Girls, Insecure, Broad City, Better Things, Two Broke Girls, New Girl, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Unreal, Abbott Elementary, Fleabag, Dear White People, and Somebody Somewhere.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM397, ANTH397, FGSS397, FILM202
Prereq: None

AMST394 Sachem School: Indigenous Lifeways and Settler Radicalism After 1600

In the 21st century, we face a series of interconnected reckonings: environmental collapse, economic disparity, racial inequality, and more. There were, and still are, alternative ways of organizing our economies, reframing our relationships with the land, and creating kinship networks that mitigate against inequality and enmity. This class will explore what settlers learned--and refused to learn--from the Indigenous societies they encountered after contact in northern North America. From Roger Williams's ideas of religious toleration in the 1640s to #landback today, settlers have at times demonstrated a willingness to learn from Indigenous lifeways and employ those lessons in ways deemed "radical" by Western standards. Understanding this history illuminates a path toward a future in which we continue learning from Indigenous nations and work to repair the damage settler societies have inflicted on each other and our world.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM394, HIST389
Prereq: None

AMST397 United States Overseas Empire

The United States is an empire: an empire that expands beyond the North American continent into many islands across the globe. From Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Atlantic to American Samoa and Guam in the Pacific, the US remains an imperial power with unincorporated island territories, a euphemism for replacing the anachronistic term "colonies." The residents of these territories have truncated political rights; they do not have voting representation in U.S. Congress, and they cannot vote in U.S. Presidential elections. Though U.S. territories are usually footnotes in the grand narrative of U.S. history, this course argues that they are integral to understanding the United States as a whole.



We will examine the history of how the U.S. acquired and governed the territories from the perspective of the islands themselves, emphasizing the local effects of U.S. colonial policies. We will analyze how U.S. foreign policy split indigenous peoples into separate political entities, how economic interests changed native political systems, how U.S. militarism affected the ecology of whole islands and the culture of territorial residents, and how public health policies racialized island peoples. We will also explore how self-determination and decolonization movements were stymied by the U.S. government, and how a whole host of other colonial policies and actions has affected and continues to affect the territories.



The course will cover islands currently under U.S. control, including American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, and Hawaii. It will also examine former territories, Trust Territories of the Pacific, and occupied islands including the Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, among others. With the changing nature of U.S. imperialism, we will also consider the United States expansive military base presence throughout the globe. The history of these islands can tell us much about limits of U.S. citizenship, about the growth of U.S. commerce and militarism globally, about patterns of migration and immigration, and about the changing discourse of race and indigeneity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST397
Prereq: None

AMST401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AMST404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AMST407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AMST408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AMST409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST419 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

AMST420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

AMST465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

AMST470 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

AMST491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AMST492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT