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 First Year Seminar 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.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
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

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

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

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

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

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

This seminar 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

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

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

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, crime, famine, and disease shape our understandings of citizenship, nationality, and identity? Finally, how do representations of social difference inform conceptions of violence and their place in the visual field?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AMST, 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

AMST217 Carceral Landscapes: From Colonial Invasion to the Prison Economy

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

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

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 High-Tech Imperialists: Technology and America's Rise to World Power

How did Americans use technologies such as the railroad, photography, the machine gun, and electricity to advance their interests abroad? In this course, we will study the interconnected histories of technology and empire from the American Civil War to the First World War, the period encompassing a techno-scientific revolution that transformed human lives and power relations all over the world. This course adopts a broad definition of imperialism, reflecting on formal and informal strategies of expansion. It goes beyond US colonies and territories to inquire into how Americans engaged with other imperial powers and their colonial populations, advancing profitable -- and often destructive -- enterprises. It further asks how processes of internal colonialism influenced US power abroad and vice versa. Attentive to material reality, it examines the environmental impact of new technologies in colonial settings and how environmental changes disrupted local communities.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

AMST228 Cancelled, Blocked, Banned

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 versus 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

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

AMST240 Work to Rule: American Labor between Emancipation and Empire

Why have workers in the US fought to join labor unions and participate in collective workplace action when the boss invariably responds with intimidation, repression, and even violence? And how has collective worker power been leveraged both for and against American colonialism and imperialism? In this course we will explore the conflict between capital and labor in the US across diverse sites of struggle, including Southern slaves' "General Strike" during the Civil War, autoworkers' shop floor militancy during the Great Depression, challenges to organizing agricultural, domestic, and service labor, and recent union campaigns of athletes and academics. What does American labor's victories and defeats reveal about the relationship between capitalism, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and empire? Considering the divisions of race, gender, and class, how have workers in the US enacted or failed to enact the famous International Workers of the World slogan "an injury to one is an injury to all"?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
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

AMST244Z Imagining the End: Neoliberalism and the Arts

Many of us now like to paraphrase the philosopher Frederic Jameson when he argued that it has become "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." As the recent deluge of post-apocalyptic movies and documentaries about melting glaciers makes clear, this is an accurate statement. Yet while most of us imagine how neoliberal capitalism will bring about the end of the world, others try to imagine the end of the status quo. Since neoliberalism became the global hegemonic system, artists of all kinds have been imagining ways we can survive and (perhaps) overcome it: think about the songs of Tracy Chapman or Residente, the street art of Keith Haring or Lady Pink, the movies of Chloe Zhao or Alejandro González Iñárritu, or the writings of Ursula Le Guin or Roberto Bolaño. This course explores how engaged art from the 1970s to the present has responded to -- and fought against -- neoliberal hegemony in the United States, Latin America, and beyond. Through the arts, we will explore the nightmares of global collapse and the dreams of a new egalitarian and sustainable society. In addition to analyzing movies, poems, short stories, songs, and street art, we will read theoretical and historical studies that help us understand how neoliberalism shapes contemporary culture and makes art into one of the few areas in which dissent can be expressed.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: HIST244Z, LAST244Z
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMST306 The Politics of Emotions and American Sensibilities

This course starts from the premise that emotions are not automatic responses or merely products of internal psychological states. Instead, we will consider them as expressions that simultaneously influence and are influenced by the world. By drawing on ethnographic case studies, we will explore the social life of sentiments and analyze how emotions serve as the medium for crafting narratives about what it means to be an American citizen. Each week, we will closely examine the social formation of an emotion, including hate, anger, horror, terror, love, and compassion. The course will be grounded in a critique of liberal concepts such as freedom, rights, autonomy, and human rights.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Prereq: None

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

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

AMST321 Migrant Personhood: Against Tales of Witches, Aliens, Beasts, and Pests

The contagious animal, the irrational woman, the foreign threat, the mentally incompetent -- this course follows the circulation of these portrayals of immigrants beyond rhetorical injury. Drawing on what Colin Dayan calls "negative personhood," we will focus on the symbolic, narrative, and representational violence of immigration law. We start with readings and films that look into the history of the idea of the "reasonable man" in immigration policy, the truth-making effect of courtroom hearings, and the figures of speech that give shape to stories about what it is to be an American in the eyes of the law. We then explore forms of alternative representation that elude legal containment and instead seek cultural membership and political participation. We finish the course by examining poetic testimonials, psychotic narrations, dirty protests, escapes from ideological frames of address, collective autobiography, imaginative refusals, and radical Latinx utopias. We will draw from interdisciplinary material in anthropology, literary theory, performance studies, philosophy, legal theory, and feminist studies, among other fields.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ANTH321, STS336
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

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

AMST347 Absences, Archives, and Adjudicating Criminalities in Settler Colonial States

Absence can refer to either distance or nonexistence. Archival inquiry embodies the former and can yield the latter. Both positions pose ethical, interpretive, and political problems. In this course, we will critically approach the archive to ask questions about how its evidentiary forms are used to narrate social relations of power, territorial claims, criminality, and adjudicate past wrongs. What genres of proof do archives produce and naturalize, and how do historical claims corroborate, refuse, or reinterpret "truth" and "knowing"? Readings span Native and Indigenous Studies, American Studies, History, Anthropology, and Postcolonial and Literary Studies, exploring how these approaches address the adjudication of individual and state crimes. The course focuses on settler colonialism and Indigenous politics in North America but engages other global examples.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM346
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; individualized approaches to medicine and medical difference; clinical trials and the ethics of human experimentation; pregnancy and childbirth; 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: OPT
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

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: 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