The core classes are ordinarily taught once a year. The courses do not have to be taken in any sequential order, although we do recommend taking the Introduction to American Studies close to the beginning of your program.
This course will focus on interdisciplinarity as a method by comparing different disciplinary approaches to the study of American culture. It will introduce students to the history of American Studies as a field, to the questions explored in greater depth in the other core courses, and to contemporary intellectual debates within the field. Readings will be chosen to enable students to compare the questions asked and the methods and evidence used by scholars in the fields of social and cultural history, literary criticism, the new historicism, and cultural studies.
This course concentrates on the individual's role in politics and society and traces the development of citizenship and national character (what it means to be an American) from the colonial period to 1860. Topics to be discussed include Puritan communalism, the relationship between American freedom and American slavery, contrasting assumptions regarding the individual in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the tension created by presumptions about race, gender, morality, and citizenship.
This course will focus on the emergence of modern American society, culture, and politics from the post-Civil War era through the Great Depression, with emphasis on the following topics: the ideologies of modernism, progressivism, and socialism, and the political, economic, and social forces that constitute modernity; innovations in politics, the arts, and the social sciences and their relationship to new technologies and the labor practices of industrial capitalism; the emergence of civil rights, feminism, and the labor movement's struggle for industrial democracy.
This course explores the historical construction of gender and sexuality in U.S. social and political culture of different eras, through current historical scholarship, primary documents, and cultural representations such as literature or film. How are conceptions of manhood and womanhood, of heterosexuality and "deviant" sexualities, shaped and reshaped in response to historical forces, and linked to concepts of race and class? How are dominant definitions contested?
This course will explore the construction and maintenance of ethnic, racial, and national identities in the United States. Students will analyze various interdisciplinary texts which contain implicit and explicit expressions of gender, ethnic, racial, sexual, regional and national identities. Various case studies will furnish material to train students in the methods and approaches used in American Studies.
This course will focus on changing definitions of culture and methods of cultural studies; the changing meanings of "folk culture," "mass culture," and "popular culture"; and the changing dynamics among technology, the media, and culture. Topics for readings and discussion may include: the relations between changing technologies and the activity of audiences in shaping commercial popular culture; the social and economic context of technological innovation; the cultural imperatives of technological change.