Introduction to American Studies: American Representations of Crime and Violence In this course we will offer an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and identity. Integrating a range of sources and methods, we will examine myths, symbols, values, and social changes that have been used to create and contest ideas of "Americanness." Sources for the course will include movies, fiction, political and religious tracts, advertising, TV shows, video games, music, and journalism. This year, we will focus on American portrayals of crime and violence in a wide range of texts and cultural artifacts that provide us with a larger sense of how these representations function in the formation of categories of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics and religion, as well as socio-economic class in American society. Texts and films will likely range from true crime shows to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and from street to war photography.

Asian Americas In this course we will investigate cultural transformations, cultural politics, and the cultural productions of and about Asian Americans. The themes of immigration, nation, and citizenship are central to the construction of the U.S. racial category of Asian. Those addressed within the category are highly diverse and differentiated along class, gender, and generational lines, yet the racial category structures particular kinds of experiences and possibilities for subjects. Historical transformations and contemporary issues in a variety of Asian American contexts will be investigated through a variety of texts including historical accounts, cultural studies, anthropological studies, autobiography, and fiction.

Television and American Culture This course explores American life in the last seven decades through an analysis of our central medium: television. Spanning a history of television from its origins in radio to today’s digital convergence via YouTube and Netflix, we will consider television's role in both representing and constituting American society through a variety of approaches, including: the economics of the television industry, television's role within American democracy, the formal attributes of various television genres, television as a site of gender and racial identity formation, television's role in everyday life, the medium's technological transformations, and television as a site of global cultural exchange.

Childhood in America In this course we will explore “childhood” as an evolving social and cultural construct.  Beginning by acknowledging great diversity in the lived experience of childhood (shaped by race, gender, geography, religion, ability/disability), we will examine representations of childhood and experiences of children from the early nineteenth century to the present.  Together we will explore classic works of literature such as Alcott’s Little Women, Twain’s Huck Finn, and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, in conversation with historical documents and visual and material artifacts (illustrations, painting, toys, and films).  Throughout, we will consider how understanding conceptions of childhood illuminate American social and cultural history more broadly.

U.S. Origin Stories Some U.S. origin stories cast (white) Americans as chosen people, discoverers of a bountiful continent, their community a beacon of righteousness to the world. Other stories locate the nation's origins in slavery or in settler colonialism. One story celebrates America’s founding commitment to freedom, equality, and justice - principles which, in turn, sustain another origin story – that of America as a nation borne of and welcoming to immigrants. Origin stories might be foundational, but their meanings are never fixed. In this course we will explore the elasticity and persistence of origin stories, evident in current debates about whether U.S. history begins in 1619 or 1776, about migrant rights, about the self-determination of indigenous peoples, about white nationalism, and about U.S. global leadership.

Cultural Community Collaboration & Production In this course we will produce the fourth annual Día de Muertos Celebration. The Celebration culminates in a community procession amid altars and performances honoring the Day of the Dead (November 2nd), contextualized by advance workshops and activities. The scope of this project requires planning with partners throughout campus, including students, staff, and faculty, as well as with regional community members. This experiential course will be modeled on Project Based Learning, as goals include engaging fruitfully with off-campus community, deepening cultural competencies, and strengthening project management skills. We will deepen our understanding of Mexican and Mexican-American cultures and contemporary Latinx experiences, as we plan and implement cultural events. Spanish-language skills are helpful but not required. This is a half-credit course.

Immigrant America In this course we will trace American immigration history from the late 19th to the turn of the 21st century, and examine the essential place immigration has occupied in the making of modern America and American culture. The central themes of this course will be industrialization and labor migrations, aftermaths of wars and refugees, constructions of racial categories and ethnic community identities, legal defining of "aliens" and citizenship, and diversity in immigrant experiences. To explore these themes, we will engage a range of sources including memoirs, novels, oral histories, and films.

Critical Studies of Sport Sports offer important contexts for the study of social relations, inequalities, and differences in North America. Sports exist as an important arena where ideas around class, gender, sexuality, race, ability, and status are embodied and performed. In this course we will discuss the significance of sports to ideas of the self as well as in broader cultural, social, economic, and political realms. We will analyze a variety of issues including the relationship of sports to media, celebrity, money, religion, and education. We will also investigate the significance of sports and athletes to contemporary processes of globalization. (Not open to students who have taken AMST 1003).

Media, Sports, & Identity       In this course we will examine the relationship between media, sports, and the formulation of one’s identity. We will examine issues pertaining to gender identification, violence, and hero worship. Reading critical essays on the subject, studying media coverage of sporting events, and writing short analytical essays will enable us to determine key elements concerning how sports are contextualized in American culture. Student essays will form the basis of a more in-depth inquiry that each student will then present, using media, at the end of the course.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature This course will examine major developments in the literary world of 19th century America.  Specific topics to be addressed might include the transition from Romanticism to Regionalism and Realism, the origins and evolution of the novel in the United States, and the tensions arising from the emergence of a commercial marketplace for literature.  Attention will also be paid to the rise of women as literary professionals in America and the persistent problematizing of race and slavery.  Among others, authors may include J. F. Cooper, Emerson, Melville, Douglass, Chopin, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, Wharton, and James.

American Literature and Culture: Origins-1830 A study of literary and other cultural forms in early America, including gravestones, architecture, furniture and visual art.  We will consider how writing and these other forms gave life to ideas about religion, diversity, civic obligation and individual rights that dominated not only colonial life but that continue to influence notions of "Americanness" into the present day. Required for all majors and minors.

Formation of Modern American Culture I: 1830-1919 An introduction to the study of American culture from 1830 through World War I with an emphasis on the changing shape of popular, mass, and elite cultural forms. We will explore a widely-accepted scholarly notion that a new, distinctively national and modern culture emerged during this period and that particular ideas of social formation (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) came with it. We will practice the interdisciplinary interpretation of American culture by exploring a wide range of subjects and media: economic change, social class, biography and autobiography, politics, photo-journalism, novels, architecture, painting, and photography. Required of all American studies majors and minors.

Introduction to Latina/o Studies In this course we will undertake an interdisciplinary investigation of the unique experiences and conditions of U.S. Latina/os of Caribbean, Latin American, and Mexican descent. We will critically examine transnational cultures, patterns of circular migration, and intergenerational transformations from a historical perspective while also using methodologies from the humanities and social sciences. Topics will include the conquest of Mexico’s northern frontier, Chicana/o and Nuyorican movements, Latina feminist thought, Latina/o arts, Central American migrations in the 1980s, Latina/o religiosities, as well as philosophies of resistance and acculturation.

Football and Higher Education Football originated on US campuses, and its 150-year history reflects the vibrant, uneasy relation between sports and higher education. The first "big time" college sport in the United States, football became a media spectacle in the 1890s, and since then critics have debated the game's violence, educational merits, commercial trappings, and bearing on college admissions policies. The course will move from the 19th century to the present, tracing the sport's cultural meanings, its relation to class identity and gender roles, and its educational mission, including the sport's regulation by the NCAA. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to these issues, and readings may include literary and secondary works by Steve Almond, Owen Johnson, Dave Meggyesy, and Michael Oriard.

Race and American Literature After Civil Rights In 2025 literature by and about the racially minoritized exists at a paradoxical juncture: institutionalized and censored, feted as an instrument of consciousness-raising and denounced as woke and reverse-racist. In this course we will ask how we got here by exploring how writers of color from the 1960s onwards fought to enter the literary mainstream – a struggle broaching difficult questions about the relation between creative and political aspiration. Would these writers counter stereotype with empowering representation or refuse the burden of racial representativeness? Would they address white readers unfamiliar with racism or non-white readers already acquainted with its realities? And what would it mean for such aspirations to succeed against the backdrop of ratcheting inequality in and across the color line? Authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Percival Everett, and R.F. Kuang.

The History of Urban America "The magnification of all the dimensions of life," writes Lewis Mumford, " . . . has been the supreme office of the city in history." Mumford's appraisal of the mission of the city can be debated, but the importance of the city to human development cannot be denied. In this course we will cover the rise of the city in America from the colonial era to the present. We will explore why Americans have huddled in concentrated settlements and the consequences of that clustering. Special attention will be given to the growth of the industrial city of the late 19th century and the modern metropolis of the 20th century.

Remembering the American Revolution, 1776-2026 How have the people and events of 1776 been remembered? And how have artifacts, pictures, and even souvenirs shaped these stories? In this course we will analyze objects from and histories of the American Revolution, as well as the celebrations of the World’s Fairs of 1876 and 1926, the 1976 Bicentennial, and today's America250. We will explore how methods of commemoration and exhibition have shaped public memory across different historical and political contexts, attesting to different ideas about and attitudes towards American identity, gender roles, race, war and pacificism, rebellion and resistance. We will work with the collections of the Henry Sheldon Museum and invite members of the public to share objects or memories of the 1976 Bicentennial. This course is part of the Axinn Center for the Humanities’ Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Initiative.

Formations of Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. Historical memories, everyday experiences, and possible futures are powerfully shaped by racial and ethnic differences. Categories of race and ethnicity structure social relationships and cultural meanings in the United States and beyond. In this course we will track the theoretical and historical bases of ideas of race and ethnicity in modern America. We will investigate how race and ethnicity intersect at particular historical moments with other forms of difference including gender, sexuality, nation, and class. The course offers an approach informed by critical studies of race including texts in history, political theory, cultural studies, and anthropology.

Gothic and Horror This course examines the forms and meanings of the Gothic and horror over the last 250 years in the West. How have effects of fright, terror, or awe been achieved over this span and why do audiences find such effects attractive? Our purpose will be to understand the generic structures of horror and their evolution in tandem with broader cultural changes. Course materials will include fiction, film, readings in the theory of horror, architecture, visual arts, and electronic media.

Asian Americas In this course we will investigate cultural transformations, cultural politics, and the cultural productions of and about Asian Americans. The themes of immigration, nation, and citizenship are central to the construction of the U.S. racial category of Asian. Those addressed within the category are highly diverse and differentiated along class, gender, and generational lines, yet the racial category structures particular kinds of experiences and possibilities for subjects.  Historical transformations and contemporary issues in a variety of Asian American contexts will be investigated through a variety of texts including historical accounts, cultural studies, anthropological studies, autobiography, and fiction.

See the U.S.A.: The History of Tourism in American Culture In this course, we will explore the history and evolution of American tourism, beginning in the 1820s, when middle-class tourists first journeyed up the Hudson River valley, and ending with our contemporary and continuing obsession with iconic destinations such as Graceland, Gettysburg, and the Grand Canyon. We will explore how the growth of national transportation systems, the development of advertising, and the rise of a middle class with money and time to spend on leisure shaped the evolution of tourism.  Along the way, we will study various types of tourism (such as historical, cultural, ethnic, eco-, and 'disaster' tourism) and look at the creative processes by which places are transformed into 'destinations'.  Our texts will come from visual art, travel literature, material culture, and film and television.  We will consider their cultural meaning and reflect on our own motivations and responses as tourists, and by so doing contemplate why tourism was-and still is-such an important part of American life.

American Consumer Culture For many Americans in the 20th century, consumer goods came to embody the promise of the "good life."  Yet mass consumption also fostered economic, political, and social inequalities and engendered anti-consumerist activism. In this course we will pursue an interdisciplinary approach to American consumer culture, focusing on the rise of commercialized leisure and advertising; the role of radio, television, and film in shaping consumer practices; and the relationship of consumerism to social inequality and democratic citizenship. Readings will include works by Veblen, Marcuse, Bordieu, Marchand, Cohen, and Schor.

The Cultural Work of Country Music “I like all kinds of music...except country.”  Arguably, aversion to American country music often tracks with class- and race-based assumptions about both makers and consumers of this genre.  In this course we will challenge those views while studying the history of the form.  Balancing our consideration of the big picture with case studies of performers like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and The Chicks, we will explore what types of music the “country” tag comprises; some of the major themes and motifs associated with the form; the Black and White roots of country music; and the politicization of the music and its performers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.  Source materials for the course will include Bill Malone’s Country Music, USA; Ken Burn’s Country Music documentary; Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, and A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry.

Captivity Narratives Captivity narratives—first-person accounts of people's experiences of being forcibly taken and held against their will by an "other"—were immensely popular and important in early America; the captivity motif has been perpetuated and transformed throughout later American literature and film. In this course we will explore what these types of tales reveal about how Americans have handled the issues of race and racism, religion, gender, violence and sexuality that experiences of captivity entail.  Beginning with classic Puritan narratives (Mary Rowlandson) and moving forward through the 19th and 20th centuries, we will consider the ways that novels (The Last of the Mohicans), autobiographies (Patty Hearst, Iraqi captivity of Pvt. Jessica Lynch) and films (The Searchers, Little Big Man, Dances with Wolves) do cultural work in shaping and challenging images of American national identity.

Constructing Memory: American Monuments and Memorials “Democracy has no monuments,” John Quincy Adams once famously argued.   “It strikes no medals; it bears the head of no man upon its coin; its very essence is iconoclastic.”  Yet nearly 250 years after America’s founding, monuments and memorials surround us. In this course we will explore the memorializing impulse; the complexity and depth of emotion evoked by memorial acts; and the oftentimes heated controversies about modes, placement, and subject of representation.  We will consider how and why America chooses to memorialize certain people and events, and what is gained—and sometimes erased—in the process.  By choosing among a broad range of traditional and non-traditional modes of representation, we will consider how public memorials both reflect and shape Americans’ shared cultural values.  The course will include site visits to local monuments and projects in which we propose designs or redesigns of memorials for a 21st century audience.

African American Literature This course surveys developments in African American fiction, drama, poetry, and essays during the 20th century. Reading texts in their social, historical, and cultural contexts—and often in conjunction with other African American art forms like music and visual art—we will explore the evolution and deployment of various visions of black being and black artistry, from the Harlem Renaissance through social realism and the Black Arts Movement, to the contemporary post-soul aesthetic. Authors may include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Octavia Butler. This course may also be counted as a general elective or REC elective for the ENAM major.  3 hrs lect./disc. (Diversity)/

Science Fiction Time travel, aliens, androids, robots, corporate and political domination, reimaginings of race, gender, sexuality and the human body--these concerns have dominated science fiction over the last 150 years.  But for all of its interest in the future, science fiction tends to focus on technologies and social problems relevant to the period in which it is written. In this course, we'll work to understand both the way that authors imagine technology's role in society and how those imaginings create meanings for science and its objects of study and transformation.  Some likely reading and films include Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, and works by William Gibson, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler and other contemporary writers. (Students who have taken FYSE 1162 are not eligible to register for this course).

Music and Social Power in American Culture Although many people associate the idea of “protest songs” primarily with the countercultural upheaval of the 1960s, popular music’s connection to cultural politics is much more complicated. In this course we will explore the relationship between music and social power in the United States from the antebellum period to the present. Using a combination of historical and ethnomusicological analysis, we will consider how and why music has been used for social influence in various historical moments. Topics may include 19th century campaign songs; music and abolitionism; folk ballads as a mechanism for social control; the political uses of country music; the protest songs and freedom songs of the 1960s; rock ‘n’ roll as social protest; and the cultural work of hip-hop.

Re-Presenting Slavery In this course we will examine 20th century American portrayals of chattel slavery through creative works and situate them in their historical contexts. Working primarily with fiction (Oxherding Tale, Kindred, The Underground Railroad), film (Mandingo, Django Unchained, Twelve Years a Slave), television (Roots, Africans in America, Underground), and visual art (works by Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Kara Walker), we will evaluate how those various representations of the “Peculiar Institution” have changed, and/or have been changed, by the cultural moments in which they appeared. This course may also be counted as a general elective or REC elective for the ENAM major. 3 hrs lect.

American Disability Studies: History, Meanings, and Cultures In this course we will examine the history, meanings, and realities of disability in the United States. We will analyze the social, political, economic, environmental, and material factors that shape the meanings of "disability," examining changes and continuities over time. Students will draw critical attention to the connections between disability, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and age in American and transnational contexts. Diverse sources, including films and television shows, music, advertising, fiction, memoirs, and material objects, encourage inter and multi-disciplinary approaches to disability. Central themes we consider include language, privilege, community, citizenship, education, medicine and technology, and representation.

Class, Culture, and Representation In this course we will examine the contested meanings of social class in U.S. culture from 1930 to the present. We will ask the following: How have workers, the workplace, and economic inequality been imagined in U.S. film, art, and popular culture? How have categories such as race, gender, and sexuality informed ideas about class? And how do the realities of economic inequality mesh with civic narratives of meritocracy and the “American Dream”?  Readings will include works by Barbara Ehrenreich, Studs Terkel, Tillie Olsen, and Helena Maria Vilamontes. Films, music, and other media will supplement written materials.

American Psycho: Disease, Doctors, and Discontents (Pre-1900 AL) What constitutes a pathological response to the pressures of modernity?  How do pathological protagonists drive readers toward the precariousness of their own physical and mental health?  The readings for this class center on the provisional nature of sanity and the challenges to bodily health in a world of modern commerce, media, and medical diagnoses.  We will begin with 19th century texts and their engagement with seemingly "diseased" responses to urbanization, new forms of work, and new structures of the family and end with contemporary fictional psychopaths engaged in attacks on the world of images we inhabit in the present.  Nineteenth century texts will likely include stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Later  20th-century works will likely include Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs, Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, and Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho.

Chicagoland In this course we will explore Chicago’s significance by focusing on its physical and spatial character. Moving from the 19th to the 21st century, we will examine the 1871 fire; the 1893 World’s Fair; the settlement house movement; the rise of modern architecture; the emergence of Black Chicago and development of a multi-ethnic, multi-class metropolis spread across various neighborhoods and suburbs; and recent planning efforts to revitalize the city as a space for all Chicagoans. Interdisciplinary in scope, the course will draw on a range of texts and theoretical perspectives to show the generative importance of Chicago’s rich and varied landscape.

Devouring Difference: Race and Food In this course, we will discuss how the connections between food and race are articulated at different moments in United States history. We begin with an exploration of the relationship between slavery, capitalism, and food. We then discuss how foods like bananas and spam have functioned as objects that forge colonial, imperial, and military relationships between the United States and various sites around the world. The course ends with a discussion of contemporary politics around food by centering racialized subjects situated within both national and global markets of food production, marketing, and consumption. Informed by queer theory, this course foregrounds the centrality of embodiment and desire when interpreting the connections between food and race.

The Bohemian Spirit: Literature, Culture, and Social Movements Greenwich Village 1912-1923 During the 1910s an extraordinary gathering radicals and reformers, artists and writers from across the United States and Europe converged in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. In this course we will immerse ourselves in this transformative cultural landscape. Through the study of literature (Whitman, Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the “little magazines”, James Joyce) visual art (John Sloan, Marcel Duchamps, Man Ray); theatre (Eugene O’Neil, Susan Glaspell), and social and cultural movements like feminism, suffrage, and labor rights, we will explore how the bohemian ethos of the time fostered a creative and social revolution. We will finish with a Reacting to the Past game, Greenwich Village, 1912-13 and consider the long-term influence of Greenwich Village's impact on American and global cultural history.

Mastodons, Mermaids, and Dioramas: Capturing Nature in America Why did 18th-century museums stuff and mount exotic and domestic animals? Why does the American Museum of Natural History still house dioramas of so-called native peoples hunting?  How has the study and staging of nature transferred into various kinds of artistic expression?  In this course we will examine the intertwining of art, science, and ecology in the United States from the 1700s to the present day. Objects of study will include museum dioramas, scientific models, artifacts and artworks collected during scientific expeditions, and the work of Walton Ford and Christy Rupp, contemporary artists whose work engages ecological issues. (not open to students who have taken FYSE 1447)

Art and Material Culture of American (US) Middle-class home  In this course we will consider the effects of technology and mechanical reproduction on the United States home, from prints to posters, houseplants to aquariums, mass-produced decorations to home-made crafts. We will also study the culture of at-home visual entertainments, from early “magic lanterns” and optical toys to the effects of televisions and computers on perception and social life. How do race, class, gender, and issues of labor and leisure inflect the middle-class domestic sphere and relate to social concerns outside the home? We will also examine the work of contemporary artists inspired by the aesthetics and social relationships of the United States middle-class home, including Martha Rosler, Mona Hatoum, and Laurie Simmons.

The Guitar in American Culture Although it has European and African antecedents, modern acoustic and electric guitars are American inventions.  From the genteel parlor guitars of the 19th century elite to the electric weaponry of today’s rock stars, the guitar is an essential artifact of American material culture.   Drawing on histories, cultural critiques, interviews, and sound and video recordings, we will study both the evolution of the instrument and the builders and players who have helped define its role.  Examining artifacts and talking with working guitar builders will illuminate the craft of guitar making.  The culmination of the course will be a student-curated exhibition.

Viewer Discretion Advised: Controversies in American Art & Museums, 1876-Present What are the “culture wars,” and why do they matter? What ideas are considered too “obscene” for American audiences? In this course we will explore controversies and scandals sparked by public displays of art in the U.S. including: Eakins’s Gross Clinic (1876), seen as too “bloody” for an art exhibition; the U.S. Navy’s objections to Paul Cadmus’s painting of sailors (1934); censorship and NEA budget cuts (Mapplethorpe & Serrano, 1989); backlash to The West as America’s deconstruction of myths of the frontier (1991); tensions surrounding Colonial Williamsburg’s “slave auction” reenactment (1994); debates over the continued display (and occasional defacement) of Confederate monuments in the era of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Reconstructing Literature: Realism, Regionalism, and the American scene, 1870-1919 (Pre-1900 AL)  American literature evolved in the late 1800s as a new generation of writers portrayed a rapidly changing culture, transformed by urbanization, industrial growth, immigration, class tensions, new roles for women, shifting race relations, and demographic transformations that seemed to split the nation into city and country. While realism was an effort to describe “life as it is” and regionalism focused on the distinctive features of specific places, both modes of representation stemmed from historical forces that were reshaping the nation. Works to be covered may include fiction by William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Theodore Dreiser.

Posthuman Medicine: Morals, Machines, and Bodies Medical treatments and technologies now keep people alive when they once surely would have died. But the increasing power of medicine has also raised nightmarish possibilities of lives controlled, squandered, or sacrificed to a system that often alienates patients, is centered on profit, and has a long history of treating marginal populations recklessly. How do science fiction writers, doctors, film makers, memoirists, and healthcare corporations portray an ever more medicalized vision of human experience and human bodies? Texts and films for the course will include HG Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Atul Gawande, Complications; Octavia Butler, Clay’s Ark; Michael Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Karen Russell, Sleep Donation, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.

Portraits of the Lady: The New Woman in American Literature & Culture At the end of the 19th century, women fought against restrictions limiting their sphere of influence. As they sought to exercise more control over their lives personally, socially, and economically, this “New Woman,”  and the way she was changing the face of society, became a popular subject in literature and art.  In this course we will consider portraits of women by well-known American authors (such as James, Chopin, Wharton, Sui Sin Far, Cather, Larsen, Hurston) alongside those by prominent painters, sculptors, photographers, illustrators, and filmmakers.  We will consider how representations of women through the early twentieth century embodied the values of the nation and codified both the fears and aspirations of its citizens.

Hemingway's Outsized Life In this class we will explore the work of Ernest Hemingway, a writer whose literary style and heroic self-construction remain a source of fascination and controversy. Through a mostly chronological reading of his writings, we will examine Hemingway’s emergence as a pioneering modernist and member of the 1920s “lost generation,” his portrayal of war and violence, and his representations of gender, race, and “American-ness.” Assigned texts will include short stories, novels, and autobiographical works, as well as critical studies (including Ken Burns’ recent documentary film) that consider the impact of Hemingway’s life and writing on broader U.S. cultural history.

Madness in America It's a mad, mad course.  In this course we will focus on representations of madness from colonial to late 20th century America, emphasizing the links between popular and material culture, science, medicine, and institutions. We will consider how ideas about madness (and normalcy) reflect broader (and shifting) notions of identity. Thus, issues of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, community, class, and region will play significant roles in our discussions and critiques. To complement foundational readings, this course will draw on American literature, documentary and entertainment films, music, and materials from the college's special collections.

Love, Sex, Race, and Disability In this course we will explore the connections between gender and sexuality, race, and disability. Culture and representation, understandings of diversity and difference, and contexts (political, social, and historical) will provide central areas of study.  Comparing and integrating topics and perspectives, we will critically analyze the constructions and politics of identity (and multiple identities) and historical perspectives on gender and sexuality, race, and disability. We also will consider the impact of education and activism, as well as the meanings of intimate relationships across and between genders and sexualities, races, and disabilities.  Our work will foster a fundamental reexamination of American life and history through its study of bodies and minds, identities, languages, cultures, citizenship and rights, power and authority, what is a "natural" and "unnatural." This course will draw on diverse sources, including documentary and Hollywood films, poetry and short fiction, academic texts, such as Freakery, Gendering Disability and Disability and the Teaching of Writing, and memoirs, such as Eli Clare's Exile and Pride.

The Graphic Novel In this course we will study some of the most widely respected graphic novels produced in the last thirty years. Our purpose will be to understand how the form works and is structured by its dual, but sometimes competing, interests in the verbal and the visual, and to think about distinct styles of illustration.  We will also think about how landmark examples have shaped the form.  Working with software designed for the purpose, students will use photographs to produce short comics of their own.  Possible texts include: Alan Moore, Watchmen; Art Spiegelman, Maus; Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home.

Race and the Contemporary Novel This course surveys multi-ethnic American literature by exploring processes of racial formation through literature and literary representations produced in the 21st century. We will study both the continuities and divergences in contemporary Black, Indigenous, and Asian American literary productions from their historical iterations. What shifts have taken place in the multi-ethnic literary canon and tradition between the past to current centuries? We will engage with themes such as the rise of genre fiction, changes to the literary marketplace, and the status of “national literature” in the global age. Authors include: Colson Whitehead, Chang-rae Lee, Louise Erdrich, and Jhumpa Lahiri.  3hrs. sem.

Issues in Critical Disability Studies: U.S. and the World Disability as a category and as lived experience plays an important but often overlooked role in national, transnational, and global contexts. In this course we will explore disability’s changing meanings in the United States and around the World. Comparative and transnational approaches will draw our attention to disability’s many meanings across wide-ranging historical, cultural, and geographical settings. Foundational concepts and principles, including ableism and Universal Design, shape our critical inquiry. Key themes frame the course: access, language, power, violence, normalcy, identity, community, institutions, and rights and justice. We will engage with diverse primary sources, from memoirs and documentary films to advertisements, material objects, and oral histories.

Disability in Film and Television In this course we will investigate film and television representations of disability and disabled people to gain an understanding of how these reflect prominent cultural ideas across twentieth and twenty-first century US history.  Specifically, we will trace changes and continuities in the various functions of disability in film and TV, and how disabled people have used these media to express their own lived experiences. Key themes to be covered include access, stereotype, spectacle, community, and activism. Our intersectional study will involve disability, deaf, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and age. Through readings, screenings, and engaged discussions students will gain insights into ways film and television reflect and shape the understandings of disability in American history and culture. This class includes regular screenings.

Vermont Incarcerated: A Digital History Course participants will contribute to Vermont Incarcerated, a new digital history project that will curate the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of Vermont state carceral institutions and the vulnerable persons compelled to live in them. We will use digital technologies to tell the human stories of the Vermont State Prison in Windsor, the State Hospital in Waterbury, the State Industrial School in Vergennes, and the State Training School in Brandon. In addition to digital project work, we will read scholarship on the digital humanities and on the histories of crime and punishment, mental illness, and intellectual disability in the United States.

Vermont Collaborations Public Humanities Lab In collaboration with local archives, museums, and community organizations, we will work closely with primary sources, learning skills of transcription, analysis, and interpretation; in the spirit of Public Humanities, we will share this scholarship with the broader community, whether in the form of an exhibition, a publication, a website, podcasts, or other digital media. The focus will change annually or by sections, but this project-based course will emphasize place-based experiential learning and community partnerships in its critical engagement with histories of collections and archives. This course is part of the Public Humanities Labs Initiative administered by the Axinn Center for the Humanities.  2021 marked the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Luther Sheldon, founder of Middlebury’s Sheldon Museum of Vermont History (founded 1881) and 2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Research Center. In this course we will mine the Archives of the Sheldon Museum for information about the early years of the museum’s establishment, exploring institutional history, histories of collecting, and local history, alongside a critical investigation of how archives and collections are formed, developed, and made legible (or illegible) to broader publics. 3 hrs. Sem.

The University and its Others In this course we will examine the history of Black Studies by asking fundamental questions about the modern university: what it is, who it is for, and what it might yet become. After surveying its entanglements with slavery, settler colonialism, and capitalism, we will examine how Black students and faculty fought, in the 1960s, to overhaul the institution’s social structure and ways of knowing. We will examine the challenges – from partisan backlash to political containment and professional self-interest – that arise from the institutionalization of these efforts in research and teaching programs like our own at Middlebury. Finally, we will examine how Black Studies has braved the turn to indebtedness and privatization animating higher education today.

American Misogyny In this course we will explore the place of misogyny in U.S. media and politics.  Early topics will include film noir, Cold War gender scapegoating, and lesbian pulp fiction.  Subsequent topics will include the backlash against second-wave feminism, the rise of “post-feminism,” and the impact of reality TV and social media on feminist and antifeminist expression.  We will conclude by examining how misogyny informs U.S. culture and politics in the Trump era. Throughout the course, we will consider how discourses of misogyny are inflected by white, cisgender, ableist, ageist, and class privilege.

Imagining Rural America Although many Americans equate “rural” with whiteness, political conservatism, and poverty, the realities and representations of rural life have always been complicated those notions. Using methodologies from geography, cultural history, folklore, and literary criticism, and privileging lenses of race, class, and gender, we will explore these complexities by analyzing novels, paintings, photographs, moving images, and music against the histories of Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Dust Bowl, and New England. Texts may include Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices, The Grapes of Wrath (novel and film), paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper, Winter’s Bone, O Brother Where Art Thou?/, and the music of John Prine and Steve Earle.

Humanitarian Visas in Vermont and Beyond This public humanities lab course will engage the topic of humanitarian visas in Vermont and beyond the state. We will learn about the various forms of humanitarian visas as historically defined by the US government including visas for refugees, asylees, trafficked people, and those who qualify for temporary protected status. We will study the histories of refugee resettlement in Vermont and learn from organizations that advocate on behalf of migrants. This course is part of the Axinn Center for the Humanities’ Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Initiative.

Theories of Popular Culture This writing-intensive course introduces a range of theoretical approaches to study American popular culture, exploring the intersection between everyday life, mass media, and identity and social power. We will consider key theoretical readings and approaches to studying culture, including ideology and hegemony theory, audience studies, subcultural analysis, the politics of taste, and cultural representations of identity. Using these theoretical tools, we will examine a range of popular media and sites of cultural expression, from television to toys, films to music, to understand popular culture as a site of ongoing political and social struggle.

Reading, Slavery, and Abolition In this course we will study both black and white writers' psychological responses to, and their verbal onslaughts on, the "peculiar institution" of chattel slavery.  We will work chronologically and across genres to understand how and by whom the written word was deployed in pursuit of physical and mental freedom and racial and socioeconomic justice. As the course progresses, we will deepen our study of historical context drawing on the substantial resources of Middlebury's special collections, students will have the opportunity to engage in archival work if they wish.  Authors will include Emerson, Douglass, Jacobs, Thoreau, Stowe, Walker, and Garrison. This course may also be counted as a general elective or REC elective for the ENAM major

U.S. Disability Rights & Hist “Nothing about us without us”—the 20th century banner of American and global disability rights movements—insists that disabled people fully participate in all aspects of life. In this course we will trace the lineage from U.S. disability rights through disability justice across the 20th - 21st centuries. We will consider how ableism interlocks with settler colonialism, capitalism, misogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia. Through focused readings and project-based work, we will unpack work around policy, service provisions, and mutual aid, and engage with themes such as access, self-determination, education, community living, institutionalization and imprisonment, employment, reproduction, and interdependence and collective care. This course draws on multi-modal sources, including scholarly articles, oral interviews, documentaries, memoirs, material artifacts, artwork, and blogs.

The Immigrant Memoir In this seminar, we will explore memoirs focused on the writing of memories about immigrant experiences in the United States. The memoirs we cover will detail subjective understandings of immigration revealing how immigrants navigate cultural, social, economic, and political challenges. The course will be an advanced seminar in immigrant history and experience in the United States as we investigate the contexts of migration of each story. We will discuss the power and the pitfalls interpreting memoir writing as social critique. The course will cover a variety of conventions within the genre of immigrant memoirs. In addition to studying book-length memoirs, we will approach how authors use poetry, short story, film, and graphic novels to tell personal stories.  Students will also write memoirs in a variety of styles. This course is part of the Public Humanities Labs Initiative administered by the Axinn Center for the Humanities.

Theory and Method in American Studies (Junior Year) A reading of influential secondary texts that have defined the field of American Studies during the past fifty years.  Particular attention will be paid to the methodologies adopted by American Studies scholars, and the relevance these approaches have for the writing of senior essays and theses.

Vermont Life’s Vermont: A Collaborative Web Project Students in this course will work collaboratively to build an online history project aimed at a wide audience.  Since 1946, Vermont Life magazine has created particular images of the landscape, culture, and recreational possibilities in the state.  Our goal will be to construct a website that examines the evolution of these images and the meaning of the state over time, paying particular attention to consumerism, the environment, tourism, urban-rural contrasts, local food movements, and the ways that race, class, and gender influence all of these.  The course is open to all students and requires collaborative work but not any pre-existing technological expertise.

American Deaf Culture and History In this course we will explore America’s “DEAF-WORLD” from the early 19th century through the present day. Creative, community-based, and scholarly readings, as well as memoirs, TV shows, films, and material objects will illustrate diverse traditions of “deaf,” including religious, biomedical, and social-cultural forms. Central themes will guide our work: language and communication, community and identity, cultural values and practices, education, artistic and popular representations, technology and bioethics, and activism. Through these themes we will learn about audism and ableism—foundational concepts in deaf studies—as they relate to other systems of power and privilege. Intersecting social identities within deaf cultural worlds also will draw sustained attention. We will engage in a highly collaborative learning process. Small group research projects and interactive class discussions will contribute to deeper learning about continuity and change, and varying perspectives in and about America’s “DEAF-WORLD.” This course does not require knowledge of American Sign Language.

Material Culture in Focus In this course we will investigate material culture, objects made or altered by human hands and design. We will keep a tight focus on one object or group of objects, cultivating an in-depth understanding and benefitting from access to local collections, curators, makers, and users. The focus will change annually, but the subject will always be an object of material culture that students will examine first-hand and research. Students will then create a lasting documentation and analysis of the work for public benefit, whether as an exhibition, a publication, or a website. This course is part of the Public Humanities Labs Initiative administered by the Axinn Center for the Humanities.  For Winter 2023, we will focus on hair and hairwork, exploring the multivalent meanings of hair in American culture, past and present. Nineteenth-century Americans often saved or exchanged locks of hair as mementos, constructing elaborate items of jewelry or keepsake wreaths that emblematized familial relationships and kinship networks. These tokens could serve memorial purposes or solidify friendships. This material, crafted from the body, was often worn on the body, near the heart, or displayed within the intimate space of the home. In more recent decades, hair has become an activist issue and a potent political medium for artists foregrounding feminism and ethnic or racial identity. In this course, we will study many artifacts of hairwork in local collections, conducting archival research and sharing our findings via a website and exhibition; a studio workshop will give us hands-on experience with Victorian techniques of hairwork. We’ll also consider the work of contemporary artists who use hair as a medium: Janine Antoni, Mark Bradford, Sonya Clark, Aisha Cousins, Wenda Gu, David Hammons, Althea Murphy-Price, Paula Santiago.

Asian American Food Studies In this course we will discuss how food shapes a sense of belonging and identity in Asian America. Going beyond how Asian American cultures are consumed through food items and restaurants, we will focus on how Asian Americans have defined themselves through food. Required readings will engage questions about the production, circulation, and consumption of food. We will critically engage the genres of memoir, recipe books, fiction, historical accounts, cultural criticism, and food criticism as we write pieces in each of these styles. There will also be a limited amount of cooking involved in the course.

Reacting to the Past: America in Turmoil - From Chicago, 1968 to Watergate In this course students will dive deep into the politically charged landscape of the 1960s and 1970s via two Reacting to the Past games—Chicago, 1968: The Democratic National Convention and Watergate, 1974-1975. As participants, students will research and present the perspectives of historical characters—sometimes with values quite different from their own—in lively debate. These games do not have a fixed script: students will find themselves examining classic documents, collaborating, making public speeches, plotting—and in the end, perhaps even rewriting history. As students deepen their understanding of this era, they will also gain insights into what might be at stake in present and future historical inflection points.

American Pulp Fiction In this course we will consider how American pulp fiction has reflected cultural attitudes, represented categories of identity, and been regularly reimagined from the golden age of the genre in the 20th century to contemporary times. We will read stories by Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as Chester Himes’ The Heat is On. We will also view Pulp Fiction, the Maltese Falcon, and Lovecraft Country.

The Graphic Novel and the Postmodern City  From dystopian visions of isolation and alienation to utopian illustrations of soaring towers and integrated communities, comics and graphic novels since the 1970s have represented a range of cityscapes and ways of living in them. Our efforts will focus on understanding how comics work as a cultural form distinct from others and how various artists and writers have imagined urban space in relatively recent cultural history.  Some texts might include: Daniel Clowes, Ghost World; Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta; Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do; and G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphono, Ms. Marvel.

Music in the United States In this course we will examine folk, classical, and popular music in the United States from the 17th century to the present. We will use historical and analytical approaches to gain insight into the music, the musicians, and the social and cultural forces that have shaped them. Students will explore music’s relation to historical events, other artistic movements, technological changes, and questions of national identity and ethnicity. Topics will include music in the British colonies, minstrelsy, American opera and orchestras, jazz, popular music, and the experimentalist composers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Roberto Lint Sagarena

Jennifer Wang

Jason Mittell

Olga Sanchez Saltveit

Jim Ralph

Hector Vila

Larry Hamberlin

Deb Evans

Susan Burch

William Nash

Michael Newbury

Brett Millier

Eric Cheuk

Ellery Foutch

Holly Allen

Tim Spears

Kathryn Morse

Rachael Joo

Read 232 reviews for American Studies courses at Middlebury College. Find the best American Studies professors and courses.  Discover your new major today!

This was a great class with a low course load and interesting content. Deb Evan’s is an amazing professor and the lectures were always interesting. There were not exams for this class. There were two oral presentations that included the final project. 

I really enjoyed this course. The mix of movies and readings was super engaging and helped bring the material to life in a way that textbooks just can't. I learned a ton, especially in how different media can be used to explore complex themes. The professor was fantastic and super passionate and always willing to answer questions. The class discussions were also really interesting, and it felt like everyone’s thoughts were valued.

I found this class very interesting. Homework was typically a few chapters of reading for each class. Your final grade is 25% of each: participation, one paper around midterms season, final project, final exam (which was essay-style, not a traditional exam). It can be a bit frustrating not really knowing where your grade stands, but from what I can tell, Nash is a fair grader. The class is heavily discussion-based. Overall, I would recommend this course if you like music or American history!