Undergraduate Semester Course Offerings
You can find the complete American Studies Department course slate on the Registrar's Schedule of Classes.
Spring 2025 Courses
- AMST 1050.11: National Bodies
CRN: 25853 // N. Ivy
TR 11:10-12:25 PM
Who makes up the body politic? How have discussions of citizenship and belonging been mapped onto ideas about biology and difference? To approach these questions, this course explores of how representations of the physical form as well as ideas about what constitutes appropriate bodies are shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. Assigned texts will present specific theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class.- AMST 1200.10: The Sixties in America
CRN: 27858 // S. Osman
MW 9:35-10:25 AM
This course will examine American society, culture, and politics during the dramatic decade of the 1960s. Students will examine topics that include the civil rights movement, the student movement, the Vietnam War and antiwar movement, the counterculture, the women’s movement, the environmentalist movement, and the conservative movement.- AMST 2000.10: The Nature & Culture of Children
CRN: 27865 // J. Cohen-Cole
W 12:45-3:15 PM
The sciences and philosophy ask hard questions: What is the nature of knowledge? What characteristics defines humanity? How much does culture matter? It turns out that these questions have provoked fierce disagreements for how we understand, raise, and educate children and are tied to our visions of morality, politics, education, and the shape we want the future to take. This seminar adopts a historical approach to see how these questions and the debates about them have been approached by philosophers, biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists.- AMST 2011.80: Modern American Cultural History
CRN: 24972 // D. Orenstein
TR 12:45-1:35 PM
This course examines the history of the United States from World War I to the present using culture as its central organizing concept. We will define culture broadly to encompass customs, beliefs, and everyday practices, as well as forms of literary and artistic expression. Central themes of the course include: the role of mass media in shaping a national culture; the intersections of culture and technology; changes in racial formations and ethnic affiliations; cultural dynamics within neighborhoods and cities; cultural meanings of gender and sexual identities; and the political consequences of cultural conflict. We will also consider transnational influences on American culture and, conversely, the effects of American culture abroad.- AMST 2410W.80: Modern US Immigration
CRN: 27886 // T. Guglielmo
TR 9:35-10:25 AM
This class will investigate immigration patterns, immigration policy, and immigrants’ lives in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Which immigrant groups have come to the United States? When and why have they come? And what have their lives been like once they got here? How has the federal government, and Americans more generally, responded to immigrants and immigration? Why have we welcomed some newcomers as good future Americans and scorned others as “forever foreigners” or “illegal aliens”? The course will explore these questions through a mix of reading, writing, lecture, and discussion. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.- AMST 2490.10: American Contagions
CRN: 26006 // N. Ivy
TR 2:20-3:35 PM
This course examines how national ideas about health, disease, cleanliness, and contamination have concurrently informed and been shaped by notions of difference. Together, we will think through how forms of human difference have been historically medicalized—as unhealthy, as in need of repair or management. We will seriously consider how gender, sexuality, race, and ability to continue to shape U.S. health care policy and practice. To do this, assigned course materials and class discussions will explore difficult-to-answer questions about the legacies of contagion narratives in American culture and politics. How have fears of outbreak influenced American military and economic actions? How do evolving understandings of the transmission and treatment of disease create and sustain moral panics? We will place primary sources such as political cartoons, plantation manuals, and printed broadsides in conversation with readings in social theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Across the semester, we will study and practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and textual analysis.- AMST 2620.10: Human Mind and Artificial Intelligence
CRN: 27905 // J. Cohen-Cole
MW 11:10-12:00 PM
Where is the boundary between humans and robots? Is it that humans can bleed and robots can rust? Or is there something more important that gets to what is distinctive about humanity? Is it how we think, our intelligence, or our language? If so, then what happens when computers or robots or robots speak and perform intelligent tasks? Focusing on questions such as these this class looks at the history of computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. In tracking this history we will see how the line between humans and machines has been in constant motion as what we believe, and imagine about machines had affected what we know, imagine, and believe about the human mind. We will examine these themes by reading about computers, robots, and artificial intelligence in history and through the visions of the future given in science fiction stories and movies from Frankenstein to AI and I Robot. Topics covered in this course include Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the Turing Machine, cyberspace, and the origins, development, and criticism of research in artificial intelligence.- AMST 3901.10: Examining America
CRN: 23185 // E. Anker
M 3:30-6:00 PM
This course offers students an introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will be introduced to key texts in American Studies scholarship from foundational primary sources to contemporary secondary scholarship. Registration restricted to American Studies majors.- AMST 3950.10: Sex, Lies, & Infrastructure
CRN: 26058 // D. Orenstein
T 4:00-6:30 PM
Course Description Coming Soon!- AMST 3950.80: Queer Politics
CRN: 27912 // A. Wright
T 12:45-3:15 PM
This course surveys the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics in the United States including the influence of colonization and slavery on understandings of gender and sexuality; influences and intersections of race and ethnicity, class, gender identity and expression, sexuality, sex, and age; considers contemporary policy debates relevant to queer politics with a focus on contemporary social justice activism.- AMST 4701W.80: Epidemics in American History
CRN: 28739 // V. Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00 PM
This course surveys the history of infectious disease epidemics in the United States from the late nineteenth century to today, including the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the development of the medical and public health responses to epidemics and the social, political, cultural and economic impact of epidemics on American history and culture. We will use primary documents, historical accounts, memoirs, and films to understand the history of epidemic disease. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
Fall 2024 Courses
- AMST 1000.10: Zombie Capitalism
CRN: 86864 // D. Orenstein
W 12:45-3:15 PM
The Walking Dead. World War Z. “Zombie Banks.” Why does the specter of the living dead loom so largely in contemporary U.S. culture? How is it useful? What does it illuminate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that might otherwise remain inscrutable? And how has it served in this allegorical manner throughout modern U.S. history? How did it haunt the rise of mass production, or the growth of suburbs, or the eruption of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street? To answer such questions, in this seminar we will screen one film per week, supplemented by brief readings in primary sources, to track the figure of the zombie from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (or, now, the Great Depression 2.0), and from the sugar plantations of Haiti to the tents of Zuccotti Park and the COVID-19 morgues of Detroit.- AMST 1050.10: National Bodies
CRN: 86784 // N. Ivy
MW 11:10-12:25 PM
Who makes up the body politic? How have discussions of citizenship and belonging been mapped onto ideas about biology and difference? To approach these questions, this course explores of how representations of the physical form as well as ideas about what constitutes appropriate bodies are shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. Assigned texts will present specific theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class.- AMST 1050.11: Gender & Environmental Politics
CRN: TBA // M. Henderson
TR 2:20-3:35 PM
This interdisciplinary seminar addresses major questions at the intersection of gender and the environment, tracking developments in feminist, queer, and environmental theory and activism. Throughout the course, we will attend to gender’s relationship to race, sexuality, nationality, class, and disability. The course will focus on topics including environmental health, colonialism and empire, and environmental and climate (in)justice, and will include readings by Rachel Carson, Naomi Klein, and Octavia Butler. Alongside academic scholarship, we will explore these ideas through film, podcasts and literature.- AMST 1100.10: Politics & Film
CRN: 82329 // E. Anker
M 12:45-2:00 PM & 7:10-9:40 PM
This class addresses the relationship between politics and film by examining how American films interpret and challenge political power in America. We pair film analysis with readings in political theory to interrogate the operations of power in political life. Exploring films thematically, first we examine those that shape conventional interpretations of political power in America, including concepts of limited government, popular sovereignty, and liberal individualism. Next, we consider films that challenge these ideas by offering alternate conceptions of how power functions, while addressing questions of ideology, surveillance, domination, and biopolitics. The last section investigates particular genres—melodrama, the western, and film noir—that reshape and rearticulate these themes within American political culture. Throughout, we will focus on how to read the visual language of film and the written texts of political theory. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.- AMST 2010.80: Early American Cultural History
CRN: 81723 // N. Ivy
MW 2:20-3:10 PM
This course starts with the argument that understanding culture is key to understanding American history. Culture can refer to art and literature—some of which we will explore in class. However, culture can also refer to popular forms of expression, including the way people act. With this broader perspective, we will study some of the major scholarship addressing the evolution of American culture—from the Colonial period through Reconstruction. For example, we will look at what scholars have to say about why minstrel shows were popular and about how Indian captivity narratives were used to justify the conquest of the West. To shape our analyses, we will examine old newspapers, read popular literature, and explore the museums here in Washington, DC—then develop our own opinions and arguments as we engage in small group discussions and complete class assignments. This is an upper division course, but it is geared toward freshmen and sophomores who are looking for a challenge. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement. Same as HIST 2010.- AMST 2440W.80: The American City
CRN: 87182 // S. Osman
TR 9:35-10:25 AM
This introduces students to the exciting field of urban studies. Students will explore the political, architectural and cultural history of American cities, with a particular focus on Washington DC. Students will tackle urban planning and policy debates about topics such as urban renewal, sprawl, public housing, policing and gentrification. The course will include works by a range of urban writers such as Jane Jacobs, Mike Davis, Neil Smith, William Julius Wilson and clips from the TV show “The Wire.”- AMST 2490.10: The Politics of Care
CRN: 87189 // J. McMaster
TR 3:45-5:00 PM
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people everywhere seem to be talking about care: self-care, collective care, care for the environment and nonhuman others. The reality is that everyone requires care to live. But what exactly is care? How is it distributed in our households, our city, our country, and across the globe? Who tends to receive it and who is disproportionately tasked with the undervalued work of providing it to others? This course will turn to critical theories of race, feminist philosophy, disability studies, and queer/trans scholarship for answers to these questions and others pertaining to the politics of care.- AMST 2490.11: Dinner with Marx
CRN: 87190 // D. Orenstein
W 5:00-7:30 PM
Some have called it the greatest novel of the nineteenth century. It has been translated into hundreds of languages, from Amharic and Bengali to Yiddish and Zulu; this September it is appearing in a new English translation. Published in 1867 (in German), Karl Marx’s first volume of Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy—the only volume of the three that Marx himself completed before his death—remains an inescapable and prescient text, for its mode of analysis as much as for its historical materialist account of the world system of capitalism. In this seminar we will read Volume One cover to cover, two to three chapters per week, over dinner for those who feel so inclined. No prior knowledge is required! But instructor approval is, because space is limited. Go to https://dinnerwithmarx.paperform.co to fill out an enrollment form.- AMST 2710.80: The United States in the World
CRN: 87191 // M. McAlister
TR 12:45-1:35 PM
This course examines US history from 1898-present in terms of its cultural and political relationships with the world beyond US borders. We will consider, among other things, US state and military power, globalizing cultures, transnational ideas and social movements, travel and tourism, and the impact of media in the context of US global power.- AMST 2730W.80: World War II in History and Memory
CRN: 87196 // T. Guglielmo
MW 9:35-10:25 AM
This course examines Americans’ World War II experiences and how those experiences have been studied, debated, understood, and “remembered”—officially, culturally, and personally. Through a mix of reading, writing, and discussion, it focuses on six overlapping topics: GIs, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment, African Americans, the Holocaust, and women.- AMST 3600.30: Popular Music & Politics
CRN: 87199 // G. Wald
TR 2:20-3:10 PM
This interdisciplinary course explores the interactions and intersections of music and politics, focusing on the 20th-century United States. It has units on music and the U.S. state, music and social protest movements, and music and freedom. For spring 2021, there will be new course material on music and #BLM and music and queer/trans/non-binary identities.- AMST 3900.10: Critiquing Culture
CRN: 82930 // G. Wald
TR 11:10-12:25 PM
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.- AMST 3950.80: Democracy and American Political Culture
CRN: 87658 // E. Anker
M 3:30-6:00 PM
This class will examine major concepts, practices, and cultural visions of democracy in the United States (and in a transnational context). Democracy is one of the most widely-valued systems for organizing politics and political culture, yet there is significant disagreement about the core ideals and practices that comprise it. This class will examine a variety of cultural, literary, and theoretical texts on the promises and perils of democracy in the US. As this is an election year, we will also explore visions of presidential power.- AMST 3950W.81: Black Women in 21st Century
CRN: 87860 // AK Wright
T 12:45-3:15 PM
An interdisciplinary approach to critical inquiry into the scholarship on, and status of, Black women in North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa in the twenty-first century; historical, national, and transnational linkages between Black women; responses to intersectionality; analyses, strategies, and actions being deployed by and about Black women in action and scholarship. Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.- AMST 4500W.10: Proseminar in American Studies
CRN: 83722 // E. Bock
TR 5:15-6:30 PM
Directed research and writing on special topics. May be repeated for credit provided the topic differs. Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.- AMST 4500W.11: Proseminar in American Studies
CRN: 87660 // E. Bock
TR 12:45-2:00 PM
Directed research and writing on special topics. May be repeated for credit provided the topic differs. Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.
Spring 2024 Courses
- AMST 1000.10: Entertainment Nation
CRN: 98635 // S. Silver
T 12:45-3:15 PM
In 2023, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History unveiled its new exhibit “Entertainment Nation,” just blocks from GW’s campus. This seminar invites students to engage critically with this exhibit, which includes artifacts from Dorothy’s ruby slippers to Ali Wong’s “Baby Cobra” dress, covering a wide range of entertainment forms in theater, television, film, music, stand-up comedy, and sports. We will examine how history is written, how historians present their ideas to the public, and how the arrangement of those ideas and artifacts make an argument. Students who are fans of music, comedy, and television will be introduced to scholarship on these topics, as we learn to think critically about the role entertainment has played in U.S. history, engaging in questions of empire, citizenship, and national identity. This seminar will introduce students to some of the major questions in American Studies—How can we think globally about “American” history? What is the relationship between the individual and the popular? How does media technology shape popular culture? What are the politics of spectatorship and display? How have U.S. entertainment cultures perpetuated white supremacy and racial subjugation? And, in contrast, how have racialized performers mobilized entertainment to demand freedom? In analyzing the exhibit’s contents and interpretation, we will examine how studies in LGBT/queer history, Black history, Latine history, and Indigenous histories have shaped the exhibit, while engaging theories in media studies, performance studies, popular music studies, and public history to interpret U.S. entertainment cultures.- AMST 1000.11: Zombie Capitalism
CRN: TBA // D. Orenstein
W 12:45-3:15 PM
The Walking Dead. World War Z. “Zombie Banks.” Why does the specter of the living dead loom so largely in contemporary U.S. culture? How is it useful? What does it illuminate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that might otherwise remain inscrutable? And how has it served in this allegorical manner throughout modern U.S. history? How did it haunt the rise of mass production, or the growth of suburbs, or the eruption of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street? To answer such questions, in this seminar we will screen one film per week, supplemented by brief readings in primary sources, to track the figure of the zombie from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (or, now, the Great Depression 2.0), and from the sugar plantations of Haiti to the tents of Zuccotti Park and the COVID-19 morgues of Detroit.- AMST 1050.11: National Bodies
CRN: 96622 // N. Ivy
TR 11:10-12:25 PM
Who makes up the body politic? How have discussions of citizenship and belonging been mapped onto ideas about biology and difference? To approach these questions, this course explores of how representations of the physical form as well as ideas about what constitutes appropriate bodies are shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. Assigned texts will present specific theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class.- AMST 2011.80: Modern American Cultural History
CRN: 95456 // G. Wald
MW 12:45-1:35 PM
This course examines the history of the United States from World War I to the present using culture as its central organizing concept. We will define culture broadly to encompass customs, beliefs, and everyday practices, as well as forms of literary and artistic expression. Central themes of the course include: the role of mass media in shaping a national culture; the intersections of culture and technology; changes in racial formations and ethnic affiliations; cultural dynamics within neighborhoods and cities; cultural meanings of gender and sexual identities; and the political consequences of cultural conflict. We will also consider transnational influences on American culture and, conversely, the effects of American culture abroad.- AMST 2120W.80: Freedom in American Thought and Popular Culture
CRN: 96623 // E. Anker
MW 11:10-12:00 PM
America was founded on the premise of providing freedom to its people. But what, exactly, is―”freedom”? Is it doing what you want or is it participation in politics? Is it about escaping domination or does it require sharing power? These questions have been debated in America since its founding. The course will examine varied answers to these questions provided by American thought and popular culture. We will intertwine the study of theoretical texts with cultural analysis to examine authors from Jefferson to Thoreau, speeches from Martin Luther King to George W. Bush, films from High Noon to Minority Report, and the video art of Jeremy Blake. Together, we will explore how concepts of freedom and anxieties over freedom’s possibility to take cultural form. While we may not settle the question of what freedom is or how to produce it, we will learn both to appreciate its complexity and to critically engage its operations in American public life. This course satisfies a WID requirement. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements.- AMST 2490.10: American Contagions
CRN: 96915 // N. Ivy
TR 2:20-3:35 PM
This course examines how national ideas about health, disease, cleanliness, and contamination have concurrently informed and been shaped by notions of difference. Together, we will think through how forms of human difference have been historically medicalized—as unhealthy, as in need of repair or management. We will seriously consider how gender, sexuality, race, and ability to continue to shape U.S. health care policy and practice. To do this, assigned course materials and class discussions will explore difficult-to-answer questions about the legacies of contagion narratives in American culture and politics. How have fears of outbreak influenced American military and economic actions? How do evolving understandings of the transmission and treatment of disease create and sustain moral panics? We will place primary sources such as political cartoons, plantation manuals, and printed broadsides in conversation with readings in social theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Across the semester, we will study and practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and textual analysis.- AMST 2490.11: US Political Culture, 1960-Present
CRN: 98474 // M. Dallek
MW 2:20-3:10 PM
This course traces the impact of cultural divisions on American politics from 1960 to the present. Students will examine how novels, films, plays, TV shows, art exhibits, and other cultural materials influenced the ideas and contexts that inform American political development. The course explores how a variety of cultural “texts” have framed debates about topics ranging from race, gender, and sexuality to social issues such as abortion and book bans, stirred public conversations about the meaning of “morality,” and dissented from mainstream thinking to upend traditional norms and behaviors. Students will be asked to think critically about manifestos (the Port Huron Statement), concert films (Altamont), conspiracy theories (Birtherism), “Be-Ins,” and the iconography of movements for social justice, among other cultural documents, in order to understand the interconnectedness of ideas, culture, and politics. Finally, the course will consider how cultural divisions since 1960 have contributed to politics in the 2020s; and how this past differs from controversies in our own times.- AMST 2490.80: Sex, Gender, Citizenship
CRN: 97824 // E. Bock
TR 12:45-1:35 PM
This course offers an examination of how sex, sexuality, and gender influence our understandings (and feelings) of what it means to be a citizen of a nation, a community, and the world. Through encounters with texts, podcasts, films, and art, we will investigate a series of important questions relating to the regulation of bodies, desires, and public/private life, paying particular attention to how these questions influence what it means to belong to a social body and to ourselves.- AMST 3901.10: Examining America
CRN: 93416 // E. Anker
M 3:30-6:00 PM
This course offers students an introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will be introduced to key texts in American Studies scholarship from foundational primary sources to contemporary secondary scholarship. Registration restricted to American Studies majors.- AMST 3950.10: Performing America
CRN: 97018 // E. Bock
R 3:30-6:00 PM
When we think of the word “performance,” we most commonly think of a stage, lights, costumes, and props, but we rarely consider how performances find their way into the most ordinary events that shape everyday life in the United States. From social media and local school board meetings to the security line at the airport and the waiting room in the doctor’s office, American life is diffused with different genres of performance that are easily dismissed and/or reproduced without question. This course asks how performance both shapes and reinforces narratives of belonging to the American social body and how people have pushed against and and complicated those very narratives through history. Taking both large and small cultural productions as our primary objects of study, we will attend to the ways that performance—on the stage, in the streets, and in the intimate spaces of the private sphere—becomes an important lens through which to understand social, political, and economic life in America.
Fall 2023 Courses
- AMST 1000.10: Consuming Asian America
CRN: 48283 // GJ Sevillano
W 12:45-3:15 PM
“Did you eat yet?” Cut fruit apologies. Dogeaters. Mukbang and kamayan. Dhaba and Chinese take-out.
Interested in the diversity of Asian American life, this course introduces students to the differentiated yet intersecting experiences of Asian racialization in the United States from the 19th century to the present by examining the complexities of Asian/American food, foodways, and food systems. Surveying critical themes in the interdisciplinary fields of Asian American studies and critical food studies, this course utilizes novels, film, television, cookbooks, recipes, archival documents, and popular culture to better understand categories such as race, gender and sexuality, family and kinship, class, empire and nationhood, and the body. Students will adopt theoretically informed reading practices to begin exploring how “consumption” informs our understanding of “Asian America.”- AMST 1050.11: Asian American Feelings
CRN: 48182 // J. McMaster
TR 11:10-12:25 PM
This course takes a feminist, queer, and crip approach to the study of Asian American emotional life. It asks questions like, How do those held and hailed by the category “Asian American” feel about themselves and the world? How do others in the world feel about them in turn? Why do all of these people feel this way? And what historical, political, economic, and social circumstances have given rise to those feelings? Over the course of the past few decades, affect theory —basically, the study of feelings, their ontology, their causes, and their effects—has emerged as a key explanatory framework for understanding what it is to affect and to be affected, to move and to be moved, to feel and to be felt.
With attention to historical specificity, students will spend the semester analyzing the arguments theorists have made in relation to racialized and gendered structures of feeling ranging from "racial melancholia" and "racist love" to "national abjection" and "model minority masochism." Students will also be asked to examine how racial feelings such as these are rendered across a range of media beyond academic theory, including creative nonfiction, live performance, visual art, television, material culture, and film. Taking seriously the political stakes of studying affect and emotion, the ultimate aim of this course is to provide students with the tools to attune to Asian American feeling and to imagine how the world might be remade so that Asian Americans might feel otherwise.- AMST 1100.10: Politics & Film
CRN: 42482 // E. Anker
M 12:45-2:00 PM; M 7:10-9:40 PM
This class addresses the relationship between politics and film by examining how American films interpret and challenge political power in America. We pair film analysis with readings in political theory to interrogate the operations of power in political life. Exploring films thematically, first we examine those that shape conventional interpretations of political power in America, including concepts of limited government, popular sovereignty, and liberal individualism. Next, we consider films that challenge these ideas by offering alternate conceptions of how power functions, while addressing questions of ideology, surveillance, domination, and biopolitics. The last section investigates particular genres—melodrama, the western, and film noir—that reshape and rearticulate these themes within American political culture. Throughout, we will focus on how to read the visual language of film and the written texts of political theory. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.- AMST 2010.80: Early American Cultural History
CRN: 41825 // N. Ivy
MW 2:20-3:10 PM
This course starts with the argument that understanding culture is key to understanding American history. Culture can refer to art and literature—some of which we will explore in class. However, culture can also refer to popular forms of expression, including the way people act. With this broader perspective, we will study some of the major scholarship addressing the evolution of American culture—from the Colonial period through Reconstruction. For example, we will look at what scholars have to say about why minstrel shows were popular and about how Indian captivity narratives were used to justify the conquest of the West. To shape our analyses, we will examine old newspapers, read popular literature, and explore the museums here in Washington, DC—then develop our own opinions and arguments as we engage in small group discussions and complete class assignments. This is an upper division course, but it is geared toward freshmen and sophomores who are looking for a challenge. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement. Same as HIST 2010.- AMST 2410W.80: Modern US Immigration
CRN: 47450 // T. Guglielmo
MW 9:35-10:25 AM
This class will investigate immigration patterns, immigration policy, and immigrants’ lives in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Which immigrant groups have come to the United States? When and why have they come? And what have their lives been like once they got here? How has the federal government, and Americans more generally, responded to immigrants and immigration? Why have we welcomed some newcomers as good future Americans and scorned others as “forever foreigners” or “illegal aliens”? The course will explore these questions through a mix of reading, writing, lecture, and discussion. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.- AMST 2490.80: Sex, Gender, Citizenship
CRN: 47947 // E. Bock
TR 12:45-1:35 PM
This course offers an examination of how sex, sexuality, and gender influence our understandings (and feelings) of what it means to be a citizen of a nation, a community, and the world. Through encounters with texts, podcasts, films, and art, we will investigate a series of important questions relating to the regulation of bodies, desires, and public/private life, paying particular attention to how these questions influence what it means to belong to a social body and to ourselves.- AMST 3625.80: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Data Ethics
CRN: 46523 // J. Cohen-Cole
T 12:45-3:15 PM
This class is an introduction to ethics of data sciences from two disparate perspectives: historical and ethnographic. The course focuses on the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by the collection and use of large data sets, by artificial intelligence, and by our increasingly on-line lives. Issues we will examine include the erosion of public life in the face of mediated remote communication, government and corporate surveillance; loss of privacy; the interaction of social media and democratic norms; and the substitution of artificial algorithmic and automatic processes for human judgment in policy making and practices of everyday life. The course is open to students from all fields. It is designed as an interdisciplinary meeting ground for students interested in humanistic inquiry and those in the data science major and other STEM fields. It will be useful to students in social sciences involved in the generation, recording, curation, processing, sharing and use of data; While it is a stand-alone course, it provides a “front door” for further research into the study of ethical life in an electronically mediated world through the methods of historical methods and digital ethnography. While it is a stand-alone course, it provides a “front door” for further research into the study of ethical life in an electronically mediated world through social scientific or humanistic methods. Those wishing further studies in these areas may consider continuing on with courses such as AMST 2610 Science, Technology and Politics in Modern America, AMST 2620 Human Minds and Artificial Intelligence, and AMST 2680 Hashtag America.- AMST 3900.10: Critiquing Culture
CRN: 43153 // E. Bock
TR 3:45-5:00 PM
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.- AMST 4500W.10: Interrogating Education: GW & Beyond
CRN: 44035 // J. Cohne-Cole
W 12:45-3:15 PM
Course Description Provided Soon
Spring 2023 Courses
- AMST 1050.11: National Bodies
CRN: 67856 // N. Ivy
TR 11:10-12:25 PM
Who makes up the body politic? How have discussions of citizenship and belonging been mapped onto ideas about biology and difference? To approach these questions, this course explores of how representations of the physical form as well as ideas about what constitutes appropriate bodies are shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. Assigned texts will present specific theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class.- AMST 1050.12: What is Democracy?
CRN: 68227 // E. Anker
W 12:45-3:15 PM
This class will examine the various concepts and experiences that make up democracy in the United States (and in a transnational context). Democracy is one of the most widely-valued systems of political power, but there is little agreement about its core ideals, and it is often defined and exercised in divergent ways. We will read a variety of texts that examine the promises and perils of democracy, and also focus on sharpening our own political values and investments.- AMST 2011.80: Modern American Cultural History
CRN: 66137 // D. Orenstein
MW 9:35-10:25 AM
This course examines the history of the United States from World War I to the present using culture as its central organizing concept. We will define culture broadly to encompass customs, beliefs, and everyday practices, as well as forms of literary and artistic expression. Central themes of the course include: the role of mass media in shaping a national culture; the intersections of culture and technology; changes in racial formations and ethnic affiliations; cultural dynamics within neighborhoods and cities; cultural meanings of gender and sexual identities; and the political consequences of cultural conflict. We will also consider transnational influences on American culture and, conversely, the effects of American culture abroad.- AMST 2120W.80: Freedom in American Thought and Popular Culture
CRN: 67857 // E. Anker
MW 11:10-12:00 PM
America was founded on the premise of providing freedom to its people. But what, exactly, is―”freedom”? Is it doing what you want or is it participation in politics? Is it about escaping domination or does it require sharing power? These questions have been debated in America since its founding. The course will examine varied answers to these questions provided by American thought and popular culture. We will intertwine the study of theoretical texts with cultural analysis to examine authors from Jefferson to Thoreau, speeches from Martin Luther King to George W. Bush, films from High Noon to Minority Report, and the video art of Jeremy Blake. Together, we will explore how concepts of freedom and anxieties over freedom’s possibility to take cultural form. While we may not settle the question of what freedom is or how to produce it, we will learn both to appreciate its complexity and to critically engage its operations in American public life. This course satisfies a WID requirement. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements.- AMST 2490.10: American Contagions
CRN: 68228 // N. Ivy
TR 2:20-3:35 PM
This course examines how national ideas about health, disease, cleanliness, and contamination have concurrently informed and been shaped by notions of difference. Together, we will think through how forms of human difference have been historically medicalized—as unhealthy, as in need of repair or management. We will seriously consider how gender, sexuality, race, and ability to continue to shape U.S. health care policy and practice. To do this, assigned course materials and class discussions will explore difficult-to-answer questions about the legacies of contagion narratives in American culture and politics. How have fears of outbreak influenced American military and economic actions? How do evolving understandings of the transmission and treatment of disease create and sustain moral panics? We will place primary sources such as political cartoons, plantation manuals, and printed broadsides in conversation with readings in social theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Across the semester, we will study and practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and textual analysis.- AMST 2490.11: NYC in the 1970s
CRN: 68229 // D. Orenstein
W 3:30-6:00 PM- AMST 2710.80: The US in the World
CRN: 66153 // M. McAlister
MW 12:45-1:35 PM
This course examines US history from 1898-present in terms of its cultural and political relationships with the world beyond US borders. We will consider, among other things, US state and military power, globalizing cultures, transnational ideas and social movements, travel and tourism, and the impact of media in the context of US global power.- AMST 2750.80: Latinos in the US
CRN: 65003 // E. Peña
TR 3:45-5:00 PM
The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the Hispanic population will reach 111 million by 2060. But who are Hispanics? What does that term mean and how does it relate to Latino and Latinx? Can those terms accurately reflect the various communities they seek to represent? Returning to those questions throughout the semester, we will critically analyze the evolution of the term “Hispanic” and its impact on discussions of race, identity, and citizenship expectations in the United States. We will engage ethnographic and historical analyses, legal perspectives, and films that explore Hispanic, Latino, and Latinx identity formation in geographic regions across the United States and in transnational/hemispheric contexts. One of the goals of this course is to not only identify how historical, political, and economic shifts have shaped the terms Hispanic and Latino in the United States but also connect those processes to ongoing discussions of immigration reform and border security. This course fulfills critical thinking and cross-cultural perspective learning goals.- AMST 3900.10: Critiquing Culture
CRN: 64622 // D. Orenstein
MW 12:45-2:00 PM
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and world views.- AMST 3901.10: Examining America
CRN: 63726 // E. Bock
TR 2:20-3:35 PM
What does it mean to examine “America” as a nation, concept, or field of study? And how does the way we examine (the methods, archives, and artifacts) affect what we can and cannot see? This course acquaints students to key theoretical and ethnographic texts on race, gender, and sexuality as important sites for asking questions about nationalism, citizenship, belonging, and sovereignty. Instead of being a chronological history of America, the course is organized around a series of questions and concepts essential to the study of migration, slavery, and struggles for emancipation so that we might reframe our teleological investments in narratives of progress. Through the readings, our goal is to explore the various technologies, strategies, and discourses that have built particular systems of power and those which have sought to disrupt those same systems. Assigned readings will be paired with poetry, visual and performance art, films, and music so that the rarified questions of the texts might be posed anew with reference to more familiar media.- AMST 3950.11: Filipinx American History
CRN: 68353 // T. Gonzalves
MW 2:20-3:35 PM
This interdisciplinary course offers a survey of Filipinx American experiences, including, but not limited to, analyses of labor migration from the Philippines to various locations in the diaspora; creative and artistic uses of expressive forms of culture; participation in various of social movements; and settlement in the United States as part of the nation’s fastest growing racial group.- AMST 4701.80: Epidemics in American History
CRN: 63770 // V. Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00 PM
This course surveys the history of infectious disease epidemics in the United States from the late nineteenth century to today, including the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the development of the medical and public health responses to epidemics and the social, political, cultural and economic impact of epidemics on American history and culture. We will use primary documents, historical accounts, memoirs, and films to understand the history of epidemic disease.
Fall 2022 Courses
- AMST 1000.10: Bodies of Work
Nicole Ivy
MW 4:45 - 6:00
CRN: 77313
The National Gallery of Art’s ongoing exhibition, Bodies of Work, explores how American painters and sculptors across the last fifty years have “reimagine[d] the human form as a site of fantasy, fear, and travail.” Taking its title from this show, this course will examine how the human body has figured in cultural and historical narratives, not simply as a physical fact but as a site of social and political meaning-making. Using an interdisciplinary approach that highlights visual culture analysis, we will trace how historical perspectives on the body and embodiment have shaped American culture. Our texts for this class will include both written works and visual objects. We will explore how artists and intellectuals have engaged embodiment over an expansive period of time, considering works by a diverse array of thinkers including: Thomas Jefferson, Donna Haraway, Kerry James Marshall, and Andy Warhol.
- AMST 1000.11: Zombie Capitalism
Dara Orenstein
T 3:30-6:00
CRN: 78432
The Walking Dead. World War Z. “Zombie Banks.” Why does the specter of the living dead loom so largely in contemporary U.S. culture? How is it useful? What does it illuminate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that might otherwise remain inscrutable? And how has it served in this allegorical manner throughout modern U.S. history? How did it haunt the rise of mass production, or the growth of suburbs, or the eruption of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street? To answer such questions, in this seminar we will screen one film per week, supplemented by brief readings in primary sources, to track the figure of the zombie from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (or, now, the Great Depression 2.0), and from the sugar plantations of Haiti to the tents of Zuccotti Park and the COVID-19 morgues of Detroit.
- AMST 1100.10: Politics and Film
Elisabeth Anker
M 2:20 -3:35 and 7:10 - 9:40
CRN: 72628
This class addresses the relationship between politics and film by examining how American films interpret and challenge political power in America. We pair film analysis with readings in political theory to interrogate the operations of power in political life. Exploring films thematically, first we examine those that shape conventional interpretations of political power in America, including concepts of limited government, popular sovereignty, and liberal individualism. Next, we consider films that challenge these ideas by offering alternate conceptions of how power functions, while addressing questions of ideology, surveillance, domination, and biopolitics. The last section investigates particular genres—melodrama, the western, and film noir—that reshape and rearticulate these themes within American political culture. Throughout, we will focus on how to read the visual language of film and the written texts of political theory. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 2010.80: Early American Cultural History
Nicole Ivy
MW 2:20 - 3:10
CRN: 71919
This course starts with the argument that understanding culture is key to understanding American history. Culture can refer to art and literature—some of which we will explore in class. However, culture can also refer to popular forms of expression, including the way people act. With this broader perspective, we will study some of the major scholarship addressing the evolution of American culture—from the Colonial period through Reconstruction. For example, we will look at what scholars have to say about why minstrel shows were popular and about how Indian captivity narratives were used to justify the conquest of the West. To shape our analyses, we will examine old newspapers, read popular literature, and explore the museums here in Washington, DC—then develop our own opinions and arguments as we engage in small group discussions and complete class assignments. This is an upper division course, but it is geared toward freshmen and sophomores who are looking for a challenge. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement. Same as HIST 2010.
- AMST 2320.80: U.S. Media and Cultural History
Melani McAlister
TR 11:10 - 12:00
CRN: 77314
This course will examine mass culture – film, radio, music, television, internet – and its role in US history from the turn of the 20th century to the present. Focusing on cultural production, consumption, and reception, this course will consider the historical contexts in which popular culture has emerged and developed. The cultural texts we will study range from silent films to 1950s sitcoms and twenty-first century new media. Students will learn to consider media histories in light of theoretical debates about ideology, media effects, national identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender roles, and imperialism. Reading and viewing requirements are extensive. In addition to other course requirements, student work includes a final paper in which students analyze a media artifact in its historical and cultural context.
- AMST 2430.10: Capitalism and Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR 2:20 - 3:10
CRN: 74829
What is capitalism, exactly? The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted this deceptively simple question in a way not seen in generations. Why were supermarket shelves empty of toilet paper in 2020? Who is an "essential" worker? When Amazon offers "free shipping," what happens in its warehouses? And, across the board, what does culture have to do with it? How might TikTok yield more answers than the New York Times? Our aim in this reading-intensive lecture course will be to tackle such riddles with the methods and insights of the arts and humanities. Each week we will take up an aspect of the real abstraction of capitalism. Surveying the histories of the crises that surround us, we will investigate how, in a capitalist society, concepts like “productivity,” “growth,” and “value” are, increasingly, threats to life itself.
- AMST 2440W.80: The American City
Suleiman Osman
MW 11:10 - 12:00
CRN: 76677
This introduces students to the exciting field of urban studies. Students will explore the political, architectural and cultural history of American cities, with a particular focus on Washington DC. Students will tackle urban planning and policy debates about topics such as urban renewal, sprawl, public housing, policing and gentrification. The course will include works by a range of urban writers such as Jane Jacobs, Mike Davis, Neil Smith, William Julius Wilson and clips from the TV show “The Wire.”
- AMST 3900.10: Critiquing Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR 9:35 - 10:50
CRN: 73335
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 3901.10: Examining America
Emily Bock
TR 2:20 - 3:35
CRN: 74830
What does it mean to examine “America” as a nation, concept, or field of study? And how does the way we examine (the methods, archives, and artifacts) affect what we can and cannot see? This course acquaints students to key theoretical and ethnographic texts on race, gender, and sexuality as important sites for asking questions about nationalism, citizenship, belonging, and sovereignty. Instead of being a chronological history of America, the course is organized around a series of questions and concepts essential to the study of migration, slavery, and struggles for emancipation so that we might reframe our teleological investments in narratives of progress. Through the readings, our goal is to explore the various technologies, strategies, and discourses that have built particular systems of power and those which have sought to disrupt those same systems. Assigned readings will be paired with poetry, visual and performance art, films, and music so that the rarified questions of the texts might be posed anew with reference to more familiar media.
- AMST 4500W.10: History of Washington, D.C.
Suleiman Osman
MW 9:35 - 10:50
CRN: 74306
This is an advanced research seminar for American Studies majors. Seminar participants will spend the semester researching and writing a paper on a topic of their choice related to the history of the District of Columbia. Students may choose a topic in any time period, including the very recent past. Students will be encouraged to explore Gelman's D.C. History collection and other archives in the D.C. metropolitan area. The seminar will be conducted as a workshop during which students will have the opportunity to give supportive feedback to one another as they develop their projects.
- AMST 4500W.11: “Interrogating GW”
Thomas Guglielmo
T 12:45 - 3:15
CRN: 75089
This is an advanced research seminar for American Studies majors on the topic of George Washington University. Each student will spend the semester writing a substantial research paper on some aspect of the university -- its student culture or activism; its race, class, or gender politics; its staff; its faculty; its leadership; its donors; its real estate holdings; its relationship with DC or Foggy Bottom; its cultural representation; its labor struggles; its “corporatization,” and so forth.
- AMST 4702W.80: Race, Medicine, and Public Health
Vanessa Northington Gamble
MW 12:45 - 2:00
CRN: 72717
This course focuses on the role of race and racism in the development of American medicine and public health by examining the experiences of African Americans from slavery to today. It will emphasize the importance of understanding the historical roots of contemporary policy dilemmas such as racial and ethnic inequalities and inequities in health and health care. The course will challenge students to synthesize materials from several disciplines to gain a broad understanding of the relationship between race, medicine, and public health in the United States.It includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.
Spring 2022 Courses
- AMST 1000.11: Zombie Capitalism
Dara Orenstein
M 12:45-3:15
CRN: 36116
The Walking Dead. World War Z. “Zombie Banks.” Why does the specter of the living dead loom so largely in contemporary U.S. culture? How is it useful? What does it illuminate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that might otherwise remain inscrutable? And how has it served in this allegorical manner throughout modern U.S. history? How did it haunt the rise of mass production, or the growth of suburbs, or the eruption of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street? To answer such questions, in this seminar we will screen one film per week, supplemented by brief readings in primary sources, to track the figure of the zombie from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (or, now, the Great Depression 2.0), and from the sugar plantations of Haiti to the tents of Zuccotti Park and the COVID-19 morgues of Detroit.
- AMST 1200.10: The Sixties in America
Suleiman Osman
TR 12:45-1:35
CRN: 36290
This course will examine American society, culture, and politics during the dramatic decade of the 1960s. Students will examine topics that include the civil rights movement, the student movement, the Vietnam War and antiwar movement, the counterculture, the women’s movement, the environmentalist movement, and the conservative movement.
- AMST 2011.80: Modern American Cultural History
Gayle Wald
MW 2:20-3:10
CRN: 37289
This course surveys US history from 1912-2020 through the lens of culture and cultural change. Instead of trying to be exhaustive, it is organized around historical moments and phenomena that reflect the course theme of “culture wars.” We are living through a moment when talk of culture wars is everywhere, and yet culture has long been a site of political struggle and social change. While lectures lay a broad groundwork, students engage with primary texts, primarily literature, film, and music, but also theater, radio, and television. Student learning is assessed through writing assignments and a final exam, as well as through participation in weekly breakout sessions. There are no prerequisites for this course.
- AMST 2410.80: Modern US Immigration History
Tom Guglielmo
MW 9:35-10:25
CRN: 17948
This class will investigate immigration patterns, immigration policy, and immigrants’ lives in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Which immigrant groups have come to the United States? When and why have they come? And what have their lives been like once they got here? How has the federal government, and Americans more generally, responded to immigrants and immigration? Why have we welcomed some newcomers as good future Americans and scorned others as “forever foreigners” or “illegal aliens”? The course will explore these questions through a mix of reading, writing, lecture, and discussion. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.- AMST 2490.10: American Contagions
Nicole Ivy
TR 2:20-3:35
CRN: 34503
This course examines how national ideas about health, disease, cleanliness, and contamination have concurrently informed and been shaped by notions of difference. Together, we will think through how forms of human difference have been historically medicalized—as unhealthy, as in need of repair or management. We will seriously consider how gender, sexuality, race, and ability to continue to shape U.S. health care policy and practice. To do this, assigned course materials and class discussions will explore difficult-to-answer questions about the legacies of contagion narratives in American culture and politics. How have fears of outbreak influenced American military and economic actions? How do evolving understandings of the transmission and treatment of disease create and sustain moral panics? We will place primary sources such as political cartoons, plantation manuals, and printed broadsides in conversation with readings in social theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Across the semester, we will study and practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and textual analysis.
- AMST 2490.11: Borders and Boundaries
Elaine Pena
TR 12:45-2:00
CRN: 36117
International borders affect you every day. In the United States and elsewhere, they play a role in determining whether you are a birthright citizen or an unauthorized migrant. They showcase a nation’s ability or inability to guarantee your wellbeing. They factor into comprehensive immigration reform and national security debates, including wall construction plans, that reinforce party lines and determine elections. Those who live in close proximity to an international border often deal with a particular set of issues. Living in an either/or environment can impel border residents to strategically recognize or deny cultural forms—to be hyper patriotic, for example, or to speak one language at home and another at school. This course will draw from the work of anthropologists, political scientists, historians, geographers, and documentary filmmakers to establish a strong base in border theory and to shine light on ground up dynamics. It will use the U.S.-Mexico border as its primary reference point, but it will also draw our attention to boundary lines around the globe including places like Ceuta and Melilla in Northern Africa and the Guatemala-Mexico border.
- AMST 2610W.80: Science, Tech, and Politics in Modern America
Jamie Cohen-Cole
TR 9:35-10:25
CRN: 37302
This course examines the history of science and technology and their role in political and social life. Among the questions we will consider are: how has society, culture, and politics developed and changed because of technical developments ranging from electricity to the automobile, nuclear weapons, the internet, biotechnology and social sciences from SAT tests to economic modeling? How have struggles over science and technology over issues including evolution, global warming, GMOs, and vaccines shaped our culture? How have citizens and the government resolved conflicts over the truth or uses of science and technology? This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
- AMST 2710.80: US in the World
Melani McAlister
TR 11:10-12:00
CRN: 37305
This course examines US history from 1898-present in terms of its cultural and political relationships with the world beyond US borders. We will consider, among other things, US state and military power, globalizing cultures, transnational ideas and social movements, travel and tourism, and the impact of media in the context of US global power.
- AMST 2750.80: Latinos in the US
Elaine Peña
TR 3:45-5:00
CRN: 35589
The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the Hispanic population will reach 111 million by 2060. But who are Hispanics? What does that term mean and how does it relate to Latino and Latinx? Can those terms accurately reflect the various communities they seek to represent? Returning to those questions throughout the semester, we will critically analyze the evolution of the term “Hispanic” and its impact on discussions of race, identity, and citizenship expectations in the United States. We will engage ethnographic and historical analyses, legal perspectives, and films that explore Hispanic, Latino, and Latinx identity formation in geographic regions across the United States and in transnational/hemispheric contexts. One of the goals of this course is to not only identify how historical, political, and economic shifts have shaped the terms Hispanic and Latino in the United States but also connect those processes to ongoing discussions of immigration reform and border security. This course fulfills critical thinking and cross-cultural perspective learning goals.
- AMST 3900.10: Critiquing Culture
Dara Orenstein
MW 9:35-10:50
CRN: 35100
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 3901.10: Examining America
Suleiman Osman
TR 2:20-3:10
CRN: 34021
This course offers students an introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will be introduced to key texts in American Studies scholarship from foundational primary sources to contemporary secondary scholarship. Registration restricted to American Studies majors.
- AMST 4701.80: Epidemics in American History
Vanessa Northington Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00
CRN: 34076
This course surveys the history of infectious disease epidemics in the United States from the late nineteenth century to today, including the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the development of the medical and public health responses to epidemics and the social, political, cultural and economic impact of epidemics on American history and culture. We will use primary documents, historical accounts, memoirs, and films to understand the history of epidemic disease.
Fall 2021 Courses
- AMST 1050.10 – What is Democracy?
Libby Anker
T 12:45-3:15
CRN: 68061
- AMST 1100.10 – Politics and Film
Elisabeth Anker
M 12:45-2:00 and M 7:10-9:40
CRN: 62945
This class addresses the relationship between politics and film by examining how American films interpret and challenge political power in America. We pair film analysis with readings in political theory to interrogate the operations of power in political life. Exploring films thematically, first we examine those that shape conventional interpretations of political power in America, including concepts of limited government, popular sovereignty, and liberal individualism. Next, we consider films that challenge these ideas by offering alternate conceptions of how power functions, while addressing questions of ideology, surveillance, domination, and biopolitics. The last section investigates particular genres—melodrama, the western, and film noir—that reshape and rearticulate these themes within American political culture. Throughout, we will focus on how to read the visual language of film and the written texts of political theory. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 2010.80 – Early American Cultural History
Teresa Murphy
MW 2:20-3:10
CRN: 62122
This course starts with the argument that understanding culture is key to understanding American history. Culture can refer to art and literature—some of which we will explore in class. However, culture can also refer to popular forms of expression, including the way people act. With this broader perspective, we will study some of the major scholarship addressing the evolution of American culture—from the Colonial period through Reconstruction. For example, we will look at what scholars have to say about why minstrel shows were popular and about how Indian captivity narratives were used to justify the conquest of the West. To shape our analyses, we will examine old newspapers, read popular literature, and explore the museums here in Washington, DC—then develop our own opinions and arguments as we engage in small group discussions and complete class assignments. This is an upper division course, but it is geared toward freshman and sophomores who are looking for a challenge. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement. Same as HIST 2010.
- AMST 2071.80 – Introduction to the Arts in America
Katherine Markowski
TR 9:35-10:50
CRN: 67687
This is a lecture survey of American art from the colonial period to the postmodern present. Primarily focused upon painting, the course also covers sculpture, architecture, printmaking and photography within the broader visual and material culture of United States history. Art works are analyzed in relation to issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class and gender.
- AMST 2430.10 – Capitalism and Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR 9:35-10:25AM
CRN: 65596
As of this writing, in April, GW is online. Most of the nation is under quarantine. And the world as we knew it is over. Why are the shelves empty of toilet paper? Why are ventilators in short supply? Why are hospitals laying off doctors and nurses? Why is Congress bailing out the airline industry, the cruise industry, the oil industry? Why are the people who are now recognized as “essential workers”—the food-service workers, the healthcare workers, the transit workers, the warehouse workers—also the same people who are most vulnerable, structurally speaking, to premature death? (And why, by the way, is GW online?) Any answer to these questions must contend with one word: capitalism. And it is not “capitalism” merely in terms of the dollars and cents that needs to be examined (or, autopsied). It is equally the culture of capitalism that is at the root of the pandemic of COVID-19. This reading-intensive, discussion-based course is an introduction to scholarship in the arts, humanities, and social sciences on the culture of capitalism. Organized thematically, and with a historical sensibility, it investigates how, in a capitalist framework, concepts like “productivity,” “growth,” and “value” are, increasingly, threats to life itself.
- AMST 2440W.80 – The American City
Suleiman Osman
TR, 2:20-3:10
CRN: 68094
This introduces students to the exciting field of urban studies. Students will explore the political, architectural and cultural history of American cities, with a particular focus on Washington DC. Students will tackle urban planning and policy debates about topics such as urban renewal, sprawl, racial inequality, policing, public housing, immigration and gentrification. The course will include works by a range of urban writers such as Jane Jacobs, Mike Davis, Neil Smith, Anne Petry and clips from the TV show “The Wire.”
- AMST 2450.10 – History and Meaning of Higher Education in the United States
Teresa Murphy
MW 11:10-12:00PM
CRN: 67688
Interest in, and support for universities as well as the academic training they provide is longstanding and complicated. Community and state support have been rooted in civic aspirations while students and their families have generally focused on the economic and cultural benefits that students derive. This course will analyze the ways in which these two different sets of expectations have evolved, intersected, and sometimes collided over the past two centuries. Students will analyze how college experiences were reflective of competing social, economic, and cultural goals. Students also will explore how colleges provided social mobility for some students at the same time that they reinscribed inequality in other ways. We will pay particular attention to how student life has changed over the last two hundred years, how college curricula have been modified, and how professional standards have evolved. Finally, students will examine how universities have been and continue to be deeply tied to governmental goals and needs. Students will be expected not only to analyze these issues but to suggest interventions for improving higher education in the 21 st century.
- AMST 2730W.80: World War II in History and Memory
Tom Guglielmo
MW 9:35-10:25AM
CRN: 66951
This course examines Americans’ World War II experiences and how those experiences have been studied, debated, understood, and “remembered”—officially, culturally, and personally. Through a mix of reading, writing, and discussion, it focuses on six overlapping topics: GIs, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment, African Americans, the Holocaust, and women.
- AMST 3362.80 – African American Women's History
Erin Chapman
TR 2:20-3:35
CRN: 66952
In this course, we will explore the history of African American women’s labor, leisure, institution-building, and activism from the antebellum period through the early 1980s. In addition, we will investigate the complexities of gender, sexuality, and class as they have shaped African American women’s experiences, the idea of race, racial identity and racism, and U.S. society. We will cover slavery, abolitionism, Reconstruction, the Women’s Era, the great migration, the New Negro Era, Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Feminism, with an eye toward both African American women’s participation and the gender politics of racial advancement efforts. Readings will include biography and histories of specific moments and movements. Requirements will include reading responses and a final examination.
- AMST 3625.80 – Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Data Ethics
Jamie Cohen-Cole and Joel Kuipers
T 12:45-3:15
CRN: 66238
This class is an introduction to ethics of data sciences from two disparate perspectives: historical and ethnographic. The course focuses on the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by the collection and use of large data sets, by artificial intelligence, and by our increasingly on-line lives. Issues we will examine include the erosion of public life in the face of mediated remote communication, government and corporate surveillance; loss of privacy; the interaction of social media and democratic norms; and the substitution of artificial algorithmic and automatic processes for human judgment in policy making and practices of everyday life. The course is open to students from all fields. It is designed as an interdisciplinary meeting ground for students interested in humanistic inquiry and those in the data science major and other STEM fields. It will be useful to students in social sciences involved in the generation, recording, curation, processing, sharing and use of data; While it is a stand-alone course, it provides a “front door” for further research into the study of ethical life in an electronically mediated world through the methods of historical methods and digital ethnography. While it is a stand-alone course, it provides a “front door” for further research into the study of ethical life in an electronically mediated world through social scientific or humanistic methods. Those wishing further studies in these areas may consider continuing on with courses such as AMST 2610 Science, Technology and Politics in Modern America, AMST 2620 Human Minds and Artificial Intelligence, and AMST 2680 Hashtag America.
- AMST 3900.10 – Critiquing Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR 9:35-10:50
CRN: 63740
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 3901.10 - Examining America
Elaine Peña
T 12:45-3:15
CRN: 65603
A wide array of itineraries, exchanges, networks, and social movements have shaped America and have created dynamic variations of the American experience. Yet, the field of American Studies has not always captured those complexities. This course invites AMST majors to think critically about the institutional history of the discipline using a variety of interpretive tools. We will examine how scholarly debates around interdisciplinarity and methodology have changed over time to contemplate where to take AMST moving forward.
- AMST 3950W.80 – American Slavery and Its Legacies
Erin Chapman
R 11:10-1:00
CRN: 67696
- AMST 4500W.10 – STEM and its Cultures
Jamie Cohen-Cole
R 12:45-3:15
CRN: 64928
This is an advanced seminar for American Studies majors in which students will write original research papers on an aspect of the cultural role of science, technology and/or medicine (STM) in America. STM has been, variously, a repository of truth and political authority, a source of values, and site of conflict. In the face of wars, climate change, and epidemics, STM provides means of imagining or modeling scenarios and of shaping possible futures. Yet these interventions are not frictionless. Scientific and technological changes sometimes reinforce and at others challenge existing social categories and hierarchies. If STM fields and their products have loomed large in American culture – even, to some, defining it – these fields have not been unmoved movers. The fields are subject to cultural and political forces and themselves have internal subcultures that are accessible to cultural critique just as much as any other aspect of American life. Thus, a premise of the class is that STM and other aspects of American culture, society, and politics mutually constitute one another. We will begin with by developing the fundamental skills for writing a research paper and reading exemplary articles. Students will then engage in individual research projects of their own choosing that are based in primary sources and address important scholarly issues related to the cultural analysis of Science, Technology, and Medicine.
- AMST 4500W.11 – Transnational America
Melani McAlister
W 12:45-3:15
CRN: 66025
In this advanced research seminar for American Studies majors, students write an original research paper that considers some aspect of how transnational connections and frictions among the world’s peoples have functioned both within and outside U.S. borders. =. Students should expect to combine archival research (using a range of possible archives) and cultural analysis that examines state and/or non-state actors as sources of international relations, broadly conceived. Research topics might cover issues such as the role culture or religion has played in the histories of the U.S. Empire. Or how have activists or actors of various types (the alt-right, nineteenth century missionaries, hip hop artists) worked across borders to construct networks. We will read theoretical materials on the state, transnationalism, and actor-network theory, as well as works of cultural analysis, to establish frameworks for individual research projects.
- AMST 4702W.80 – Race, Medicine, and Public Health
Vanessa Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00PM
CRN: 63044
This course focuses on the role of race and racism in the development of American medicine and public health by examining the experiences of African Americans from slavery to today. It will emphasize the importance of understanding the historical roots of contemporary policy dilemmas such as racial and ethnic inequalities and inequities in health and health care. The course will challenge students to synthesize materials from several disciplines to gain a broad understanding of the relationship between race, medicine, and public health in the United States. Among the questions that will be addressed are: How have race and racism influenced, and continue to influence, American medicine and public health? What is race? How have concepts of race evolved? What have been some of the historical vulnerabilities of black bodies within the medical system? How has medical thought and practices contributed to the political and social status of African Americans? What are racial inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What is the history of these inequalities and inequities and what factors have contributed to their existence and persistence? How have African Americans, the medical and public health professions, and governmental agencies addressed these inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What have been the experiences of African Americans as patients and health care providers and how have they challenged racism in medicine. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
Spring 2021 Courses
- AMST 1000.10 – Bodies of Work
Nicole Ivy
M 12:45-3:15
CRN: 15114
The National Gallery of Art’s ongoing exhibition, Bodies of Work, explores how American painters and sculptors across the last fifty years have “reimagine[d] the human form as a site of fantasy, fear, and travail.” Taking its title from this show, this course will examine how the human body has figured in cultural and historical narratives, not simply as a physical fact but as site of social and political meaning-making. Using an interdisciplinary approach that highlights visual culture analysis, we will trace how historical perspectives on the body and embodiment have shaped American culture. Our texts for this class will include both written works and visual objects. We will explore how artists and intellectuals have engaged embodiment over an expansive period of time, considering works by a diverse array of thinkers including: Thomas Jefferson, Donna Haraway, Kerry James Marshall, and Andy Warhol.
- AMST 1000.11 – Media Culture & COVID
Melani McAlister
MW 2:20-3:35
CRN: 17707
This is a research seminar in which students will document and analyze cultural and political responses to the COVID crisis. Our final product will be a jointly produced webpage that will serve as a public digital humanities resource. Students will read some theoretical and historical materials on how US and global cultures have responded to previous contagions. But our primary work will be independent projects. Participants draw on their own experiences, using diaries, photographs, interviews, etc. Or they may analyze news media coverage, popular culture, or social media to unpack ideologies, cultural meanings, and the responses of ordinary people. Our project will include local, national, and transnational analyses, and formats will likely range from written essays to short videos to podcasts to photographic essays. This course satisfies GPAC requirements in the Arts and Global/Cross-Cultural perspectives.
- AMST 1000.12 – The Nature & Culture of Children
Jamie Cohen-Cole
W, 3:30-6:00
CRN: 18875
The sciences and philosophy ask hard questions: What is the nature of knowledge? What characteristics define humanity? How much does culture matter? It turns out that these questions have provoked fierce disagreements for how we understand, raise, and educate children. They are tied to our visions of morality, politics, education, and the shape we want the future to take. This seminar adopts a historical approach to see how these questions and the debates about children have been approached by philosophers, biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Registration restricted to CCAS freshman only.
- AMST 1200.10 – The Sixties in America
Suleiman Osman
TR 11:10-12:00
CRN: 17949
This course will examine American society, culture, and politics during the dynamic and contentious decade of the 1960s. Students will examine topics such as the civil rights movement, the student movement, the Vietnam War and anti-war movement, black power, the counterculture, feminism, the environmental movement, and the New Right. Students will also examine how the memory of the 1960s continues to shape debates about political activism, foreign policy, and cultural consumption today. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 1050.10 – Race and Racism in US History
Tom Guglielmo
MW 9:35-10:50
CRN: 17948
This class will examine the history of race and racism in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Through a mixture of reading, writing, lecture, in-class discussion, film viewings, and trips around DC, we’ll explore the evolving social boundaries of race and their significance in shaping our lives, livelihoods, thoughts, and dreams. Class topics will include Jim Crow and mass incarceration, colonialism and immigration, Chinese exclusion and Japanese-American internment, civil rights and Black Lives Matter.
- AMST 2120W.80 – Freedom in American Thought and Popular Culture
Elisabeth Anker
MW 11:10-12:00
CRN: 13389
America was founded on the premise of providing freedom to its people. But what, exactly, is―”freedom”? Is it doing what you want or is it participation in politics? Is it about escaping domination or does it require sharing power? These questions have been debated in America since its founding. The course will examine varied answers to these questions provided by American thought and popular culture. We will intertwine the study of theoretical texts with cultural analysis to examine authors from Jefferson to Thoreau, speeches from Martin Luther King to George W. Bush, films from High Noon to Minority Report, and the video art of Jeremy Blake. Together, we will explore how concepts of freedom and anxieties over freedom’s possibility to take cultural form. While we may not settle the question of what freedom is or how to produce it, we will learn both to appreciate its complexity and to critically engage its operations in American public life. This course satisfies a WID requirement. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements
- AMST 2210.10 – African American Experience
Amber Musser
TR 12:45-1:35
CRN: 15177
Much of what we think about in relation to the African American experience begins with the central question: what does it mean to have been treated as a commodity? This course uses that question as the central point for examining African American life from slavery to the present by focusing specifically on how gender and sexuality have been part of commodification and central to resisting it. Students will gain historical contexts for this question in addition to learning to analyze contemporary portrayals of African American experience in literature, film, television, and music.
- AMST 2490.10 – American Contagions
Nicole Ivy
MW 4:45-6:00
CRN: 15180
This course examines how national ideas about health, disease, cleanliness, and contamination have concurrently informed and been shaped by notions of difference. Together, we will think through how forms of human difference have been historically medicalized—as unhealthy, as in need of repair or management. We will seriously consider how gender, sexuality, race, and ability to continue to shape U.S. health care policy and practice. To do this, assigned course materials and class discussions will explore difficult-to-answer questions about the legacies of contagion narratives in American culture and politics. How have fears of outbreak influenced American military and economic actions? How do evolving understandings of the transmission and treatment of disease create and sustain moral panics? We will place primary sources such as political cartoons, plantation manuals, and printed broadsides in conversation with readings in social theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Across the semester, we will study and practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and textual analysis.
- AMST 2490.11 – COVID: Race, Gender & Uprisings
Amber Musser
TR 3:45-5:00
CRN: 17708
The Covid-19 pandemic has upended so many aspects of American Culture. This seminar will focus specifically on the reorientations to intimacy, work, and leisure in several ways. We will position this moment in relation to previous public health emergencies; we will look at the way inequalities have been made visible by this crisis; and we will look at emergent solutions to these social problems. This seminar will require critical self-reflection and a willingness to engage with theory. There will be a weekly writing assignment in addition to a final project.
- AMST 2750.80 – Latinos in the U.S.
Elaine Peña
TR 12:45-2:00
CRN: 16925
The U.S. Census Bureau projects that Latinos will make up the majority in the United States by 2050. But who are Latinos? What does that term mean now and how has it changed over time? Can the term accurately reflect the various communities it seeks to represent? Returning to those questions throughout the semester, we will critically analyze the evolution of the term “Latino” and its impact on discussions of race, identity, and citizenship expectations in the United States. We will engage ethnographic and historical analyses, legal perspectives, and films that explore Latino identity formation in geographic regions across the United States as well as hemispherically. One of the goals of this course is to not only identify how historical, political, and economic shifts have shaped the term Latino in the United States but also connect those processes to ongoing discussions of immigration reform and border security. This course fulfills critical thinking and cross-cultural perspective learning goals.
- AMST 3600.10 – Popular Music and Politics
Gayle Wald
MW, 2:20-3:10
CRN: 17709
This interdisciplinary course explores the interactions and intersections of music and politics, focusing on the 20th-century United States. It has units on music and the U.S. state, music and social protest movements, and music and freedom. For spring 2021, there will be new course material on music and #BLM and music and queer/trans/non-binary identities.
- AMST 3900.10 – Critiquing Culture
Melani McAlister
MW 12:45-2:00
CRN: 16111
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 3901.10 – Examining America
Elaine Pena
T 3:30-6:00
CRN: 14583
This course invites students to examine America using international, transnational, and cross-border processes as optics. A wide array of itineraries, exchanges, networks, and social movements have shaped America and have created dynamic variations of the American experience. Using key works in American Studies, this course shows that the United States is deeply invested in maintaining those long-standing strategies of social reproduction and economic development. But does the cross-border flow of capital, people, ideas, and values weaken or strengthen national character? Do those processes make the category of “nation” obsolete? Do they change the way we think about American racial politics, American citizenship, or what constitutes American religion? We will consider those questions using a variety of interpretive tools. We will also situate those discussions within the development of American Studies as a field of study to understand how scholarly debates have changed over time.
- AMST 3950.10 – The Iraq Wars
Zaynab Quadri
TR, 9:35-10:50
CRN: 18466
Nearly twenty years after the “shock and awe” invasion of Baghdad, the Iraq War remains a contested subject in the United States— sharply criticized by some, generally misunderstood by most, if remembered publicly at all. This writing-intensive, interdisciplinary seminar seeks to remedy the knowledge gap by building a multimedia archive with which to study the war, utilizing memoirs, films, news reporting, and government documents to lay a historical foundation. Further, the course will contextualize the 2003-2011 conflict in a longer trajectory of American foreign policy in Iraq and the Middle East from the 1980s to the present. Finally, the course will consider the legacies of the war in U.S. politics and culture, from the changing nature of security and surveillance to popular Hollywood memory. Students will be challenged to analyze the long origins and impacts of the Iraq War(s); survey the deployment of American power in the world; and critically evaluate an array of primary sources and perspectives.
- AMST 3950.80 – Freemasonry and American Art
David Bjelajac
T 3:30-6:00
CRN: 18167
During the eighteenth-century, English, Scottish, Irish and continental European stonemasons’ medieval guild traditions inspired the modern cultural formation of Freemasonry and competing international networks of masonic lodges. Freemasonry attracted men from a wide socio- economic spectrum and found support from both radical revolutionaries and counter- revolutionary conservatives. Barred from membership in White lodges, free African Americans created their own fraternal network of Prince Hall Freemasons. Ever since the Age of Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, Freemasonry’s secretive lodge meetings, mysterious initiation rituals and esoteric visual symbols have fostered orthodox Christian opposition and anti-masonic conspiracy theories charging a varying host of purported vices, blasphemies and subversive misdeeds. This course critically examines these conspiracy theories, popularized in a variety of media, while also exploring Freemasonry’s racial, gender and class exclusions/divisions. Freemasonry’s global networking assisted American imperialism and helped shape the nation’s capital. Washington, D.C.’s urban design, historic-revival architecture, monumental sculpture and large-scale history paintings will be subjects for lectures, readings, and class discussions. The seminar will consider the manner in which George Washington himself came to personify American Freemasonry, becoming a model for later United States presidents who joined the fraternity. Students will read both primary and secondary sources and will be required to write papers critically analyzing visual objects and architectural spaces while also evaluating the literature of Freemasonry, anti-masonry and secret-society conspiracies. Contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney, Bill Traylor and Jim Shaw have appropriated masonic emblems and themes.
- AMST 4701W.80 – Epidemics in American History
Vanessa Northington Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00
CRN: 14663
This course surveys the history of infectious disease epidemics in the United States from the late nineteenth century to today, including the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the development of the medical and public health responses to epidemics and the social, political, cultural and economic impact of epidemics on American history and culture. We will use primary documents, historical accounts, memoirs, and films to understand the history of epidemic disease.
Fall 2020 Courses
- AMST 1000.10: Zombie Capitalism
Dara Orenstein
T 3:30-6:00
CRN: 56078
The Walking Dead. World War Z. “Zombie Banks.” Why does the specter of the living dead loom so largely in contemporary U.S. culture? How is it useful? What does it illuminate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that might otherwise remain inscrutable? And how has it served in this allegorical manner throughout modern U.S. history? How did it haunt the rise of mass production, or the growth of suburbs, or the eruption of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street? To answer such questions, in this seminar we will screen one film per week, supplemented by brief readings in primary sources, to track the figure of the zombie from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (or, now, the Great Depression 2.0), and from the sugar plantations of Haiti to the tents of Zuccotti Park and the COVID-19 morgues of Detroit.
- AMST 1000.11 – World of Bob Dylan
Gayle Wald
TR, 9:35-10:50AM
CRN: 58235
This dean’s seminar investigates the life and art of Bob Dylan, placing Dylan in the context of the wider social, cultural, and political forces have shaped and influenced him. We’ll investigate Dylan’s own creative work (primarily music, but also writing and visual art) as well as creative and scholarly work that Dylan’s persona and music have inspired. We’ll also pay attention to figures that are sometimes relegated to the margins of the Dylan story, especially the women and people of color with whom Dylan has long engaged in a complex dance of love and theft. This course is not meant as an uncritical love letter to Bob Dylan or an exercise in hagiography (although we’ll briefly delve into the domain of Dylanologists). It is rather about Dylan the person/artist and “Dylan” as a lens into American history and culture. No previous Dylan experience necessary!
**This course satisfies a GPAC requirement in Creative Thinking**
- AMST 1100.10 Politics and Film
Elisabeth Anker
M 3:45-5:00 and M 7:10-9:40
CRN: 53373
This class addresses the relationship between politics and film by examining how American films interpret and challenge political power in America. We pair film analysis with readings in political theory to interrogate the operations of power in political life. Exploring films thematically, first we examine those that shape conventional interpretations of political power in America, including concepts of limited government, popular sovereignty, and liberal individualism. Next, we consider films that challenge these ideas by offering alternate conceptions of how power functions, while addressing questions of ideology, surveillance, domination, and biopolitics. The last section investigates particular genres—melodrama, the western, and film noir—that reshape and rearticulate these themes within American political culture. Throughout, we will focus on how to read the visual language of film and the written texts of political theory. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 2010.80: Early American Cultural History
Nicole Ivy
MW 2:20-3:10
CRN: 52329
This course explores how people’s efforts to make meaning of natural landscapes, built environments, social worlds, and encounters of difference influenced the formation of the United States. We track the development of national ideas about freedom and democracy alongside the evolution of everyday beliefs and practices in order to explore what culture might mean as a category of study-- and what difference the study of culture makes. Same as HIST 2010.
- AMST 2071.80: Introduction to the Arts in America
David Bjelajac
MW 12:45-2:00
CRN: 54009
This is a lecture survey of American art from the colonial period to the postmodern present. Primarily focused upon painting, the course also covers sculpture, architecture, printmaking and photography within the broader visual and material culture of United States history. Art works are analyzed in relation to issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class and gender.
- AMST 2320.80: U.S. Media and Cultural History
Melani McAlister
TR 12:45-1:35PM
CRN: 54972
This course will examine mass culture – film, radio, music, television, internet – and its role in US history from the turn of the 20th century to the present. Focusing on cultural production, consumption, and reception, this course will consider the historical contexts in which popular culture has emerged and developed. The cultural texts we will study range from silent films to 1950s sitcoms and twenty-first century new media. Students will learn to consider media histories in light of theoretical debates about ideology, media effects, national identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender roles, and imperialism. Reading and viewing requirements are extensive. In addition to other course requirements, student work includes a final paper in which students analyze a media artifact in its historical and cultural context.
- AMST 2410W.80: 20th Century US Immigration
Tom Guglielmo
MW 9:35-10:25AM
CRN: 57718
This class will investigate immigration patterns, immigration policy, and immigrants’ lives in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Which immigrant groups have come to the United States? When and why have they come? And what have their lives been like once they got here? How has the federal government, and Americans more generally, responded to immigrants and immigration? Why have we welcomed some newcomers as good future Americans and scorned others as “forever foreigners” or “illegal aliens”? The course will explore these questions through a mix of reading, writing, lecture, and discussion. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
- AMST 2430.10: Capitalism and Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR 9:35-10:25AM
CRN: 57097
As of this writing, in April, GW is online. Most of the nation is under quarantine. And the world as we knew it is over. Why are the shelves empty of toilet paper? Why are ventilators in short supply? Why are hospitals laying off doctors and nurses? Why is Congress bailing out the airline industry, the cruise industry, the oil industry? Why are the people who are now recognized as “essential workers”—the food-service workers, the healthcare workers, the transit workers, the warehouse workers—also the same people who are most vulnerable, structurally speaking, to premature death? (And why, by the way, is GW online?) Any answer to these questions must contend with one word: capitalism. And it is not “capitalism” merely in terms of the dollars and cents that needs to be examined (or, autopsied). It is equally the culture of capitalism that is at the root of the pandemic of COVID-19. This reading-intensive, discussion-based course is an introduction to scholarship in the arts, humanities, and social sciences on the culture of capitalism. Organized thematically, and with a historical sensibility, it investigates how, in a capitalist framework, concepts like “productivity,” “growth,” and “value” are, increasingly, threats to life itself.
- AMST 2620.10: Human Mind and Artificial Intelligence
Jamie Cohen-Cole
TR 11:10-12:00
CRN: 57099
Where is the boundary between humans and robots? Is it that humans can bleed and robots can rust? Or is there something more important that gets to what is distinctive about humanity? Is it how we think, our intelligence, or our language? If so, then what happens when computers or robots or robots speak and perform intelligent tasks? Focusing on questions such as these this class looks at the history of computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. In tracking this history we will see how the line between humans and machines has been in constant motion as what we believe, and imagine about machines had affected what we know, imagine, and believe about the human mind. We will examine these themes by reading about computers, robots, and artificial intelligence in history and through the visions of the future given in science fiction stories and movies from Frankenstein to AI and I Robot. Topics covered in this course include Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the Turing Machine, cyberspace, and the origins, development, and criticism of research in artificial intelligence.
- AMST 3625.80: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Data Ethics
Jamie Cohen-Cole and Joel Kuipers
T 12:45-3:15
CRN: 58013
This class is an introduction to ethics of data sciences from two disparate perspectives: historical and ethnographic. The course focuses on the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by the collection and use of large data sets, by artificial intelligence, and by our increasingly on-line lives. Issues we will examine include the erosion of public life in the face of mediated remote communication, government and corporate surveillance; loss of privacy; the interaction of social media and democratic norms; and the substitution of artificial algorithmic and automatic processes for human judgment in policy making and practices of everyday life. The course is open to students from all fields. It is designed as an interdisciplinary meeting ground for students interested in humanistic inquiry and those in the data science major and other STEM fields. It will be useful to students in social sciences involved in the generation, recording, curation, processing, sharing and use of data; While it is a stand-alone course, it provides a “front door” for further research into the study of ethical life in an electronically mediated world through the methods of historical methods and digital ethnography. While it is a stand-alone course, it provides a “front door” for further research into the study of ethical life in an electronically mediated world through social scientific or humanistic methods. Those wishing further studies in these areas may consider continuing on with courses such as AMST 2610 Science, Technology and Politics in Modern America, AMST 2620 Human Minds and Artificial Intelligence, and AMST 2680 Hashtag America.
- AMST 3900.10: Critiquing Culture
Melani McAlister
T 3:30-6:00
CRN: 54362
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 3901.10: Examining America
Elisabeth Anker
T 12:45-3:15
CRN: 57106
This course offers students an introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will analyze key texts in American Studies scholarship from the foundational ―Myth and Symbol school to contemporary transnational works. Students will also be introduced to different approaches to interdisciplinary research. Registration restricted to American Studies majors.
- AMST 4500W.10: STEM and its Cultures
Jamie Cohen-Cole
R 12:45-3:15
CRN: 56079
This is an advanced seminar for American Studies majors in which students will write original research papers on an aspect of the cultural role of science, technology and/or medicine (STM) in America. STM has been, variously, a repository of truth and political authority, a source of values, and site of conflict. In the face of wars, climate change, and epidemics, STM provides means of imagining or modeling scenarios and of shaping possible futures. Yet these interventions are not frictionless. Scientific and technological changes sometimes reinforce and at others challenge existing social categories and hierarchies.
If STM fields and their products have loomed large in American culture – even, to some, defining it – these fields have not been unmoved movers. The fields are subject to cultural and political forces and themselves have internal subcultures that are accessible to cultural critique just as much as any other aspect of American life. Thus, a premise of the class is that STM and other aspects of American culture, society, and politics mutually constitute one another. We will begin with by developing the fundamental skills for writing a research paper and reading exemplary articles. Students will then engage in individual research projects of their own choosing that are based in primary sources and address important scholarly issues related to the cultural analysis of Science, Technology, and Medicine.
- AMST 4500W.11: DC Immigration Histories
Elaine Peña
W 3:30-6:00
CRN: 57730
This is an advanced research seminar for American Studies majors. Seminar participants will spend the semester focusing on immigration histories and narratives that are specific to the District of Columbia. Key goals of this course include: choosing an aspect of DC immigration history that you would like to know more about, conceptualizing an original project, undertaking independent research, making connections between individual research agendas and scholarly sources, and producing a substantial research paper. Various methods-- ranging from archival, ethnographic, to built environment-focused or any approach you feel most comfortable with-- may be combined to produce your research paper.
- AMST 4702W.80 – Race, Medicine, and Public Health
Vanessa Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00PM
CRN: 53489
This course focuses on the role of race and racism in the development of American medicine and public health by examining the experiences of African Americans from slavery to today. It will emphasize the importance of understanding the historical roots of contemporary policy dilemmas such as racial and ethnic inequalities and inequities in health and health care. The course will challenge students to synthesize materials from several disciplines to gain a broad
understanding of the relationship between race, medicine, and public health in the United States. Among the questions that will be addressed are: How have race and racism influenced, and continue to influence, American medicine and public health? What is race? How have concepts of race evolved? What have been some of the historical vulnerabilities of black bodies within the medical system? How has medical thought and practices contributed to the political and social status of African Americans? What are racial inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What is the history of these inequalities and inequities and what factors have contributed to their existence and persistence? How have African Americans, the medical and public health professions, and governmental agencies addressed these inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What have been the experiences of African Americans as patients and health care providers and how have they challenged racism in medicine. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
Spring 2020 Courses
- AMST 1000.10: Bodies of Work
Nicole Ivy
MW 4:45-6:00
CRN: 75951
The National Gallery of Art’s ongoing exhibition, Bodies of Work, explores how American painters and sculptors across the last fifty years have “reimagine[d] the human form as a site of fantasy, fear, and travail.” Taking its title from this show, this course will examine how the human body has figured in cultural and historical narratives, not simply as a physical fact but as site of social and political meaning-making. Using an interdisciplinary approach that highlights visual culture analysis, we will trace how historical perspectives on the body and embodiment have shaped American culture. Our texts for this class will include both written works and visual objects. We will explore how artists and intellectuals have engaged embodiment over an expansive period of time, considering works by a diverse array of thinkers including: Thomas Jefferson, Donna Haraway, Kerry James Marshall, and Andy Warhol. Class meetings will include time spent at the National Gallery of Art, which offers free admission to all visitors.
- AMST 2011.80: Modern American Cultural History
Dara Orenstein
MW 9:35-10:25
CRN: 75583
This course examines the history of the United States from World War I to the present using culture as its central organizing concept. We will define culture broadly to encompass customs, beliefs, and everyday practices, as well as forms of literary and artistic expression. Central themes of the course include: the role of mass media in shaping a national culture; the intersections of culture and technology; changes in racial formations and ethnic affiliations; cultural dynamics within neighborhoods and cities; cultural meanings of gender and sexual identities; and the political consequences of cultural conflict. We will also consider transnational influences on American culture and, conversely, the effects of American culture abroad.
- AMST 2120W.80: Freedom in American Thought and Popular Culture
Elisabeth Anker
MW 11:10-12:00
CRN: 73847
America was founded on the premise of providing freedom to its people. But what, exactly, is―”freedom”? Is it doing what you want or is it participation in politics? Is it about escaping domination or does it require sharing power? These questions have been debated in America since its founding. The course will examine varied answers to these questions provided by American thought and popular culture. We will intertwine the study of theoretical texts with cultural analysis to examine authors from Jefferson to Thoreau, speeches from Martin Luther King to George W. Bush, films from High Noon to Minority Report, and the video art of Jeremy Blake. Together, we will explore how concepts of freedom and anxieties over freedom’s possibility to take cultural form. While we may not settle the question of what freedom is or how to produce it, we will learn both to appreciate its complexity and to critically engage its operations in American public life. This course satisfies a WID requirement. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements.
- AMST 2210.10: The African American Experience
Amber Musser
TR 3:45-4:35
CRN: 76028
Much of what we think about in relation to the African American experience begins with the central question: what does it mean to have been treated as a commodity? This course uses that question as the central point for examining African American life from slavery to the present by focusing specifically on how gender and sexuality have been part of commodification and central to resisting it. Students will gain historical contexts for this question in addition to learning to analyze contemporary portrayals of African American experience in literature, film, television, and music.
- AMST 2380.80: Sexuality in U.S. History
Sylvea Hollis
MW 5:10-6:00
CRN: 73783
- AMST 2490.10: American Contagions
Nicole Ivy
MW 2:20-3:35
CRN: 76031
This course examines how national ideas about health, disease, cleanliness, and contamination have concurrently informed and been shaped by notions of difference. Together, we will think through how forms of human difference have been historically medicalized—as unhealthy, as in need of repair or management. We will seriously consider how gender, sexuality, race, and ability continue to shape U.S. health care policy and practice. To do this, assigned course materials and class discussions will explore difficult-to-answer questions about the legacies of contagion narratives in American culture and politics. How have fears of outbreak influenced American military and economic actions? How do evolving understandings of the transmission and treatment of disease create and sustain moral panics? We will place primary sources such as political cartoons, plantation manuals, and printed broadsides in conversation with readings in social theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Across the semester, we will study and practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and textual analysis.
- AMST 2710.80: The U.S. and the Global Color Line
Sam Klug
TR 11:10-12:25
CRN: 76032
This course examines the relationship between Americans’ global engagement, both political and cultural, and the history of race and racism within the United States from the early twentieth century until today. We will consider how racial inequality in the U.S. has shaped how policymakers view the world beyond American borders—affecting decisions about when, where, and how to conduct warfare, whether to support or resist movements for independence, and how to promote economic development. We will analyze how the supposedly domestic politics of labor, immigration, civil rights, and policing have intersected with what we think of as foreign policy, and how geopolitical shifts, from the world wars to decolonization, have rebounded on American racial politics. Students will gain a better understanding of how the color line—what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem of the twentieth century”—has been established, maintained, and challenged, both at home and abroad.
- AMST 2750.80: Latinos in the U.S.
Elaine Peña
TR 2:20-3:35
CRN: 77585
The U.S. Census Bureau projects that Latinos will make up the majority in the United States by 2050. But who are Latinos? What does that term mean now and how has it changed over time? Can the term accurately reflect the various communities it seeks to represent? Returning to those questions throughout the semester, we will critically analyze the evolution of the term “Latino” and its impact on discussions of race, identity, and citizenship expectations in the United States. We will engage ethnographic and historical analyses, legal perspectives, and films that explore Latino identity formation in geographic regions across the United States as well as hemispherically. One of the goals of this course is to not only identify how historical, political, and economic shifts have shaped the term Latino in the United States but also connect those processes to ongoing discussions of immigration reform and border security. This course fulfills critical thinking and cross-cultural perspective learning goals.
- AMST 3900.10: Critiquing Culture
Melani McAlister
MW 12:45-2:00
CRN: 77586
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 3901.10: Examining America
Elisabeth Anker
M 12:45-3:15
CRN: 75283
This course offers students an introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will analyze key texts in American Studies scholarship from the foundational ―Myth and Symbol school to contemporary transnational works. Students will also be introduced to different approaches to interdisciplinary research. Registration restricted to American Studies majors.
- AMST 3901.11: Examining America
Elaine Peña
TR 4:45-6:00
CRN: 77587
This course invites students to examine America using international, transnational, and cross-border processes as optics. A wide array of itineraries, exchanges, networks, and social movements have shaped America and have created dynamic variations of the American experience. Using key works in American Studies, this course shows that the United States is deeply invested in maintaining those long-standing strategies of social reproduction and economic development. But does the cross-border flow of capital, people, ideas, and values weaken or strengthen national character? Do those processes make the category of “nation” obsolete? Do they change the way we think about American racial politics, American citizenship, or what constitutes American religion? We will consider those questions using a variety of interpretive tools. We will also situate those discussions within the development of American Studies as a field of study to understand how scholarly debates have changed over time.
- AMST 3950.80: Portraiture and Cultural Capital
David Bjelajac
T 4:00-6:30
CRN: 77588
This junior-senior seminar explores the revolutionary-era portraits of John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) through the Gilded Age portraits painted by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834-1913). “Portraiture & Cultural Capital” also will explore portraiture’s ubiquitous, monumental prominence within Washington, D.C.’s growth as the nation’s capital. Through class discussion of required common readings and supplementary lectures, the seminar examines the origins and development of North American portraiture within a transatlantic context comprising Africa as well as Europe and the British Isles. Cultural capital or the cultivated possession of aesthetic taste ideologically supported contested political claims for making reputedly objective, critical judgments. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), a pioneer in the budding philosophy of aesthetics, argued from a British aristocratic perspective, that the pleasures of politeness and sympathy manifested in the arts drew private men of rank and learning into a public state of social harmony and civic virtue. Inspired by an ethos of masonic fraternalism, the Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley imagined portrait clients in biblical, stonemasonry terms as “living stones” for cementing together harmonic societies—utopian, merit-based models for empire-building. During the course of the semester, we will be making field trips to the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, among other possible venues. Grades will be based upon a short paper and a longer research paper as well as oral presentations and active class participation.
- AMST 4500W.10: Interrogating GW
Tom Guglielmo
R 12:45-3:15
CRN: 97397
This is an advanced research seminar for American Studies majors on the topic of George Washington University. Each student will spend the semester writing a substantial research paper on some aspect of the university -- its student culture or activism; its race, class, or gender politics; its staff; its faculty; its leadership; its donors; its real estate holdings; its relationship with DC or Foggy Bottom; its cultural representation; its labor struggles; its “corporatization,” and so forth. Whatever intellectual interests brought students to American Studies, they will explore these by making GW their principal object of inquiry.
- AMST 4701W.80: Epidemics in American History
Vanessa Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00PM
CRN: 75398
This course surveys the history of infectious disease epidemics in the United States from the late nineteenth century to today. It examines the development of the medical and public health responses to epidemics and the social, political, cultural and economic impact of epidemics on American history and culture. We will use primary documents, historical accounts, memoirs, and films to understand the history of epidemic disease. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
Fall 2019 Courses
- AMST 1000.11: Zombie Capitalism
Dara Orenstein
W 12:45-3:15
CRN: 97394
The Walking Dead. World War Z. “Obama Zombies.” Why does the specter of the living dead loom so largely in contemporary U.S. culture? How is it useful? What does it illuminate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that might otherwise remain inscrutable? And how has it served in this allegorical manner throughout modern U.S. history? How did it haunt the rise of mass production, or the growth of suburbs, or the eruption of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street? To answer such questions, in this seminar we will track the figure of the zombie from the Gilded Age to the crash of 2008, and from the sugar plantations of Depression-era Haiti and Louisiana to the tents of Zuccotti Park. Our syllabus will range across the humanities and social sciences, encompassing, to cite a few examples, the writings of Karl Marx, the films of George Romero, and the genre of the Zombie Survival Guide. Students will be expected to view a total of 11 films outside of class, to read an average of 2 articles or essays per week as well as 1 novel, to contribute to a class blog each week, to give 2 oral presentations in class during the semester, and to write a final paper.
- AMST 1100.10: Politics and Film
Elisabeth Anker
M 11:10-12:25 and M 7:10-9:40
CRN: 93721
This class addresses the relationship between politics and film by examining how American films interpret and challenge political power in America. We pair film analysis with readings in political theory to interrogate the operations of power in political life. Exploring films thematically, first we examine those that shape conventional interpretations of political power in America, including concepts of limited government, popular sovereignty, and liberal individualism. Next, we consider films that challenge these ideas by offering alternate conceptions of how power functions, while addressing questions of ideology, surveillance, domination, and biopolitics. The last section investigates particular genres—melodrama, the western, and film noir—that reshape and rearticulate these themes within American political culture. Throughout, we will focus on how to read the visual language of film and the written texts of political theory. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 1200.10: The Sixties in America
Suleiman Osman
TR, 2:20-3:10
CRN: 97006
This course will examine American society, culture, and politics during the dynamic and contentious decade of the 1960s. Students will examine topics such as the civil rights movement, the student movement, the Vietnam War and anti-war movement, black power, the counterculture, feminism, the environmental movement, and the New Right. Students will also examine how the memory of the 1960s continues to shape debates about political activism, foreign policy, and cultural consumption today. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 2010.80: Early American Cultural History
Nicole Ivy
MW 2:20-3:10
CRN: 92471
This course explores how people’s efforts to make meaning of natural landscapes, built environments, social worlds, and encounters of difference influenced the formation of the United States. We track the development of national ideas about freedom and democracy alongside the evolution of everyday beliefs and practices in order to explore what culture might mean as a category of study-- and what difference the study of culture makes. Same as HIST 2010.
- AMST 2071.80: Introduction to the Arts in America
David Bjelajac
MW 3:45-5
CRN: 94460
This is a lecture survey of American art from the colonial period to the postmodern present. Primarily focused upon painting, the course also covers sculpture, architecture, printmaking and photography within the broader visual and material culture of United States history. Art works are analyzed in relation to issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class and gender.
- AMST 2320.80: U.S. Media and Cultural History
Melani McAlister
MW 12:45-1:35PM
CRN: 95688
This course will examine mass culture – film, radio, music, television, internet – and its role in US history from the turn of the 20th century to the present. Focusing on cultural production, consumption, and reception, this course will consider the historical contexts in which popular culture has emerged and developed. The cultural texts we will study range from silent films to 1950s sitcoms and twenty-first century new media. Students will learn to consider media histories in light of theoretical debates about ideology, media effects, national identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender roles, and imperialism. Reading and viewing requirements are extensive. In addition to other course requirements, student work includes a final paper in which students analyze a media artifact in its historical and cultural context.
- AMST 2385W.80: Sex and Citizenship
Michael Horka
TR 12:45-2:00PM
CRN: TBD
This course examines the ways that gender and sexuality have shaped American citizenship since the Second World War and requires students to engage with several forms of writing in the field of American studies. Together we will explore:
- the state’s efforts to regulate marriage, reproduction, and obscenity; The emergence of the right to privacy and the privatization of sexuality,
- the role that gender and sexuality have played in determining who can work for the government, serve in the military, or immigrate to the United States,
- the development of women’s and LGBT social movements and identity politics
- the ways that religious and pop cultural representations of women and sexual and gender minorities have shaped Americans’ understanding of good (and bad) citizens; and
- the effects of terror, violence, and the prison industrial complex on the full participation of women and members of the LGBT community in American politics and culture.
- AMST 2490.10: National Bodies
Nicole Ivy
MW 4:45-6:00PM
CRN: 97015
Who makes up the body politic? How have discussions of citizenship and belonging been mapped onto ideas about biology and difference? To approach these questions, this course explores of how representations of the physical form as well as ideas about what constitutes appropriate bodies are shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. Assigned texts will present specific theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class.
- AMST 2490.12: Managing Race & Sexuality
Amber Musser
TR 11:10-12:25PM
CRN: 96001
“One of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life. What I mean is the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the biological came under state control…the right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die.” —Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
Taking Michel Foucault’s idea that the management of race and sexuality is how power is exercised in modern life, this course examines the ways in which race and sexuality have been produced and regulated by multiple different entities. Drawing on history, theory, and literature, we will look at contemporary examples of the relationship between different forms of governmentality—both local and international— and racialization and sexuality. What assumptions lie behind our ideas of race? How are bodies managed according to the prevailing logics of racialized sexuality? How does sexuality inform the way that we see bodies as gendered, raced, or able-bodied? In addition to looking at the relationship between sexuality and capitalism, religion, and nation, this course asks how these ideas are embodied in particular raced and gendered ideologies. Students will gain historical context for thinking about the relationship between race, sexuality, and its management in addition to learning how to analyze different formations of racialized sexuality.
- AMST 2730W.80: World War II in History and Memory
Tom Guglielmo
TR 9:35-10:25AM
CRN: 97017
This course examines Americans’ World War II experiences and how those experiences have been studied, debated, understood, and “remembered”—officially, culturally, and personally. Through a mix of reading, writing, and discussion, it focuses on six overlapping topics: GIs, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment, African Americans, the Holocaust, and women.
- AMST 3600.10: Popular Music and Politics
Gayle Wald
MW 9:35-10:25AM
CRN: 97675
This interdisciplinary course explores the interactions and intersections of music and politics from the era of abolitionism to the present moment's activism around #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. We will investigate music as political expression, music in social protest movements, and music as a tool of political organizing. Requirements: open ears, an interest in engaging deeply and widely with both primary and secondary source materials. This course fulfills a GPAC Humanities requirement. AMST 3600 will not overlap with AMST 2600. Students who have taken AMST 2600 are encouraged to take AMST 3600.
- AMST 3900.10 – Critiquing Culture
Amber Musser
T 3:30-6:00
CRN: 94865
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 4500W.10: Interrogating GW
Tom Guglielmo
R 12:45-3:15
CRN: 97397
This is an advanced research seminar for American Studies majors on the topic of George Washington University. Each student will spend the semester writing a substantial research paper on some aspect of the university -- its student culture or activism; its race, class, or gender politics; its staff; its faculty; its leadership; its donors; its real estate holdings; its relationship with DC or Foggy Bottom; its cultural representation; its labor struggles; its “corporatization,” and so forth. Whatever intellectual interests brought students to American Studies, they will explore these by making GW their principal object of inquiry.
- AMST 4702W.80: Race, Medicine, and Public Health
Vanessa Gamble
MW 12:45-2:00PM
CRN: 93847
This course focuses on the role of race and racism in the development of American medicine and public health by examining the experiences of African Americans from slavery to today. It will emphasize the importance of understanding the historical roots of contemporary policy dilemmas such as racial and ethnic inequalities and inequities in health and health care. The course will challenge students to synthesize materials from several disciplines to gain a broad
understanding of the relationship between race, medicine, and public health in the United States. Among the questions that will be addressed are: How have race and racism influenced, and continue to influence, American medicine and public health? What is race? How have concepts of race evolved? What have been some of the historical vulnerabilities of black bodies within the medical system? How has medical thought and practices contributed to the political and social status of African Americans? What are racial inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What is the history of these inequalities and inequities and what factors have contributed to their existence and persistence? How have African Americans, the medical and public health professions, and governmental agencies addressed these inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What have been the experiences of African Americans as patients and health care providers and how have they challenged racism in medicine. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
Spring 2019 Courses
- AMST 1000.10 – Dean’s Seminar: Zombie Capitalism
Dara Orenstein
Monday 12:45-3:15
CRN: 47078
The Walking Dead. World War Z. “Obama Zombies.” Why does the specter of the living dead loom so largely in contemporary U.S. culture? How is it useful? What does it illuminate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy that might otherwise remain inscrutable? And how has it served in this allegorical manner throughout modern U.S. history? How did it haunt the rise of mass production, or the growth of suburbs, or the eruption of a social movement like Occupy Wall Street? To answer such questions, in this seminar we will track the figure of the zombie from the Gilded Age to the crash of 2008, and from the sugar plantations of Depression-era Haiti and Louisiana to the tents of Zuccotti Park. Our syllabus will range across the humanities and social sciences, encompassing, to cite a few examples, the writings of Karl Marx, the films of George Romero, and the genre of the Zombie Survival Guide. Students will be expected to view a total of 11 films outside of class, to read an average of 2 articles or essays per week as well as 1 novel, to contribute to a class blog each week, to give 2 oral presentations in class during the semester, and to write a final paper.
- AMST 1000.12 – Dean’s Seminar: Washington Sex Scandals
Chad Heap
Monday & Wednesday 12:45-2:00
CRN: 48074
The sexual assault accusations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh; the allegations of sexual misconduct that led to the resignations of U.S. Senator Al Franken and U.S. Congressmen Tim Murphy, John Conyers Jr., and Trent Franks; and the release of a videotape of Donald Trump’s lewd conversation about women with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush: These are but a few of the sex scandals that have preoccupied Washington during the past couple years. Yet, no matter how contemporary such topics might seem, they are but the latest in a long history of sexual controversies in Washington and in the federal government, dating back to the earliest years of the Republic. Focusing on several such scandals in the recent and more distant past, this seminar will ask what these incidents can tell us about Americans’ changing attitudes toward sex and sexuality. We will also explore the insights these scandals provide into a number of broader historical transformations in American culture and politics, including the shifting contours of American citizenship and the definition of the nation, the shaping of political ideologies and party warfare, the emergence of mass media and its effects on molding public opinion, and the reconfiguration of the boundary between public and private in American life. Registration restricted to CCAS freshmen.
- AMST 1050.11 – Bodies of Work
Nicole Ivy
Monday & Wednesday 2:20-3:35
CRN: 48575
The National Gallery of Art’s ongoing exhibition, Bodies of Work, explores how American painters and sculptors across the last fifty years have “reimagine[d] the human form as a site of fantasy, fear, and travail.” Taking its title from this show, this course will examine how the human body has figured in cultural and historical narratives, not simply as a physical fact but as site of social and political meaning making. Using an interdisciplinary approach that highlights visual culture analysis, we will trace how historical perspectives on the body and embodiment have shaped American culture. Our texts for this class will include both written works and visual objects. We will explore how artists and intellectuals have engaged embodiment over an expansive period of time, considering works by a diverse array of thinkers including: Thomas Jefferson, Donna Haraway, Kerry James Marshall, and Andy Warhol. Class meetings will include time spent at the National Gallery of Art, which offers free admission to all visitors.
- AMST 1160.10 – Race, Gender and Law
Elizabeth Rule
Monday & Wednesday 12:45-1:35
CRN: 46034
In this course, students will explore the historical and contemporary intersections of race, gender, and law in the United States. The course will offer foundations in critical race, gender, and intersectionality theory, analyze a number of significant case studies, and contemplate historical lessons for the contemporary moment. The use of court documents, newspapers, popular culture materials, film, the digital humanities, and emerging classroom technologies will familiarize students with interdisciplinary methods of inquiry. Topics for discussion include: civil and human rights, gendered violence, mass incarceration, racial profiling, police brutality, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and more
- AMST 2011.80 – Modern American Cultural History
Dara Orenstein
Monday & Wednesday 9:35-10:25
CRN: 46568
This course examines the history of the United States from the Civil War to the present using culture as its central organizing concept. We will define culture broadly to encompass customs, beliefs, and practices, as well as more specific forms of literary and artistic expression. Central themes of the course include: the role of mass media in shaping a national culture; the intersections of culture and technology; changes in racial formations and ethnic affiliations; cultural influences on our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities; cultural meanings of gender and sexual identities; and the political consequences of cultural conflict. We will also consider transnational influences on American culture and, conversely, the effects of American culture abroad.
- AMST 2071.80 – Introduction to Arts in American
David Bjelajac
Tuesday & Thursday 12:45-2:00
CRN: 46040
This is a lecture survey of American art from the colonial period to the postmodern present. Primarily focused upon painting, the course also covers sculpture, architecture, printmaking and photography within the broader visual and material culture of United States history. Art works are analyzed in relation to issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class and gender.
- AMST 2120W.80 – Freedom in American Thought/Popular Culture
Elisabeth Anker
Monday & Wednesday 11:10-12:00
CRN: 44220
America was founded on the premise of providing freedom to its people. But what, exactly, is―”freedom”? Is it doing what you want or is it participation in politics? Is it about escaping domination or does it require sharing power? These questions have been debated in America since its founding. The course will examine varied answers to these questions provided by American thought and popular culture. We will intertwine the study of theoretical texts with cultural analysis to examine authors from Jefferson to Thoreau, speeches from Martin Luther King to George W. Bush, films from High Noon to Minority Report, and the video art of Jeremy Blake. Together, we will explore how concepts of freedom and anxieties over freedom’s possibility take cultural form. While we may not settle the question of what freedom is or how to produce it, we will learn both to appreciate its complexity and to critically engage its operations in American public life. This course satisfies a WID requirement. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements.
- AMST 2210.10 – The African American Experience
Amber Musser
Tuesday & Thursday 2:20-3:35
CRN: 47284
Much of what we think about in relation to the African American experience begins with the central question: what does it mean to have been treated as a commodity? This course uses that question as the central point for examining African American life from slavery to the present by focusing specifically on how gender and sexuality have been part of commodification and central to resisting it. Students will gain historical contexts for this question in addition to learning to analyze contemporary portrayals of African American experience in literature, film, television, and music.
- AMST 2380.80 – Sexuality in U.S. History
Chad Heap
Monday & Wednesday 3:45-4:35
CRN: 44145
This course examines the changing social organization and cultural meaning of sexual practices and desires in the US. Topics include the establishment of sexual and gender norms in colonial America; the relationship between sex and slavery; the contested boundaries drawn between same-sex sociability and eroticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the relatively recent emergence of heterosexuality and homosexuality as predominant categories of sexual experience and identity; and the development of women’s liberation and lesbian, gay, queer and transgender politics. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 2490.10 – American Contagions
Nicole Ivy
Monday & Wednesday 4:45-6:00
CRN: 47288
This course examines how national ideas about health, disease, cleanliness, and contamination have concurrently informed and been shaped by notions of difference. Together, we will think through how forms of human difference have been historically medicalized — as unhealthy, as in need of repair or management. We will seriously consider how gender, sexuality, race, and ability continue to shape U.S. health care policy and practice. To do this, assigned course materials and class discussions will explore difficult-to-answer questions about the legacies of contagion narratives in American culture and politics. How have fears of outbreak influenced American military and economic actions? How do evolving understandings of the transmission and treatment of disease create and sustain moral panics? We will place primary sources such as political cartoons, plantation manuals, and printed broadsides in conversation with readings in social theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Across the semester, we will study and practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and textual analysis.
- AMST 2490.11 – Politics of “Saving Africa”
Melani McAlister
Tuesday & Thursday 2:20-3:35
CRN: 48576
This seminar will examine how people in the United States have represented Africa, as well as how Africans responded to those representations. Often, images in the US showed Africa and Africans as abject and in need of rescue, or as dangerous and savage. We will analyze the content of those images and their effect on US-African relations. We will also explore how, in some cases, Americans engaged African people in relationships of solidarity. The course will begin with a history of European imperial images of Africa, including the images that accompanied the slave trade. The majority of the semester will focus on US images produced after 1960. Drawing on a few case studies, we will examine cultural representations, including movies and travel narratives, as well as media reporting. We will see how Africa was understood by US policymakers who were positioning the US as a global power both during and after the Cold War. And we will study the work of social movements both in the US and Africa. Our case studies will include the views of African Americans toward pan-Africanism and anti- colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s; American and European responses to the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s (when Doctors without Borders was founded); the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s; and US support for the founding of South Sudan in the 2000s. This course will be reading intensive and will require original research for a substantive final paper.
- AMST 2710.80 – U.S. in a Global Context
Melani McAlister
Tuesday & Thursday 11:10-12:00
CRN: 47289
The course examines U.S. cultural and political global engagement in the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries. Focusing on the transnational flow of people, ideas, and culture, the course considers the history of the US in the world in terms of how cultural products (photography, film, music, television, internet) have shaped US understandings of the rest of the world, and how they have impacted global understandings of the United States. It also examines the role of religion, the influence of travel and migration, and the impact of war, along with humanitarianism and human rights activism. Lecture plus discussion sections. Significant reading, two exams, and a research paper.
- AMST 3901.10 – Examining America
Elisabeth Anker
Monday 12:45-3:10
CRN: 46049
This course offers students an introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will analyze key texts in American Studies scholarship from the foundational ―Myth and Symbol school to contemporary transnational works. Students will also be introduced to different approaches to interdisciplinary research. Registration restricted to American Studies majors.
- AMST 3950.10 – U.S. Constructions of the Middle East
Thomas Dolan
Wednesday & Friday 11:10-12:25
CRN: 44822
As reported in December 2015, Public Policy Polling showed that 30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats supported bombing “Agrabah,” the fictional city of Disney’s Aladdin. Among Trump supporters, the tally was even higher, as was their support for the “Muslim ban” and outlawing Islam in the US outright. How do we reconcile the fact that most Americans know so little about Islam and the Middle East, yet are equally certain of the need to ban Muslims, bomb Agrabah, or legislate against “sharia law”? The “Middle East” and “Islam” have long been American obsessions, but the omnipresence of these concepts belies a knowledge gap, such that specifics about the region and its religions often leave us puzzled. Rather than a historical survey, this course considers various perceptions of the “Middle East” to better understand the emotional and material investments Americans hold for the region. Exploring an expansive archive to include legislation, film, history, music, fiction and critical theory, the course embraces Melani McAlister’s insight that culture and foreign policy are mutually constitutive sites of meaning-making. These insights will guide mastery of material for this course, while also providing an overview of critical debates and methodologies in American Studies writ large. Each week of this course focuses on a particular theme to consider multiple, distinct and overlapping “Middle Easts.” Sessions will begin with a brief lecture summarizing key theoretical concepts and historical background before a student-led discussion of the text’s methodology, merits and questions. In addition, the course particularly highlights the scholarship of other GW professors to facilitate visits/Q&A with these faculty so students gain a greater understanding of the production of scholarship and feel empowered to take advantage of the many resources at their disposal.
- AMST 4701W.80 – Epidemics in American History
Vanessa Gamble
Monday & Wednesday 12:45-2:00
CRN: 46278
This course surveys the history of infectious disease epidemics in the United States from the late nineteenth century to today. It examines the development of the medical and public health responses to epidemics and the social, political, cultural and economic impact of epidemics on American history and culture. We will use primary documents, historical accounts, memoirs, and films to understand the history of epidemic disease.
Fall 2018 Courses
- AMST 1000.80 – Freemasonry & American Art
David Bjelajac
T, 2:30-5:00
CRN: 22848
During the eighteenth-century, English, Scottish, Irish and continental European stonemasons’ medieval guild traditions inspired the modern cultural formation of Freemasonry and competing international networks of Masonic lodges. Freemasonry attracted men from a wide socioeconomic spectrum and found support from both radical revolutionaries and counterrevolutionary conservatives. But ever since the Age of Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, Freemasonry’s secretive lodge meetings, mysterious initiation rituals and esoteric visual symbols have fostered orthodox Christian opposition and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories charging a varying host of purported vices, blasphemies and subversive misdeeds. This course critically examines these conspiracy theories, popularized in a variety of media, while also exploring Freemasonry's racial, gender and class exclusions/divisions. Freemasonry's global networking assisted American imperialism and helped shape the nation’s capital. Washington, D.C.’s urban design, historic-revival architecture, monumental sculpture and large-scale history paintings will be subjects for lectures, readings, class discussions and field trips to local museums, libraries, buildings and monuments. The seminar will consider the manner in which George Washington himself came to personify American Freemasonry, becoming a model for later United States presidents who joined the fraternity. Students will read both primary and secondary sources and will be required to write papers critically analyzing visual objects and architectural spaces while also evaluating the literature of Freemasonry, anti-Masonry and secret-society conspiracies
- AMST 1100.10 – Politics and Film
Elizabeth Anker
M, 11:10-12:25 and M, 7:10-9:40
CRN: 24134
This class addresses the relationship between politics and film by examining how American films interpret and challenge political power in America. We pair film analysis with readings in political theory to interrogate the operations of power in political life. Exploring films thematically, first we examine those that shape conventional interpretations of political power in America, including concepts of limited government, popular sovereignty, and liberal individualism. Next, we consider films that challenge these ideas by offering alternate conceptions of how power functions, while addressing questions of ideology, surveillance, domination, and biopolitics. The last section investigates particular genres—melodrama, the western, and film noir—that reshape and rearticulate these themes within American political culture. Throughout, we will focus on how to read the visual language of film and the written texts of political theory. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 2010.80 – Early American Cultural History
Nicole Ivy
TR, 3:45-4:35
CRN: 22718
How people’s efforts to make meaning of natural landscapes, built environments, social worlds, and encounters of difference influenced the formation of the United States. We track the development of national ideas about freedom and democracy alongside the evolution of everyday beliefs and practices in order to explore what culture might mean as a category of study-- and what difference the study of culture makes. Same as HIST 2010.
- AMST 2071.80 – Introduction to the Arts in America
David Bjelajac
MW, 3:45-5:00
CRN: 25006
This is a lecture survey of American art from the colonial period to the postmodern present. Primarily focused upon painting, the course also covers sculpture, architecture, printmaking and photography within the broader visual and material culture of United States history. Art works are analyzed in relation to issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class and gender.
- AMST 2320.80 – U.S. Media and Cultural History
Melani McAlister
TR, 11:10-12:00
CRN: 26910
This course will examine mass culture – film, radio, music, television, internet – and its role in US history from the turn of the 20th century to the present. Focusing on cultural production, consumption, and reception, this course will consider the historical contexts in which popular culture has emerged and developed. The cultural texts we will study range from silent films to 1950s sitcoms and twenty-first century new media. Students will learn to consider media histories in light of theoretical debates about ideology, media effects, national identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender roles, and imperialism. In addition to other course requirements, student work includes a final paper in which students analyze a media artifact in its historical and cultural context.
- AMST 2385W.10 – Sex and Citizenship
Chad Heap
MW, 2:20-3:35
CRN: 27896
This new Writing in the Disciplines (WID) course examines the ways that gender and sexuality have shaped American citizenship since the Second World War and requires students to engage with several forms of writing in the field of American studies. Together we will explore the state’s efforts to regulate marriage, reproduction, and obscenity; the emergence of the right to privacy and the privatization of sexuality; the role that gender and sexuality have played in determining who can work for the government, serve in the military, or immigrate to the United States; the development of women’s and LGBT social movements and identity politics; the ways that religious and pop cultural representations of women and sexual and gender minorities have shaped Americans’ understanding of good (and bad) citizens; and the effects of terror, violence, and the prison industrial complex on the full participation of women and members of the LGBT community in American politics and culture. In addition, the course will provide students with opportunities to hone their critical analysis and writing skills by requiring students to complete a variety of writing assignments geared toward different audiences (including analytical papers, journal entries, and a final research proposal and paper), to revise several of their assignments, and to participate in the peer review of other students’ work.
- AMST 2430.10 – Capitalism and Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR, 12:45-2:00
CRN: 26918
“If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE,” the comedian Marc Maron wrote in 2013, “you just lost the game — bzzzzz — thanks for playing extreme capitalism.” If capitalism is a game, then what are its rules, and how do "you" learn them? Why does Maron imply a distinction between capitalism and “extreme” capitalism? Indeed, what does Maron mean by “capitalism,” and how is his definition different from that of Richard Pryor, or Charlie Chaplin? In this discussion-based, reading-intensive lecture course, we will sift through over a century’s worth of commentary on capitalism and its impact on the United States, examining an array of artifacts to put flesh on the bones of Maron’s “you,” and to historicize the grammar of our present. We will treat capitalism as both an economic and a cultural system, a way of life and a structure of feeling, drawing on readings of primary documents from Herman Melville to Milton Friedman, Lorraine Hansberry to June Jordan, Kurt Vonnegut to Kurt Cobain, the Wobblies to the World Bank.
- AMST 2440.80 – The American City
Suleiman Osman
TR, 2:20-3:10
CRN: 26919
This introduces students to the exciting field of urban studies. Students will explore the political, architectural and cultural history of American cities, with a particular focus on Washington DC. Students will tackle urban planning and policy debates about topics such as urban renewal, sprawl, policing, public housing, immigration and gentrification. The course will include works by a range of urban writers such as Jane Jacobs, Mike Davis, Neil Smith, Malcolm X and clips from the TV show “The Wire.” Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements.
- AMST 2490.13 – Religious Icons in American Culture & Politics
Julie Chamberlain
WF 11:10-12:25
CRN: 27315
From the earliest encounters to today’s mass media landscape, religious figures have played an important role in U.S. history. This course chronicles some of the most important of these icons —from the 17th century “Mohawk Saint” to modern-day “prophets” such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (and even Oprah!)—to tell the tale of American religious history. We'll learn not only about individual personalities and the historical worlds they evoke, but also how they function as icons—that is, as objects of identification, admiration, skepticism and analysis. We'll distill major tensions in the field, including what has counted as “religion” at different moments in U.S. history. Because of their power, we’ll pay particular attention to Christian leaders, while accounting for the substantial challenges posed by religious and irreligious “outsiders”—many of whom became icons in their own right. As we do, we’ll foreground the ever-present impact of race, gender and class, as well as the role of media and technology.
- AMST 2520.80 – American Architecture I
P. Jacks
MW. 2:20-3:35
CRN: 27457
This course examines selected aspects of the built environment in the United States from the first period of European settlement to the eve of the Civil War. Stylistic properties, functions, common patterns of design, technological developments, and urbanistic patterns are introduced as vehicles for interpreting the historical significance of this legacy of both exceptional and representative examples. Buildings are analyzed both as artifacts and as signifiers of broader social, cultural, and economic tendencies. Other topics introduced include the persistence and mixing of cultural traditions, the role of the designer, the influence of region, and architecture as a component of landscape. Among the facets of the built environment that are examined are the multi-faceted nature of colonial building and settlement patterns; the emergence of national expression; the rise of city building and of a commercial core; the growing specificity of building types for commercial, governmental, institutional, and religious functions; the enduring importance of the single-family house; the multi-faceted nature of eclecticism; evolving views of nature and landscape design; and the impact of technology. Detailed examination is made of the contribution made by many celebrated figures in design, including Alexander Jackson Davis, Andrew Jackson Downing, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Robert Mills, Frederick Law Olmsted, William Strickland, and Richard Upjohn. At the same time, attention is given to broad tendencies in design and their effect upon rural and urban landscapes. The impact of peoples from Africa and the Caribbean, the British Isles, France, German states, the Netherlands, and Spain is examined during both the colonial and post-colonial periods. Lectures are profusely illustrated.
- AMST 2600.10 – U.S. Popular Music and Culture
Gayle Wald
MW, 12:45-2:00
CRN: 27314
This interdisciplinary American Studies course uses popular music—from spirituals and blues to country music and hip hop—as a lens for thinking critically about identity, culture, and history from the 19th century to the present. Rather than survey the history of U.S. popular music, the course approaches popular music as a form of cultural production and expression that sheds light on U.S. national identity, history, and politics. Popular music, we will find, is not merely a cultural reflection of society, but a key means through which Americans enact and negotiate social opportunities, challenges, and struggles. We will examine popular music from the viewpoint of musicians, the music industry (businesses, labels, promoters), and music's publics (audiences, fans). Coursework involves lots of reading and frequent writing. The culmination of the course includes a “Critical Karaoke”—an oral presentation set to a song.
- AMST 2610W.80 – Science, Technology, and Politics in Modern America
Jamie Cohen-Cole
MW, 9:35-10:25
CRN: 27793
This course examines the history of science and technology and their role in political and social life. Among the questions we will consider are: how has society, culture, and politics developed and changed because of technical developments ranging from electricity to the automobile, nuclear weapons, the internet, biotechnology and social sciences from SAT tests to economic modeling? How have struggles over science and technology over issues including evolution, global warming, GMOs, and vaccines shaped our culture? How have citizens and the government resolved conflicts over the truth or uses of science and technology? This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
- AMST 2630.10 – Discovering the Mind
Jamie Cohen-Cole
MW 11:10-12:25
CRN: 27823
This class is an introduction to the growth and development of mind sciences. We will examine how the psychological sciences have given us a variety of ways to understand ourselves, other people, and human nature. They have come to help us understand what it means to normal and have shaped the definitions of illness and insanity. Class topics will include the birth of experimental psychology, eugenics, personality testing, the SAT, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and the uses of mind sciences in politics, law, business, and education.
- AMST 3900.10 – Critiquing Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR, 4:45-6:00
CRN: 25507
This course provides an introduction to the major theories and methods that define the field of American studies. In particular, we seek to understand the elusive yet omnipresent world of “culture”—the values, symbols, myths, ideas, ways of life, and systems of meaning that shape our identities and worldviews.
- AMST 4500.10 – Citizenship in American Life
Tom Guglielmo
W, 12:45-3:15
CRN: 26930
This is an advanced research seminar for American Studies majors on the meanings of citizenship in American life. Students will spend the semester writing substantial research papers on some aspect of this broad topic.
- AMST 4702.80W – Race, Medicine, and Public Health
Vanessa Northington Gamble
MW, 12:45-2:00
CRN: 24280
This course focuses on the role of race and racism in the development of American medicine and public health by examining the experiences of African Americans from slavery to today. It will emphasize the importance of understanding the historical roots of contemporary policy dilemmas such as racial and ethnic inequalities and inequities in health and health care. The course will challenge students to synthesize materials from several disciplines to gain a broad understanding of the relationship between race, medicine, and public health in the United States. Among the questions that will be addressed are: How have race and racism influenced, and continue to influence, American medicine and public health? What is race? How have concepts of race evolved? What have been some of the historical vulnerabilities of black bodies within the medical system? How has medical thought and practices contributed to the political and social status of African Americans? What are racial inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What is the history of these inequalities and inequities and what factors have contributed to their existence and persistence? How have African Americans, the medical and public health professions, and governmental agencies addressed these inequalities and inequities in health and health care? What have been the experiences of African Americans as patients and health care providers and how have they challenged racism in medicine. This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
Spring 2018 Courses
- AMST 1050.10 – Race & Racism
Tom Guglielmo
TR, 9:35-10:50
CRN: 37331
This class will examine the history of race and racism in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Through a mixture of reading, writing, lecture, film viewings, and in-class discussion, we’ll explore the evolving social boundaries of race and their significance in shaping our lives, livelihoods, thoughts, and dreams. Class topics will include Jim Crow and mass incarceration, colonialism and immigration, Chinese exclusion and Japanese-American internment, civil rights and Black Lives Matter.
- AMST 1200.10 – The Sixties in America
Suleiman Osman
MW, 12:45-1:35
CRN: 37332
A survey of American society, culture, and politics during the decade of the 1960s. Topics include the civil rights movement, the student movement, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture.
- AMST 2011.80/81 – Modern American Cultural History
Kimberly Schisler
MW, 12:45-2:00; TR, 11:10-12:25
CRN: 38013/38024
This course examines the history of the United States from the Civil War to the present using culture as its central organizing concept. We will define culture broadly to encompass customs, beliefs, and practices, as well as more specific forms of literary and artistic expression. Key themes of the course include: the rise of consumer culture; the role of mass media in shaping a national culture; the impact of cultural values on the physical landscape; changes in racial formations and ethnic affiliations; cultural meanings of gender identities; and the political consequences of cultural conflict. We will also consider transnational influences on American culture and, conversely, the effects of American culture abroad. The course draws on many different kinds of primary sources, including memoirs, short stories, films, political speeches, music, photographs, and television shows. In addition, we will read analyses of culture from a variety of scholars and develop our own interpretations. Students must register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST2071.80 – Introduction to the Arts in America
David Bjelajac
TR, 12:45-2:00
CRN: 37337
This is a lecture survey of American art from the colonial period to the postmodern present. Primarily focused upon painting, the course also covers sculpture, architecture, printmaking and photography within the broader visual and material culture of United States history. Art works are analyzed in relation to issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class and gender.
- AMST2120W.80 – Freedom in American Thought and Popular Culture
Elisabeth Anker
MW, 11:10-12:00
CRN: 34747
America was founded on the premise of providing freedom to its people. But what, exactly, is ―”freedom”? Is it doing what you want or is it participation in politics? Is it about escaping domination or does it require sharing power? These questions have been debated in America since its founding. The course will examine varied answers to these questions provided by American thought and popular culture. We will intertwine the study of theoretical texts with cultural analysis to examine authors from Jefferson to Thoreau, speeches from Martin Luther King to George W. Bush, films from High Noon to Minority Report, and the video art of Jeremy Blake. Together, we will explore how concepts of freedom and anxieties over freedom’s possibility take cultural form. While we may not settle the question of what freedom is or how to produce it, we will learn both to appreciate its complexity and to critically engage its operations in American public life. This course satisfies a WID requirement. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements.
- AMST 2380.80 – Sexuality in U.S. History
Chad Heap
WF, 12:45-1:35
CRN: 34647
This course examines the changing social organization and cultural meaning of sexual practices and desires in the US. Topics include the establishment of sexual and gender norms in colonial America; the relationship between sex and slavery; the contested boundaries drawn between same-sex sociability and eroticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the relatively recent emergence of heterosexuality and homosexuality as predominant categories of sexual experience and identity; and the development of women’s liberation and lesbian, gay, queer and transgender politics. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirement.
- AMST 2410.80 – 20th-Century U.S. Immigration
Tom Guglielmo
TR, 2:20-3:10
CRN: 37341
This class will investigate immigration patterns, immigration policy, and immigrants’ lives in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Which immigrant groups have come to the United States? When and why have they come? And what have their lives been like once they got here? How has the federal government, and Americans more generally, responded to immigrants and immigration? Why have we welcomed some newcomers as good future Americans and scorned others as “forever foreigners” or “illegal aliens”? The course will explore these questions through a mix of reading, writing, lecture, and discussion.
- AMST 2430.10 – Capitalism and Culture
Dara Orenstein
TR, 3:45-5:00
CRN: 37719
“If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE,” the comedian Marc Maron wrote in 2013, “you just lost the game—bzzzzz—thanks for playing extreme capitalism.” If capitalism is a game, then what are its rules, and how do "you" learn them? Why does Maron imply a distinction between capitalism and “extreme” capitalism? Indeed, what does Maron mean by “capitalism,” and how is his definition different from that of Richard Pryor, or Charlie Chaplin? In this discussion-based, reading-intensive lecture course, we will sift through over a century’s worth of commentary on capitalism and its impact on the United States, examining an array of artifacts to put flesh on the bones of Maron’s “you,” and to historicize the grammar of our present. We will treat capitalism as both an economic and a cultural system, a way of life and a structure of feeling, drawing on readings of primary documents from Herman Melville to Milton Friedman, Lorraine Hansberry to June Jordan, Kurt Vonnegut to Kurt Cobain, the Wobblies to the World Bank.
- AMST 2521.80– American Architecture II
Richard Longstreth
MW, 9:35-10:50
CRN: 32720
This course examines selected aspects of the built environment in the United States from the Gilded Age to the eve of World War II. Stylistic properties, functions, common tendencies of design, technological developments, and urban patterns are introduced as vehicles for interpreting the historical significance of this legacy of both exceptional and representative examples. Buildings are analyzed both as artifacts and as signifiers of broader social, cultural, and economic tendencies. Other topics introduced include the persistence and mixing of cultural traditions, the role of the designer, the influence of region, and architecture as a component of landscape. Among the facets of the built environment that are examined are the changing, multifaceted nature of eclecticism; the exponential growth of metropolitan areas; the emergence and development of tall commercial buildings; the rise of a comprehensive approach to planning; the enduring importance of the single-family house; evolving views of nature and landscape design;the pursuit of fantasy and reality in design; the impact of mass transportation systems and motor vehicles on the landscape; the reluctant acceptance of modernism; and the varied impacts of technology. Detailed examination is made of the contribution made by many celebrated figures in design, including Daniel Burnham, Frank Furness, Charles and Henry Greene, Irving Gill, Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, Richard Neutra, Henry Hobson Richardson, John Wellborn Root, R. M. Schindler, Gustav Stickley, Stanford White, and Frank Lloyd Wright. At the same time, attention is given to broad tendencies in design and their effect upon suburban and urban landscapes. The impact immigrants and new ideas from abroad is examined throughout the decades covered. Lectures are profusely illustrated. For more information, contact Richard Longstreth.
- AMST 2620.10 – Human Mind and Artificial Intelligence
Jamie Cohen-Cole
TR, 9:35-10:50
CRN: 38496
Where is the boundary between humans and robots? Is it that humans can bleed and robots can rust? Or is there something more important that gets to what is distinctive about humanity? Is it how we think, our intelligence, or our language? If so, then what happens when computers or robots or robots speak and perform intelligent tasks? Focusing on questions such as these this class looks at the history of computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. In tracking this history we will see how the line between humans and machines has been in constant motion as what we believe, and imagine about machines had affected what we know, imagine, and believe about the human mind. We will examine these themes by reading about computers, robots, and artificial intelligence in history and through the visions of the future given in science fiction stories and movies from Frankenstein to AI and I Robot. Topics covered in this course include Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the Turing Machine, cyberspace, and the origins, development, and criticism of research in artificial intelligence.
- AMST 3901.10–Examining America
Kimberly Schisler
MW, 3:45-5:00
CRN:37350
Modes of power and forms of identification within and across U.S. national borders. Social constructions of the nation; forms of diversity and identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality; and the transnational flow of people, ideas, culture, and religion. Restricted to American Studies majors.
- AMST 3950.80–Architecture and Post-WWII Landscape
Richard Longstreth
TR, 3:45-5:00
CRN: 35618
During the fifteen-year period after World War II, the shape and character of the American landscape experienced profound changes. The highly centralized organization of cities that had dominated growth patterns since the early republic began decisively to shift to more diffuse patterns. Industrial production became ever more scattered and relied on sophisticated technological processes. Corporate offices likewise were relocating into what were formerly considered rural or quasi-rural sites. Retail activities regrouped along arteries far removed from the city center. Suburban residential development occurred at an accelerated pace and for the first time lay within reach of a major segment of the populace. At the same time, the urban core was experiencing accelerated decay and became subject to massive clearance programs. Central and outlying sections alike were shaped and reshaped by massive highway construction programs. A variety of renewal programs captured the limelight, but few proved effective in reversing the prevalent trend. Design was also experiencing significant changes. Only recently cast as extreme and freakish, avant-garde modernism rose to the fore in architectural training and also in building campaigns for commerce, industry, and education. The United States now led the world in fostering a rich spectrum of approaches to design that made the environment of preceding decades seem markedly dated.Among other topics explored are the impact of widespread motor vehicle use on the metropolis, the rise of a mass consumer market for goods and housing, fundamental shifts in popular taste, critical views of the city, and the undercurrent of persistence in traditional patterns of settlement. reversing the prevalent trend. Design was also experiencing significant changes. Only recently cast as extreme and freakish, avant-garde modernism rose to the fore in architectural training and also in building campaigns for commerce, industry, and education. The United States now led the world in fostering a rich spectrum of approaches to design that made the environment of preceding decades seem markedly dated. Among other topics explored are the impact of widespread motor vehicle use on the metropolis, the rise of a mass consumer market for goods and housing, fundamental shifts in popular taste, critical views of the city, and the undercurrent of persistence in traditional patterns of settlement. This year the seminar will focus on the dualities of the boom in outlying areas and the decline of inner-city areas. The growth of the periphery beyond the traditional scope of bedroom communities (suburbs in the nineteenth-century sense) will be explored. No less attention will be given to efforts at urban revitalization through commercial and institutional projects as well as efforts to lure the middle-class in-town and to segregate the poor. Participants may choose from a wide range of topics concerning architecture, landscape, and urbanism, as well as cultural, economic, social, and technological factors that have an impact on the built environment for their research paper. For more information, contact Richard Longstreth.
- AMST 3950.81 – Post-Civil Rights Black Literature and Culture
Gayle Wald
TR, 9:35-10:50
CRN: 37860
Post-civil rights is a term used to describe black American art and performance in the contemporary era, in which struggles over race and racial justice take new forms and respond to new challenges, including the notion that the nation is "post-race." This course examines how black American artists—primarily writers but also fine artists, musicians, and film/TV producers —have defined, critiqued, and engaged with concepts of post-ness in their work. It is also concerned with how a generation born after legal desegregation views the "golden age" of civil rights and Black Power. Featured writers/artists include: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, Ava DuVernay, Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, Chimamanda Adichie, Kara Walker, and Solange.
- AMST 3950W.10 – Science Fiction and Climate Change
Michael Horka
WF, 2:20-3:35
CRN: 38142
Scientific models of climate change abound, but how can we understand the relationship between science, politics, power, and ecological crisis? This course utilizes science fiction as a way to model, inhabit, and engage with climate change. Students will examine how science fiction imagines the relationship of climate change at various scales from the microbe to human and nonhuman bodies to the biosphere. Using an interdisciplinary approach, students will consider how ecological changes are interconnected with histories and theories of race, gender, and nature, along with capitalism, colonialism, and biopolitics. Topics will include the relationship between bodies and ecosystems, along with the Anthropocene, dystopia, apocalypse, nonhuman animals, genetic modification, species extinction, contagion, terraforming, and the atmosphere.
- AMST 4701W.10 - Epidemics in American History
Vanessa Gamble
MW, 12:45-2:00
CRN: 37656
This course surveys the history of infectious disease epidemics in the United States from the late nineteenth century to today. It examines the development of the medical and public health responses to epidemics and the social, political, cultural and economic impact of epidemics on American history and culture. We will use primary documents, historical accounts, memoirs, and films to understand the history of epidemic disease.