Current Courses

AM 101W 001 Rock Music and Culture
Mondays and Wednesdays 2:30-4:20 PM
Instructor K. Grover

An examination of 20th- and 21st-century American rock music and culture as a crucial site for ongoing struggles over identity, belonging, and power in the U.S. By considering various interdisciplinary approaches to the field of American studies, we will consider how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity have shaped Americans’ historical engagements with rock music and culture, as well as what insights these engagements provide about “the American experience” over time. Students will study the social, political, and cultural conditions that led to the birth of rock music as a uniquely American art form, analyze the ways Americans have utilized rock culture as a medium of expression and social critique, and debate the stakes of rock history as a portal into the American past.

4 credits

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AM 101W 002 Eating in America
Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:10–11 am
Instructor C. Bunschoten

The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin in 1825 was the first to offer the adage: “You are what you eat.” This course asks, what do Americans eat? What is American food and how does eating relate to the broader ideological beliefs and institutions that organize daily life in this nation? The course examines the power structures at play when it comes to producing and eating food in the United States in the past and present. The course also emphasizes reading critically, thinking historically, practicing interdisciplinarity, acknowledging diversity, and making connections. Students will analyze and synthesize multiple kinds of primary sources (such as literature, music, art, and film) and a wide array of disciplinary perspectives including cultural criticism, anthropology, sociology, and history, among others, to analyze the complexity of food culture in the United States.

4 credits

AM 221 001 Methods and Approaches
Wednesdays and Fridays 12:20–2:10 pm
Instructor C. Bunschoten

An introduction to American studies scholarship, methodologies, and approaches to the study of society and culture in the United States. Course materials include "classics" in American studies as well as the most recent scholarship: the "myth and symbol" school, the culture concept, psychoanalytic methodologies, new literary and feminist critiques, material culture and oral history resources, mass and popular culture analyses, with attention to issues of race, gender, class, and ethnicity throughout. The intent of the course is to offer students a variety of opportunities to sharpen their analytical, research, and writing skills from interdisciplinary and historiographic perspectives.

Note(s): Required of majors and minors in their sophomore or junior years. Fulfills Humanistic Inquiry requirement.  

4 credits

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AM 237 001 Americans in Outer Space
Wednesdays and Fridays, 8:40-10 am
Instructor G. Pfitzer

An examination of the cultural, political and economic contours of the debate about the exploration of deep space, with special attention to NASA's "Artemis" proposal to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. The course will focus on the power and justice dynamics associated with efforts to find answers to lingering and unresolved questions associated with the original lunar landings, including: Who has access to space? What groups have the authority to control the use of space? Who should be responsible for funding exploration? And how do the lenses of identity, ethnicity, gender, nationality, socio-economic class, and race inform these decisions?

Prerequisites: SSP 100.   

Note(s): Fulfills social sciences requirement; fulfills Bridge Experience requirement.  

4 credits

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AM 261 001 Vampires in Film and Media
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:10-12:30 pm, and Mondays, 6:30-7:50 pm
Instructor K. Grover

Vampires: as American as … the baseball scene in Twilight? While arguably a European literary creation, vampires have long fascinated Americans, engendering a veritable canon of American vampire fiction. In this class, we will examine the ways writers, filmmakers, musicians, and television producers imagine vampires within the context of America, as well as what questions their pop culture creations ask about the role of the vampire within American society. From Anne Rice’s germinal characters to modern-day icons like Blade, Buffy, and Edward Cullen, we’ll explore how vampires — as well as those who hunt them — reflect historical and contemporary debates about identity, difference, and belonging. Whether as villains or heroes, monsters or gods, American vampires force us to evaluate the norms that shape our lives and what it means to be human, let alone American.

4 credits

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AM 261 002 A League of Their Own
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:10-3:30 pm
Instructor K. Grover

This course explores the relationship between gender and sports through the pop culture phenomenon, A League of Their Own. We will watch the 1992 film, A League of Their Own, as well as season one of the 2022 A League of Their Own streaming series, to investigate various critical issues at the root of this dramatized history. Class discussion topics include sexism, queerness, racial difference, American identity, and the experiences of women and gender diverse athletes in professional sports. 

3 credits 

AM 342 001 Black Feminist Thoughts
Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:10-2 pm
Instructor T. Owens

This multidisciplinary seminar will chart and examine the development and expression of Black feminist thoughts, particularly in the United States. The course will focus on the intraracial significance of gender, sexuality, race, ability, and class, as well as the complex interplay among these variables. Emphasis will also be placed on illuminating Black feminist resistance and activism in several distinct, yet overlapping, contexts, including under conditions of servitude, the Black club women’s movement, and the reemergence of Black feminisms and womanism from the late 1960s onward. In this class, you will be introduced to the roots of modern Black feminist thought vis-à-vis Anna Julia Cooper and the prescient writings of Lorraine Hansbury. Later, the focus will be on Black feminist theorizing, particularly the intellectual development of radical Black feminist thought and lesbian separatism during the 1960s and 1970s and late 20th century transnational feminisms.

4 credits

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AM 351 001 Material Culture
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:40-2 pm
Instructor C. Bunschoten

How do we decide what is valuable — and what becomes waste? This seminar examines the cultural, historical, and environmental lives of materials, from treasured objects and natural resources to discarded goods and pollutants. Drawing on a range of material culture frameworks in the interdisciplinary field of American studies, students will learn to interpret objects, landscapes, commodities, and waste as evidence of the values, identities, histories, and power relations that shape American life. Through interdisciplinary readings and hands-on analysis, the course will explore how practices of making, consuming, collecting, and discarding connect everyday material worlds to broader questions of culture, economy, and environment.

3 credits

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AM 368 001 The 1960s
Mondays and Wednesdays, 4-5:50 pm
Instructor G. Pfitzer

A consideration of the major events of the 1960s, including the New Frontier, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual and gender revolutions, the rise of rock and roll, the counterculture, the moon landing, and other landmarks of the decade. The course considers not only what happened during those climactic years, but why such events were so important to American development, and how perceptions about the 1960s have changed over time.

4 credits