Graduate Semester Course Offerings

AMST 6110.10: Cultural Theory and American Studies

CRN: 28420 // E. Anker
M 12:30-2:20 PM

This course examines major issues in critical and cultural theory in American Studies. This year, the focus will be the study of power, the people, democracy and authoritarianism. We will read canonical texts central to the field, including work by Marx, J.S. Mill, W.E.B. DuBois, Foucault, and Arendt, and we will place them in dialogue with contemporary scholarship by Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Ann Norton and others. By using studies of power and the political as a “way in” to critical and cultural theory, the course aims to appeal both to students who have special interest in this topic and those who expect to pursue research in other fields.

AMST 6190.10: Cultural Memory Studies

CRN: 25151 // G. Wald
W 12:30-2:20 PM

This course serves as an introduction to, and critical engagement with, cultural memory studies. (The term “cultural memory studies” is itself contested, and serves as a place marker here.) It proposes that memory is not just (or primarily) individual, but collective; that memory is not just (or only) a function of cognition but is a social practice; and that what we might variously call “national memory” or “collective memory” or “cultural remembrance” is performed, cultivated, and contested. We’ll begin with some of the founding texts in the field (Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora) and then move quickly on to case studies. Likely topics include: the literary genre of the neo-slave narrative; cultural remembrance and memorialization of American imperial wars; grief, hope, and memory (e.g., with regard to Native genocide and AIDS); memory and archives; and memory as it is produced and mediated in digital/online culture.

AMST 6195.10: Research Seminar in AMST

CRN: 21426 // S. Osman
M 6:10-8:00 PM

This is a graduate-level research seminar. Each student will focus on research and writing—and on reading and commenting on classmate's work. The central course goal is for each student to produce a primary-source, article-length research paper, which, in time, they will submit for publication.

AMST 6710.10: American Material Culture

CRN: 27234 // K. Ott
T 1:30-3:30 PM
*Please note this course is taught at the Smithsonian's NMAH.

The world is populated by things. The objects that surround us are as strange, lovable, and scary as the people. People have always used objects to learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. This course explores the world of material culture -- where things come from, why they are made the way they are, their afterlife in recycling and regifting, and how we value them or not. Using history, we'll explore the major theories, issues, and diverse viewpoints and practices in the field of material culture. We meet at the Smithsonian.

AMST 6100.10: Scope & Methods

CRN: 81468 // S. Osman
R 6:10-8:00 PM

This course is an intensive introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Seminar participants will analyze key texts and debates, explore ways to redefine the canon of American Studies scholarship, and design new pathways for research. This course is restricted to graduate students in American Studies.

AMST 6190.10: After Humanity

CRN: 82354 // M. McAlister
T 5:10-7:00 PM

This interdisciplinary course examines humanism, human rights, and post-humanism, bringing together historical studies, cultural and political theory, religious studies scholarship, and popular culture. It explores the ways in which “the human” has been a category in political thought and religious life, from the rise of European humanism to the history of human rights thinking in the US and around the world. It explores anxieties about the human/non-human boundary in popular culture, from robots to animal rights. It also considers the emergence of post-humanism in cultural theory, scientific discourse, environmental politics, and speculative fiction. The readings will be broad, including highly theoretical texts, historical scholarship, and fiction/film. We will ask what kind of cultural work the category of the human has done and (perhaps) continues to do, and what are the stakes in challenges to its centrality. Theoretical readings will likely include T. Adorno & M. Horkheimer, J. Bennett, D. Fassin, D. Haraway, B. Latour, A. Tsing, and C. Warren. Cultural texts will range from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner to Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. And histories may include work by S. Hartman, L. Heerten, and S. Moyn, among others.

AMST 6610.80: Constructing the Natural, Unnatural, and Artifactual

CRN: 87204 // J. Cohen-Cole
W 11:10-1:00 PM

What is nature and what is natural? What is unnatural? What is artificial? This reading and discussion seminar examines how the answers to these questions are products of specific, historically contingent cultural formations. What we humans experience of the natural, artificial, and unnatural comes filtered by specific personal, cultural, institutional, religious, and political formations that vary in time and place. Even how the line that divides the natural from the artificial varies depending on who draws it and where, how, and when the drawing happens. This class will focus on when and how natural things, society, and human artifacts carry moral and political weight; the relationships among nature, truth, and objectivity; how and why some people but not others have more authority to speak about or fashion nature and its opposites; and the making of spaces, technologies, and institutions that construct the natural and the artificial. We will approach these questions through recent and classic critical studies on nature as artifice. Topics to be considered will include, among others, space, landscape, and environment; climate and the anthropocene; cybernetics, information technology and artificial reality; the biological and social scientific construction of human natures (e.g. by ethnicity, race, sex, gender, and sexuality); and the association of specific socio-political formations (e.g. capitalism, imperialism, or democracy) with the construction of the natural and its others.

AMST 6190.10: The Politics of Care

CRN: 95712 // J. McMaster
T 3:10-5:00 PM

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have taken renewed interest in "care" as a critical term. All of us require relations of care to live. But what exactly is care? Who tends to receive it and who is disproportionately tasked with its life-sustaining labors? What can the study of care teach us about gender, race, sexuality, disability, empire, and capitalism? This course will assist students in answering these questions by surveying various twentieth and twenty-first century theories of care. Students will read Joan Tronto, Saidiya Hartman, Nancy Fraser, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Hil Malatino, Rhacel Parreñas, Dean Spade, Kim TallBear, M.E. O'Brien, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, and others.

AMST 6190.11: Capitalism and Everyday Life

CRN: 98473 // D. Orenstein
W 5:10-7:00 PM

This seminar is an introduction to the cultural history of capitalism in the United States. It centers on what the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre in 1947 called “the critique of everyday life,” in recognition of the striking extent to which, in the humanities over the past half-century, the academic study of political economy has focused on the scale of the quotidian. To sketch the broad contours of this intellectual and political tradition that Lefebvre was associated with, known as “Western Marxism,” and to consider how it has influenced historical materialist scholarship in American studies, each week we pair a case study with a theorist (Adorno, Althusser, Barthes, Benjamin, Berger, Bourdieu, Debord, Gramsci, Hall, Jameson, Lefebvre, Lukács, Marcuse, Williams), and, moving thematically, we look at “capitalism” in sites such as the factory, the warehouse, the plantation, the office, the bank, the hospital, the park, the prison, the department store, the supermarket, the call center, the kitchen, the bedroom, and the classroom. Throughout, too, we foreground influential elaborations of Western Marxism by decolonial, feminist, and queer scholars, from Angela Davis and Colleen Lye to Samuel Delaney, Fred Moten, and Sarah Schulman. Lastly, reading is our task in this seminar, not writing; the required work consists of a weekly assignment that is designed to support the former, and not to bog us down in the stress of the latter.

AMST 6195.10: Research Seminar in AMST

CRN: 91523 // T. Guglielmo
T 10:10-12:00 PM

This is a graduate-level research seminar. Each student will focus on research and writing—and on reading and commenting on classmate's work. The central course goal is for each student to produce a primary-source, article-length research paper, which, in time, they will submit for publication.

AMST 6710.10: American Material Culture

CRN: 98638 // K. Ott
T 1:30-3:30 PM
*please note this course is taught at Smithsonian's NMAH*

The world is populated by things. The objects that surround us are as strange, lovable, and scary as the people. People have always used objects to learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. This course explores the world of material culture -- where things come from, why they are made the way they are, their afterlife in recycling and regifting, and how we value them or not. Using history, we'll explore the major theories, issues, and diverse viewpoints and practices in the field of material culture. We meet at the Smithsonian.

AMST 6100.10: Scope & Methods

CRN: 41545 // E. Anker
M 3:30-6:00 PM

This course is an intensive introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Seminar participants will analyze key texts and debates, explore ways to redefine the canon of American Studies scholarship, and design new pathways for research. This course is restricted to graduate students in American Studies.

AMST 6190.10: Aesthetics & Black Radical Imagination

CRN: 42507 // N. Ivy
W 4:10-6:00 PM

Course Description Provided Soon.

AMST 6190.10: Freedom Struggles

CRN: 66565 // T. Guglielmo
T 11:10-1:00 PM

This class will offer an advanced introduction to scholarship on social movements for civil rights, liberation, and self-determination primarily in the twentieth-century United States. We will explore the organizing, activism, and politics of an eclectic and multiracial mix of people -- housewives and entertainers, soldiers and domestic workers, union organizers and college students, radicals and moderates, politicians and grassroots activists, and more.

AMST 6190.11: Borders and Boundaries

CRN: 68702 // E. Peña
T 5:10-7:00 PM

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 immigration, asylum, and national security debates. 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, to speak one language at home and another at school, or to understand race and ethnicity in site-specific ways. This course will draw from the work of anthropologists, historians, geographers, performance, and borderlands scholars to think through foundational border and boundaries theory, debates, and genealogies and to think comparatively about cross-border coordination practices. It will use North America as its primary reference point, but it will also draw our attention to border and boundary dynamics around the globe.

AMST 6195.10: Research Seminar in AMST

CRN: 61659 // E. Bock
R 4:10-6:00 PM

AMST 6710.10: American Material Culture

CRN: 66603 // K. Ott
T 1:30-3:30 PM
**this course is taught at the Smithsonian**

The world is populated by things. The objects that surround us are as strange, lovable, and scary as the people. People have always used objects to learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. This course explores the world of material culture -- where things come from, why they are made the way they are, their afterlife in recycling and regifting, and how we value them or not. Using history, we'll explore the major theories, issues, and diverse viewpoints and practices in the field of material culture. We meet at the Smithsonian.

AMST 6100.10: Scope and Methods in American Studies

Melani McAlister

T 2:10 - 4:00

CRN: 71619

This course is an intensive introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Seminar participants will analyze key texts and debates, explore ways to redefine the canon of American Studies scholarship, and design new pathways for research. This course is restricted to graduate students in American Studies.

AMST 6190.10: “Welcome to the Good Life”

Emily Bock

T 5:10 - 7:00

CRN: 72658

In the United States, the good life has long been synonymous with the idea of the American dream (the white picket fence, secure union job, stable marriage with 2.5 kids). But this romanticized image has increasingly been thrown into crisis with the rise of a destabilized national economy, political infighting, and a global pandemic. It seems as though the veil has been lifted and the American Dream has been exposed as a fantasy object, if not a complete impossibility. This class explores how people have imagined, worked toward, and critiqued the idea of the good life. As we investigate how scholars and artists have shaped and reshaped concepts of the good life, this course explores the multiple ways that fantasy and imagination organize notions of race, gender, sexuality, belonging, and citizenship.

AMST 6230.10: The Politics of Freedom

Elisabeth Anker

W 11:10 - 1:00

CRN: 77337

Each year the course has a different theme, and this year it will be on neoliberalism, a political- economic-social system organized by the politics of freedom...especially the freedom of money over people. We'll ask: what are the cultural practices that have shaped the politics of neoliberalism? This class will examine the history, theory, cultural production and political imaginary of capitalism as and neoliberalism. We will emphasize the gendered and racialized forms of neoliberalism, with a focus on consumption, mass incarceration, work and welfare, the privatization of public life especially in education and politics, transnational capital, global migration, climate change, and self-help literature. The first half of the class will examine central texts for the cultural study of capitalism and neoliberalism. The second half of the class will focus on cutting-edge American Studies scholarship.

AMST 6110.10: Cultural Theory

Gayle Wald

M 11:10-1:00

CRN: 37261

This course examines major issues in critical and cultural theory in American Studies as they relate to the study of popular music. We will organize our inquiry through a series of keywords, emphasizing recent texts but also going back to read foundational works in the field (Baraka, Adorno, Small). By using popular music as a “way in” to critical and cultural theory, the course aims to appeal both to students who have special interest in music culture and those who expect to pursue research in other fields. No special knowledge of popular music is required. Keywords include: Genre, Democracy, Blues, Aesthetics, Archive, Taste, Race, Gender, Youth, Memory, Listening, Space, Mixtape. Authors include: Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, Nina Eidsheim, Sasha Geffen, Kyra Gaunt, Deb Paredez, Lisa Gilman, William Sites.

AMST 6190.10: Theorizing Bodies

Nicole Ivy

R 5:10-7:00

CRN: 37817

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of how representations of the human physical form as well as ideas about what constitutes appropriate bodies are continually re-shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. The assigned coursework will present specific theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class. During the course of this graduate seminar, we will take up key concepts associated with theories of the body in cultural studies including, but not limited to: waste, surveillance, performance, and the embodiment of the citizen/alien dynamic.

AMST 6190.80, Historic American Interiors, 1800-1900

Erin Kuykendall

R 10:00AM-12:30PM

CRN: 38584

The history of domestic interiors and furnishings in the United States relies heavily on the adaptation of European and Asian tastes, as transposed, modified or rejected by Europeans, Africans and native cultures. This multidisciplinary seminar engages the work of material culture scholars, museum curators, and art historians, as well as historical archaeologists, architectural historians, folklorists, geographers, and landscape architects. In doing so, the course traces the development of American homes, from seventeenth-century Dutch and English settlements to the lavish late nineteenth-century estates of industrialists in the Gilded Age. Major course themes consider the social, economic and technological changes that propelled design choices made by consumers, producers and retailers. Students will interpret the material evidence of domesticity, as revealed through both elegant and everyday furnishings used within or around the American home, from kitchens and bedchambers to parlors and conservatories. These changes spurred the development of new furnishing forms, ornament, room use, and spatial organization. As a result of this class, students significantly expand their knowledge of American interiors and the decorative arts; hone their professional presentation skills; conduct primary research; and strengthen their writing abilities. In addition to illustrated lectures and critical discussion, this course includes study tours to period rooms preserved by major museums and historic house museums.

AMST 6195.10: The Cultural Construction of the Natural, Unnatural, and Artificial

Jamie Cohen-Cole

T 2:10-4:00

CRN: 37261

What is nature and what is unnatural? What is artificial? This research class examines how the answers to these questions are products of specific, historically contingent cultural formations. What we humans experience of the natural, artificial, and unnatural comes filtered by and created specific personal, cultural, institutional, religious, and political formations that vary in time and place. Even how the line that divides the natural from the artificial varies depending on who draws it and where, how, and when the drawing happens. This class will focus on when and how natural things, society, and human artifacts carry moral and political weight; the relationships among nature, truth, and objectivity; how and why some people but not others have more authority to speak about or fashion nature and its opposites; and the making of spaces, technologies, and institutions that construct the natural and the artificial. In this research seminar students will write original research papers aimed at publication in a peer reviewed journal and based on in-depth critical analysis of primary sources on this them of natural/unnatural/artificial. In writing their papers, students may rely on primary sources ranging from archival materials to literary fiction, visual media, and/or material culture.

AMST 6710.10: American Material Culture

Katherine Ott

W 2:30-4:30

CRN: 37865

The world is populated by things. The objects that surround us are as strange, lovable, and scary as the people. People have always used objects to learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. This course explores the world of material culture -- where things come from, why they are made the way they are, their afterlife in recycling and regifting, and how we value them or not. Using history, we'll explore the major theories, issues and diverse viewpoints and practices in the field of material culture. And we meet at the Smithsonian.

AMST 6100.10 – Scope and Methods in American Studies

Elaine Peña

M 5:10-7:00PM

CRN: 61799

This course is an intensive introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Seminar participants will analyze key texts and debates, explore ways to redefine the canon of American Studies scholarship, and design new pathways for research. This course is restricted to graduate students in American Studies.

AMST 6190.10 – Cultural Studies: History & Method

Melani McAlister

W 5:10-7:00PM

CRN: 62981

This course examines a range of theoretical and methodological tools for the study of culture, from Marxism and semiotics to queer theory and affect studies. The course is designed to teach students about the theoretical debates that led into and out of the classical work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, showing how Marxism, feminism, and other frameworks helped to shape the field at its founding, then exploring the many directions that “cultural studies” has taken in the decades since. Students will read Stuart Hall, Walter Benjamin, Adorno & Horkheimer, Frederick Jameson, Roland Barthes, and Paul Gilroy, as well as Hazel Carby, E. Patrick Johnson, Donna Haraway, Jennifer Nash, Ramzi Fawaz, Inderpal Grewal, Jaspir Puar, and others.

AMST 6190.11 – United States of Archipelagos

Theodore Gonzalves

T 5:10-7:00PM

CRN: 65604

This course uses a comparative method to examine three archipelagic formations of U.S. empire, locations which are not often studied in direct relation to each other. The course hopes to tackle at least two broad themes: How do islands matter in the historical emergence of U.S. continental power, and what are examples of resistance unique to each location? How can the study of U.S. empire's islands inform our understanding of present-day efforts to win sovereignty and sustain memory? Prior experience in Asian American studies, Pacific Islander studies, and/or Latin American studies is preferred.

AMST 6470.80 – Cityscapes

Suleiman Osman

R 5:10-7:00

CRN: 67693

What is the city? How have writers, reformers, theorists, planners and everyday residents analyzed, represented and inhabited the modern metropolis? Students will read scholarship on the social and cultural history of American cities, as well as theoretical works by authors such as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, WEB DuBois, Doreen Massey and David Harvey.Registration restricted to graduate students

AMST 6710.10 – American Material Culture

Katherine Ott

W 1:30-3:30PM

CRN: 67694

The world is populated by things. The objects that surround us are as strange, lovable, and scary as the people. People have always used objects to learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. This course explores the world of material culture -- where things come from, why they are made the way they are, their afterlife in recycling and regifting, and how we value them or not. Using history, we'll explore the major theories, issues and diverse viewpoints and practices in the field of material culture. And we meet at the Smithsonian.

AMST 6195.10 – Research Seminar in American Studies

Suleiman Osman

R 4:10-6:00

CRN: 11890

In this graduate research seminar, students write, discuss and revise a research paper on a topic in twentieth-century American Studies. The 20-30 page final paper will be an article-length essay of publishable quality based on original research.

AMST 6730.80 – Natural Magic, Religion & American Art

David Bjelajac

M 3:30-6:00

CRN: 17723

This research seminar explores the visual arts in relation to a wide range of aesthetic religious experiences and magical, occult sciences. Trained in occult craft mysteries, spiritually devout artists participated in collective, utopian projects for perfecting humankind and nature from a “fallen” wilderness state as described in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Renaissance humanists and early modern (16th-18th century) practitioners of the arts and sciences diverged from the orthodox Christian doctrine of human depravity inherited from the “original sin” of eating forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. European discovery of the Americas, global maritime exploration and capitalist, commercial development of previously “wilderness” territories suggested the possible recovery and perfection of paradise for White colonial settlers and their sponsoring imperial governments, all at the expense of indigenous “savages” and enslaved peoples. Though White European settlers generally denigrated and dehumanized people of color, some artists painted portraits of Native Americans which suggested not only the semi-nude sitters’ quasi-classical nobility but also their sphinxlike possession of ancient, occult wisdom akin to European folklore secrets. Boston-born artist John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) painted non-caricatured portraits of black Africans that conjure associations with the mysteries of alchemy, astrology and ancient Ethiopian lore from biblical and classical sources. The seminar considers the importance of alchemy and astrology for the arts within the larger metaphysical tradition of an ancient theology or divine wisdom (pansophist) literature legendarily originating with the Egyptian god of writing, Thoth, a moon god, whom the Greeks and Romans would identify with the Egyptian magus Hermes (aka Mercurius) Trismegistus. This “thrice great” Hermes purportedly authored the Hermetica, a collection of theological-philosophical texts that inspired generations of humanists, alchemists, Rosicrucians, scientists, antiquarians, freemasons, theosophists and writers from novelist Laurence Sterne to philosophers G.W.F Hegel and Gilles Deleuze. Identified with Hermes and Mercury, Greco-Roman gods of all arts and sciences, the Egyptian Hermes envisioned an archetypal “Hermetic Man” comparable to the biblical Adam before the Fall. The Hermetica’s seminal text, Pymander, or Poimandres, pronounced the Creator’s, or divine mind’s “essential man” as “androgyne because he comes from an androgyne father [god or mind]”. The Hebraic account of Creation similarly suggested that Adam was an androgyne, who embodied both male and female genders, a union of opposites “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). America’s edenic, “primitive purity” purportedly foretold millennial progress toward retrieval of Adam’s god-like wisdom and power in naming all of nature’s creatures. American artists and collectors tended to privilege White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant values as well as masculine creativity over the feminine. In alchemy and fine arts, the androgyne ideal traditionally possessed a masculine bias. Cultivating an androgynous persona, the Harvard-educated artist/writer Washington Allston (1779-1843) painted pictures that blurred material boundaries, thereby inspiring later Gilded Age “tonalist painters”. Allston claimed the Venetian Renaissance secret of color, the “philosopher’s stone” of painting. Initiates into Venetian craft secrets transmuted opaque, earthly pigments into luminous oil glazes of ethereal tonal harmonies. Eluding cognitive naming, Allston’s tones analogically alluded to the divine “Word…made flesh” from St. John’s Gospel (1:14), a New Testament book that biblical scholars have interpreted in relation to Hermeticism.

AMST 6100.10 – Scope and Methods in American Studies

Elaine Peña

T 1:10-3:00PM

CRN: 51964

This course is an intensive introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Seminar participants will analyze key texts and debates, explore ways to redefine the canon of American Studies scholarship, and design new pathways for research. This course is restricted to graduate students in American Studies.

AMST 6190.10 – Theorizing Bodies

Nicole Ivy

M 5:10-7:00PM

CRN: 53417

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of how representations of the human physical form as well as ideas about what constitutes appropriate bodies are continually re-shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. The assigned coursework will present specific theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class. During the course of this graduate seminar, we will take up key concepts associated with theories of the body in cultural studies including, but not limited to: waste, surveillance, performance, and the embodiment of the citizen/alien dynamic.

AMST 6190.11 – United States of Archipelagos

Theodore Gonzalves

T 6:10-8:00PM

CRN: 57107

This course uses a comparative method to examine three archipelagic formations of U.S. empire, locations which are not often studied in direct relation to each other. The course hopes to tackle at least two broad themes: How do islands matter in the historical emergence of U.S. continental power, and what are examples of resistance unique to each location? How can the study of U.S. empire's islands inform our understanding of present-day efforts to win sovereignty and sustain memory? Prior experience in Asian American studies, Pacific Islander studies, and/or Latin American studies is preferred.

AMST 6730.80 – Art Historiography & Methodology

David Bjelajac

T 1:00-3:30PM

CRN: 55795

The development of art history as a discipline from the eighteenth century to the present. An investigation of different art historical methodologies, including formal analysis, iconological, feminist, Marxist, semiotic and deconstructivist approaches.

AMST 6190.10: African American Literature and Contemporary Black Studies

Gayle Wald

T 9:10-11:00

CRN: 76035

This new course pairs texts from the African American literary canon with defining works of late 20th-century and contemporary black studies, particularly as they emerge in and through literary studies. We will read a selection of literary texts by writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. Our critical texts might include works by Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Henry Louis Gates, Hazel Carby, and Hortense Spillers.

AMST 6190.11: Race and Aesthetics

Amber Musser

T 5:10-7:00

CRN: 76036

Race and Aesthetics uses blackness and colonization as two lenses through which to examine how racialized people have used aesthetics in relation to practices of resistance. We will discuss particular aesthetic strategies in image making, performance, and the literary arts that have been associated by minoritarian subjects in the long twentieth century. Specific attention will be given to the relationship between race, aesthetics, and queerness.

AMST 6190.12: United States of Archipelagos

Theo Gonzalves

T 5:10-7:00

CRN: 77590

This course uses a comparative method to examine three archipelagic formations of U.S. empire, locations which are not often studied in direct relation to each other. The course hopes to tackle at least two broad themes: How do islands matter in the historical emergence of U.S. continental power, and what are examples of resistance unique to each location? How can the study of U.S. empire's islands inform our understanding of present-day efforts to win sovereignty and sustain memory? Prior experience in Asian American studies, Pacific Islander studies, and/or Latin American studies is preferred.

AMST 6190.13: After Humanity

Melani McAlister

W 3:10-5:00

CRN: 78403

This interdisciplinary course examines humanism, human rights, and post-humanism, bringing together historical studies, cultural and political theory, religious studies scholarship, and popular culture. It explores the ways in which “the human” has been a category in political thought and religious life, from the rise of European humanism to the history of human rights thinking in the US and around the world. It explores anxieties about the human/non-human boundary in popular culture, from robots to animal rights. It also considers the emergence of post-humanism in cultural theory, scientific discourse, environmental politics, and speculative fiction. The readings will be broad, including highly theoretical texts, historical scholarship, and fiction/film. We will ask what kind of cultural work the category of the human has done and (perhaps) continues to do, and what are the stakes in challenges to its centrality. Theoretical readings will likely include T. Adorno & M. Horkheimer, J. Bennett, D. Fassin, D. Haraway, B. Latour, A. Tsing, and C. Warren. Cultural texts will range from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner to Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. And histories may include work by S. Hartman, L. Heerten, and S. Moyn, among others.

AMST 6195.10: Graduate Research Seminar

Tom Guglielmo

R 4:10-6:00

CRN: 72020

This is a graduate research seminar on the broad subject of American studies. We will focus on individual research and writing—and on reading and commenting on each other’s work. The central course goal is for each student to produce a primary-source research paper that, with slight revision, can be—and will be—submitted to a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal for publication. We will work collaboratively and deliberately—moving from central questions and reviews of relevant scholarship to formal proposals and first and second drafts. At term’s end, you should have produced a paper that you’re not only proud of, but one that you’re ready, or close to ready, to send out into the wider scholarly world.

AMST 6100 – Scope and Methods in American Studies

Suleiman Osman

R 5:10-7:00PM

CRN: 92073

This course is an intensive introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will analyze key texts, explore ways to redefine the canon of American Studies scholarship, and begin to formulate ideas for future research. This course is restricted to graduate students in American Studies.

AMST 6190 – Racial Capitalism

Dara Orenstein

M 5:10-7:00PM

CRN: 93770

If it's the economy, stupid, then what's race got to do with it? How has the accumulation of capital required the reproduction of race, both in and beyond the nation-state? How has racial commodification shaped the value form of capital and the category of the human? What difference has difference made in the expansion of (and resistance to) global capitalism? These and other questions inspire Cedric Robinson’s claim that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.” We will explore Robinson’s theory of “racial capitalism" in this reading-intensive seminar, first in the context of chattel slavery in the United States, and then across an array of more contemporary sites, from the prison industrial complex to domestic labor.

AMST 6230 – The Politics of Freedom

Elisabeth Anker

T 10:40-12:30PM

CRN: 98325

The topic of this year’s seminar will be “Freedom and Domination”. Freedom is one of the most contested of political terms, and is taken to mean everything from individual self-mastery to the radically collective emancipatory overthrow of domination. This course will examine these varied interpretations of freedom, with specific focus on how the promise of freedom often, paradoxically, justifies war, domination, slavery, and oppression. We will focus on freedom in relation to slavery, property, settler colonialism and decolonization, black feminism, indigenous political movements, and global empire. We will also examine concepts and practices of freedom that support emancipatory, world-making, and transformative action in historical and contemporary contexts. Readings to include John Locke, Karl Marx, CLR James, Saidiya Hartman, Lauren Berlant, Fred Moten, LeeAnne Simpson, Hannah Arendt, Orlando Patterson, and others.

AMST 6431 – Gender, Sexuality, and American Culture II

Sylvea Hollis

T 5:10-7:00PM

CRN: 97033

This graduate seminar explores the usefulness of gender and sexuality as categories of analysis in American culture. Focusing on the period since the Civil War, we will read broadly across the field of sexuality and gender studies in US social and cultural history, performance studies, ethnography, media and popular culture studies, and critical theory. We will examine the roles that gender and sexuality have played in shaping American culture from the late- nineteenth to the early-twenty-first century; the extent to which modernity and postmodernity gave rise to new categories of sexual and gender identity and experience; and the historically shifting meanings and cultural representations that have marked sexual difference. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of gender and sexuality with race, class, religion, citizenship, and the body; the spatial organization of gender and sexuality in relation to the city, the suburbs, the state, and globalization; and the role that cultural discourses and products— possibly including music, television, film, print media, stage performances, medicine, science, and the law—play in shaping the popular understanding of sexuality and gender and vice versa.

AMST 6710 – American Material Culture

Katherine Ott

W 1:30-3:30

CRN: 91831

The world is populated by things. The objects that surround us are as strange, lovable, and scary as the people. People have always used objects to learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. This course explores the world of material culture -- where things come from, why they are made the way they are, their afterlife in recycling and regifting, and how we value them or not. Using history, we'll explore the major theories, issues and diverse viewpoints and practices in the field of material culture. And we meet at the Smithsonian.

AMST 6730 – Art Historiography & Methodology

David Bjelajac

T 02:30PM - 05:00PM

CRN: 97034

The development of art history as a discipline from the eighteenth century to the present. An investigation of different art historical methodologies, including formal analysis, iconological, feminist, Marxist, semiotic and deconstructivist approaches.

AMST 6190.10 – Folklore Theory

James Deutsch

Monday 6:10-8:00

CRN: 47295

This graduate-level seminar will explore the intellectual history of the academic field of folklore and folklife study in the United States. It will trace the rise of interpretation starting in the second half of the nineteenth century and conclude with contemporary times. Student presentations and discussions will focus on key figures in folklore theory whose careers illustrate particular interpretive techniques and positions. In addition to participation in class discussions, students will be expected to write a seminar paper (20-25 pages) on some aspect of American folklore scholarship and practice. The specific topic for the seminar paper will be selected in consultation with the instructor. The class will meet at a Smithsonian Institution facility near L'Enfant Plaza SW.

AMST 6190.11 – Biopolitics, Intimacy & Precarity

Amber Musser

Tuesday 6:10-8:00

CRN: 47296

This seminar brings together theoretical texts to examine the issue of precarity as a biopolitical formation. This means understanding precarity as a form of structural vulnerability enabled and sustained by neoliberalism, racialization, gender, and sexuality. In order to plumb the complex theoretical and political dimensions of precarity, we will focus on recent texts in affect studies, queer of color critique, and black studies in order to compare and contrast relations to queer theory, methodological commitments, and analyses of biopolitics.

AMST 6195.10 – Cultures of Science, Tech & Medicine

Jamie Cohen-Cole

Friday 11:10-1:00

CRN: 42131

This is a research seminar 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 means of imagining futures, a source of values, and site of conflict. 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 American culture, society, and politics mutually constitute one another. In writing original research papers, students may rely on sources ranging from archival materials to literary fiction, visual media, and/or material culture. We will begin by reading exemplary secondary articles that illustrate methods for the cultural analysis of STM. In certain cases, the best expression of methods has been written by historians who have looked at earlier periods. In those instances, we will examine both the methodological exemplars and the studies on American science. Students will then engage in individual research projects of their own choosing that are based in primary sources and that address important scholarly issues related to the role of STM in American culture.

AMST 6730 – Nature’s Nation and the Visual Arts

David Bjelajac

Tuesday 3:30-6:00

CRN: 44140

This course explores the visual arts in relation to a wide range of natural/human sciences and socio-economic, ecological phenomena. Common readings will address the manner in which artists, designers and cultural reformers variously envisioned human bodies and nature’s resources in aesthetic terms adapted to capitalist development and transcontinental, transoceanic expansion. Covering several centuries, the course considers American landscapes, seascapes and representations of the West, which privileged white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant values. In vernacular architecture, humble log cabins and elaborate log structures bore conflicting symbolic meanings. The seminar examines Transcendentalist nature religion and post-Darwinian evolutionary theories of human development involving issues of race, class and gender. Inspired by Asian, African, and Native American art, Modernist painters and sculptors cultivated primitive, pre-rational experiences, which mysteriously seemed to correspond with the new subatomic physics of nature’s invisible, alchemical energies. For neurologists and psychologists, the visual arts assumed therapeutic value in treating neurasthenia or nervous disorders caused by the urban, capitalist distancing of American civilization from its mythic rootedness as “nature’s nation”.

AMST 6100.10 – Scope and Methods in American Studies

Chad Heap

W, 5:10-7:00

CRN: 22263

This course is an intensive introduction to the history, debates, and methodologies that are central to the field of American Studies. Students will analyze key texts, explore ways to redefine the canon of American Studies scholarship, and begin to formulate ideas for future research. This course is restricted to graduate students in American Studies.

AMST 6190.10 – Cultural Studies: History & Method

Melani McAlister

T, 5:10-7:00

CRN: 24191

This course examines a range of theoretical and methodological tools for the study of culture, from Marxism and semiotics to queer theory and affect studies. The course is designed to teach students about the theoretical debates that led into and out of the classical work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, showing how Marxism, feminism, and other frameworks helped to shape the field at its founding, then exploring the many directions that “cultural studies” has taken in the decades since. Students will read Stuart Hall, Walter Benjamin, Adorno & Horkheimer, Frederick Jameson, Roland Barthes, and Paul Gilroy, as well as Hazel Carby, E. Patrick Johnson, Donna Haraway, Jennifer Nash, Ramzi Fawaz, Inderpal Grewal, Jaspir Puar, and others.

AMST 6190.12 – National Bodies

Nicole Ivy

M, 5:10-7:00

CRN: 26932

Interdisciplinary exploration of how representations of the physical form shape and are shaped by U.S. cultural, political, social, and economic discourse. Theoretical emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, labor, ability, and class.

AMST 6470.80 – Cityscapes

Suleiman Osman

R, 5:10-7:00

CRN: 26934

What is the city? How have writers, reformers, theorists, planners and everyday residents analyzed, represented and inhabited the modern metropolis? Students will read scholarship on the social and cultural history of American cities, as well as theoretical works by authors such as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, WEB DuBois, Doreen Massey and David Harvey.Registration restricted to graduate students.

AMST 6710.10 – American Material Culture

Katherine Ott

W, 1:30–3:30

CRN: 22000

This class is an introduction to the major theories, issues, and diverse viewpoints and practices in the field of material culture. Material culture refers to the objects and artifacts that populate the tactile and visual environment. Material culture is a form of evidence poorly understood and often dismissed, yet it is the primary component of the sensory world – it is through objects and images that people learn about and integrate themselves into the human community. Material culture carries and creates meaning. Some artifacts, such as the refrigerator, the spinning wheel, and the contraceptive pill, initiate new systems and support cultural transitions. Other objects, such as a wedding ring or a judge’s gavel, convey complex symbolic meanings. Still others, such as photographs and clothing, create personal identity. We will study the range of these relationships with material things. Registration restricted to graduate students. The class is taught by a Smithsonian history curator and meets off campus; contact Professor Ott at [email protected] for location details

AMST 6190.10 – Humans, Machines, and their Interface: From Automata to Cyborgs, Cyberculture, and Social Media

Jamie Cohen-Cole

R, 12:00-2:00

CRN: 34184

It is now commonplace in popular and scholarly discourse to draw metaphors which link humans and their communities, institutions, and forms of governance to the structures of individual machines and the networks works that connect them. By providing a language to describe nature, machines, individuals, and society in common terms, the ideas of cybernetics and computers have been means of conceptual transfer that has enabled a wide range of critical theories in cultural studies including models of the "encoding and decoding" of cultural texts to ideas of post-humanness, classical and neoliberalism, the anthropocene, and object oriented ontology. In so doing, computers and information technologies have facilitated the reimagining and reordering of the individual, the social, the institutional, and the state. So too have the cybernetic and computer sciences been central to the structural evolution of the academic-military-industrial complex and reshaped established a number of disciplines across the humanities, physical, biological, social and human sciences. This course provides an introduction to the human/machine metaphor, to its applications, and of how meanings of the metaphor have varied historically based the specific sub-cultural locations of their origination, application, and interpretation.

AMST 6195.10 –Democracy in Chains

Dara Orenstein

T, 6:30-8:20

CRN: 32275

A single book—Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains—anchors this graduate research seminar. In just the five months since its publication in June, Maclean’s intellectual and political biography of the economist James Buchanan has stirred up tremendous controversy, with its arguments and even its author's integrity debated in tweets, blogs, op-eds, petitions, and talk shows. We will work collaboratively to study the book and the furor surrounding it as a way to grapple both with the specific topics that MacLean investigates— conservatism, libertarianism, regionalism, the New South, the Beltway, the Radical Right, state violence, desegregation, white supremacy, massive resistance, education “reform” and school “choice,” think tanks, the Koch brothers—as well as with the general challenges of academic scholarship, such as how to develop a research question, how to identify and interpret primary sources, how to dialogue with other scholars, and how to distill half-baked hunches into clear, persuasive prose. The seminar will function like a laboratory, in that students will pursue individual projects as spin- offs from our collective case study. These projects will touch on MacLean’s historical concerns, however loosely, and/or will explore the meta-problem of what counts as academic authority in the age of fake news. The goal GRADUATE COURSES 2 AMST Spring 2018 will be to produce essays of 7,000-10,000 words, based on original research and intended for submission to journals, and drafts of which we will workshop with each other at the end of the semester. Midway through the semester, we will dialogue with MacLean in person.

AMST 6195.11 – Research in American Studies

Suleiman Osman

W,6:10-8:00

CRN: 32726

AMST 6230.10 – The Politics of Freedom

Elisabeth Anker

W, 2:00-4:00

CRN: 38199

Each year the course has a different theme, and this year it will be on neoliberalism, a political- economic-social system organized by the politics of freedom...especially the freedom of money over people. We'll ask: what are the cultural practices that have shaped the politics of neoliberalism? This class will examine the history, theory, cultural production and political imaginary of capitalism as and neoliberalism. We will emphasize the gendered and racialized forms of neoliberalism, with a focus on consumption, mass incarceration, work and welfare, the privatization of public life especially in education and politics, transnational capital, global migration, climate change, and self-help literature. The first half of the class will examine central texts for the cultural study of capitalism and neoliberalism. The second half of the class will focus on cutting-edge American Studies scholarship.

AMST 6550.80 – Architecture and Post-WWII Landscape

Richard Longstreth

M, 3:30-6:00

CRN: 37354

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. 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 3 AMST Spring 2018 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.

AMST 6730.80 – Orientalism in American Art

David Bjelajac

T, 3:30-6:00

CRN: 34639

Four decades ago, Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism (1978) established a binary analytical paradigm for explaining how academicians and governments in the West constructed cultural “otherness” or subordinating stereotypes of “the Orient.” This ideology of western superiority served to justify European and American imperialism in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia as a whole. More recent, revisionist scholarship, has transformed the dualistic model of western Orientalist constructs to comprise a heterogeneous range of cultural, ideological positions that are dependent upon the contingencies of specific historical traditions, geo-political interests and aesthetic, religious practices. Americans from the colonial period onward have defined themselves in relation to the ancient Israelites and the biblical history of the Holy Land. The pyramid decorating the Great Seal of the United States and the obelisks of the Bunker Hill and Washington Monuments suggest national rootedness in ancient Egyptian wisdom. On the other hand, the seminar will also explore Orientalism in terms of political resistance to oppression. African-Americans identified with Hebraic opposition to slavery, but they also later celebrated Egyptian art and architecture in conjunction with civil-rights activism and Ethiopia’s victory over Italian colonialism at the Battle of Adowa (1896). The seminar will also consider nineteenth-century feminist sculptors’ sympathetic representations of powerful, yet tragic, orientalist heroines such as Cleopatra and Zenobia, the third-century Queen of Palmyra resisting Roman domination of the Middle East. In commissioning history paintings, landscapes and sculptures for the United States Capitol, Supreme Court and other public buildings, politically dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) fused the traditional imperial trope of civilization’s westward course with Christian and Masonic transnational notions of millennial progress to forge the expansionist ideology of America’s Manifest Destiny, which undergirded “open-door” world trade or “dollar diplomacy.” The seminar will end by exploring the visual culture of Orientalism in relation to U.S. imperial conquest of the Philippines, the post-WWI propaganda campaign against communism, and, finally, the the advent of the Cold War marked by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response to the atomic bombings and the wartime internment of Japanese-American citizens, many painters, sculptors and Beat Generation artists campaigned against nuclear weapons. African-American civil rights activists linked their use in Japan to American segregationist policies and to the nation’s pervasive domestic racism, which further fueled the Cold War and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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