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Introduction
Introduction
BackColloquia
Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
Colloquium
105 New Women in America
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2019
226 Mobilization, the US Firearms Industry, and Gun Rights in World War I
World War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Spring semester. Professor Obert.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023234 America's Death Penalty
(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
246 Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism, 1930-1970
This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020
248 Secret Lives of the Late-Soviet Stage: the Archive and the Repertoire
How can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020
252 Future People Puzzles
What are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
260 Researching the Dakota Iapi (Language) in History, Culture, and Literature
Working with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023326 Blackness in Asia: Race and Relation between Afropessimism and Settler Colonialism
This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of historical and contemporary texts that treat as a point of departure the ways that the idea of Blackness has been treated in Asia. The course’s framework, which will have an emphasis on the Philippines, will also significantly explore the theoretical intersections of Indigenous thought, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Latinx/American studies. The class will begin with a reading of famed Filipino American journalist Alex Tizon’s confessional essay “My Family’s Slave” published in The Atlantic in 2017 in which he admits to his role in the labor exploitation of a family servant. His family had a live-in servant who resided with them for decades without the ability to return home. Critique of this essay surfaced local histories of debt bondage in the Philippines as well as the histories of the transatlantic slave trade pointing to slippages and overlaps between Asian American and Black American experiences of race, labor, and family. Class meetings will be dedicated to discussion of assigned theoretical readings and primary source materials in Philippine history, Asian American studies, Afropessimist philosophy, and Indigenous studies grounding our analysis and, it is my hope, mutual commitment to shared discovery of historical models that could aid us in thinking about the deep connection across deep differences in global race relations. The goal for course discussions will be to advance global, expansive thinking and collegial collaboration. Students will be encouraged to chart their own unique pathways of intellectual discovery through course materials (in consultation with the professor) and will be supported in the construction of their own individualized or group-based research projects depending on preference.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course is open to all students, with a preference for sophomores and juniors who are interested in academic research; students who have already completed a research methods course in a social science or humanities discipline; students with a knowledge of other languages especially Spanish, German, or Tagalog. A reading knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended. This course will be limited to six participants. Students will be asked to fill out a brief application elaborating research interests and skills. The professor may request to interview students prior to enrollment approval. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Course discussions will likely be held in English with the possibility of their being held in Spanish depending on language skills.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023332 Cities, Schools and Space
In the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project.Omitted. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2020
335 Transgender Histories
A revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Manion.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
342 Hearing Difference: The Political Economy of Accent
Accents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
344 Point/Counterpoint: Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
345 Migrant Lives
Offered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Spring semester. Professor Boucher.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023348 War in Translation
The “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
349 Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
This research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
351 Critical Sports Studies
Sports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring Semester. Professor Hayashi
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023352 The ABCs of Publishing
A thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023390H Learning by Doing: Internship and Fieldwork Reflection
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
412 Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint
The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Fall 2018
About Amherst College
About Amherst College
BackColloquia
Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
Colloquium
105 New Women in America
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2019
226 Mobilization, the US Firearms Industry, and Gun Rights in World War I
World War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Spring semester. Professor Obert.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023234 America's Death Penalty
(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
246 Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism, 1930-1970
This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020
248 Secret Lives of the Late-Soviet Stage: the Archive and the Repertoire
How can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020
252 Future People Puzzles
What are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
260 Researching the Dakota Iapi (Language) in History, Culture, and Literature
Working with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023326 Blackness in Asia: Race and Relation between Afropessimism and Settler Colonialism
This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of historical and contemporary texts that treat as a point of departure the ways that the idea of Blackness has been treated in Asia. The course’s framework, which will have an emphasis on the Philippines, will also significantly explore the theoretical intersections of Indigenous thought, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Latinx/American studies. The class will begin with a reading of famed Filipino American journalist Alex Tizon’s confessional essay “My Family’s Slave” published in The Atlantic in 2017 in which he admits to his role in the labor exploitation of a family servant. His family had a live-in servant who resided with them for decades without the ability to return home. Critique of this essay surfaced local histories of debt bondage in the Philippines as well as the histories of the transatlantic slave trade pointing to slippages and overlaps between Asian American and Black American experiences of race, labor, and family. Class meetings will be dedicated to discussion of assigned theoretical readings and primary source materials in Philippine history, Asian American studies, Afropessimist philosophy, and Indigenous studies grounding our analysis and, it is my hope, mutual commitment to shared discovery of historical models that could aid us in thinking about the deep connection across deep differences in global race relations. The goal for course discussions will be to advance global, expansive thinking and collegial collaboration. Students will be encouraged to chart their own unique pathways of intellectual discovery through course materials (in consultation with the professor) and will be supported in the construction of their own individualized or group-based research projects depending on preference.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course is open to all students, with a preference for sophomores and juniors who are interested in academic research; students who have already completed a research methods course in a social science or humanities discipline; students with a knowledge of other languages especially Spanish, German, or Tagalog. A reading knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended. This course will be limited to six participants. Students will be asked to fill out a brief application elaborating research interests and skills. The professor may request to interview students prior to enrollment approval. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Course discussions will likely be held in English with the possibility of their being held in Spanish depending on language skills.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023332 Cities, Schools and Space
In the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project.Omitted. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2020
335 Transgender Histories
A revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Manion.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
342 Hearing Difference: The Political Economy of Accent
Accents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
344 Point/Counterpoint: Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
345 Migrant Lives
Offered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Spring semester. Professor Boucher.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023348 War in Translation
The “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
349 Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
This research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
351 Critical Sports Studies
Sports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring Semester. Professor Hayashi
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023352 The ABCs of Publishing
A thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023390H Learning by Doing: Internship and Fieldwork Reflection
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
412 Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint
The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Fall 2018
Admission & Financial Aid
Admission & Financial Aid
BackColloquia
Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
Colloquium
105 New Women in America
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2019
226 Mobilization, the US Firearms Industry, and Gun Rights in World War I
World War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Spring semester. Professor Obert.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023234 America's Death Penalty
(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
246 Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism, 1930-1970
This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020
248 Secret Lives of the Late-Soviet Stage: the Archive and the Repertoire
How can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020
252 Future People Puzzles
What are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
260 Researching the Dakota Iapi (Language) in History, Culture, and Literature
Working with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023326 Blackness in Asia: Race and Relation between Afropessimism and Settler Colonialism
This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of historical and contemporary texts that treat as a point of departure the ways that the idea of Blackness has been treated in Asia. The course’s framework, which will have an emphasis on the Philippines, will also significantly explore the theoretical intersections of Indigenous thought, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Latinx/American studies. The class will begin with a reading of famed Filipino American journalist Alex Tizon’s confessional essay “My Family’s Slave” published in The Atlantic in 2017 in which he admits to his role in the labor exploitation of a family servant. His family had a live-in servant who resided with them for decades without the ability to return home. Critique of this essay surfaced local histories of debt bondage in the Philippines as well as the histories of the transatlantic slave trade pointing to slippages and overlaps between Asian American and Black American experiences of race, labor, and family. Class meetings will be dedicated to discussion of assigned theoretical readings and primary source materials in Philippine history, Asian American studies, Afropessimist philosophy, and Indigenous studies grounding our analysis and, it is my hope, mutual commitment to shared discovery of historical models that could aid us in thinking about the deep connection across deep differences in global race relations. The goal for course discussions will be to advance global, expansive thinking and collegial collaboration. Students will be encouraged to chart their own unique pathways of intellectual discovery through course materials (in consultation with the professor) and will be supported in the construction of their own individualized or group-based research projects depending on preference.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course is open to all students, with a preference for sophomores and juniors who are interested in academic research; students who have already completed a research methods course in a social science or humanities discipline; students with a knowledge of other languages especially Spanish, German, or Tagalog. A reading knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended. This course will be limited to six participants. Students will be asked to fill out a brief application elaborating research interests and skills. The professor may request to interview students prior to enrollment approval. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Course discussions will likely be held in English with the possibility of their being held in Spanish depending on language skills.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023332 Cities, Schools and Space
In the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project.Omitted. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2020
335 Transgender Histories
A revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Manion.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
342 Hearing Difference: The Political Economy of Accent
Accents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
344 Point/Counterpoint: Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
345 Migrant Lives
Offered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Spring semester. Professor Boucher.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023348 War in Translation
The “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
349 Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
This research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
351 Critical Sports Studies
Sports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring Semester. Professor Hayashi
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023352 The ABCs of Publishing
A thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023390H Learning by Doing: Internship and Fieldwork Reflection
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
412 Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint
The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Fall 2018
Regulations & Requirements
Regulations & Requirements
Back- General Regulations
- Terms and Vacations
- Conduct
- Attendance at College Exercises
- Records and Reports
- Pass/Fail Option
- Examinations and Extensions
- Withdrawals
- Readmission
- Deficiencies
- Housing and Meal Plans
- Degree Requirements
- Course Requirements
- The Liberal Studies Curriculum
- The Major Requirement
- Departmental Majors
- Interdisciplinary Majors
- Comprehensive Requirement
- Degree with Honors
- Independent Scholar Program
- Field Study
- Five College Courses
- Academic Credit from Other Institutions
- Cooperative Doctor of Philosophy
- Engineering Exchange Program with Dartmouth
Colloquia
Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
Colloquium
105 New Women in America
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2019
226 Mobilization, the US Firearms Industry, and Gun Rights in World War I
World War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Spring semester. Professor Obert.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023234 America's Death Penalty
(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
246 Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism, 1930-1970
This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020
248 Secret Lives of the Late-Soviet Stage: the Archive and the Repertoire
How can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020
252 Future People Puzzles
What are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
260 Researching the Dakota Iapi (Language) in History, Culture, and Literature
Working with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023326 Blackness in Asia: Race and Relation between Afropessimism and Settler Colonialism
This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of historical and contemporary texts that treat as a point of departure the ways that the idea of Blackness has been treated in Asia. The course’s framework, which will have an emphasis on the Philippines, will also significantly explore the theoretical intersections of Indigenous thought, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Latinx/American studies. The class will begin with a reading of famed Filipino American journalist Alex Tizon’s confessional essay “My Family’s Slave” published in The Atlantic in 2017 in which he admits to his role in the labor exploitation of a family servant. His family had a live-in servant who resided with them for decades without the ability to return home. Critique of this essay surfaced local histories of debt bondage in the Philippines as well as the histories of the transatlantic slave trade pointing to slippages and overlaps between Asian American and Black American experiences of race, labor, and family. Class meetings will be dedicated to discussion of assigned theoretical readings and primary source materials in Philippine history, Asian American studies, Afropessimist philosophy, and Indigenous studies grounding our analysis and, it is my hope, mutual commitment to shared discovery of historical models that could aid us in thinking about the deep connection across deep differences in global race relations. The goal for course discussions will be to advance global, expansive thinking and collegial collaboration. Students will be encouraged to chart their own unique pathways of intellectual discovery through course materials (in consultation with the professor) and will be supported in the construction of their own individualized or group-based research projects depending on preference.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course is open to all students, with a preference for sophomores and juniors who are interested in academic research; students who have already completed a research methods course in a social science or humanities discipline; students with a knowledge of other languages especially Spanish, German, or Tagalog. A reading knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended. This course will be limited to six participants. Students will be asked to fill out a brief application elaborating research interests and skills. The professor may request to interview students prior to enrollment approval. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Course discussions will likely be held in English with the possibility of their being held in Spanish depending on language skills.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023332 Cities, Schools and Space
In the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project.Omitted. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2020
335 Transgender Histories
A revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Manion.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
342 Hearing Difference: The Political Economy of Accent
Accents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
344 Point/Counterpoint: Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
345 Migrant Lives
Offered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Spring semester. Professor Boucher.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023348 War in Translation
The “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
349 Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
This research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
351 Critical Sports Studies
Sports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring Semester. Professor Hayashi
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023352 The ABCs of Publishing
A thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023390H Learning by Doing: Internship and Fieldwork Reflection
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
412 Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint
The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Fall 2018
Amherst College Courses
Amherst College Courses
Back- American Studies
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Architectural Studies
- Art and the History of Art
- Asian Languages and Civilizations
- Biochemistry and Biophysics
- Biology
- Black Studies
- Chemistry
- Classics
- Colloquia
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Economics
- Educational Studies
- English
- Environmental Studies
- European Studies
- Film and Media Studies
- First Year Seminar
- French
- Geology
- German
- History
- Latinx and Latin American Studies
- Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
- Mathematics and Statistics
- Mellon Seminar
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Philosophy
- Physics and Astronomy
- Political Science
- Psychology
- Religion
- Russian
- Sexuality Wmn's & Gndr Studies
- Spanish
- Theater and Dance
- Courses of Instruction
- 01- Bruss Seminar
- 02- Kenan Colloquium
- 03- Linguistics
- 04- Mellon Seminar
- 05- Physical Education
- 06- Premedical Studies
- 07- Teaching
- 08- Five College Dance
Colloquia
Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
Colloquium
105 New Women in America
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2019
226 Mobilization, the US Firearms Industry, and Gun Rights in World War I
World War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Spring semester. Professor Obert.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023234 America's Death Penalty
(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
246 Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism, 1930-1970
This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020
248 Secret Lives of the Late-Soviet Stage: the Archive and the Repertoire
How can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020
252 Future People Puzzles
What are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
260 Researching the Dakota Iapi (Language) in History, Culture, and Literature
Working with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023326 Blackness in Asia: Race and Relation between Afropessimism and Settler Colonialism
This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of historical and contemporary texts that treat as a point of departure the ways that the idea of Blackness has been treated in Asia. The course’s framework, which will have an emphasis on the Philippines, will also significantly explore the theoretical intersections of Indigenous thought, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Latinx/American studies. The class will begin with a reading of famed Filipino American journalist Alex Tizon’s confessional essay “My Family’s Slave” published in The Atlantic in 2017 in which he admits to his role in the labor exploitation of a family servant. His family had a live-in servant who resided with them for decades without the ability to return home. Critique of this essay surfaced local histories of debt bondage in the Philippines as well as the histories of the transatlantic slave trade pointing to slippages and overlaps between Asian American and Black American experiences of race, labor, and family. Class meetings will be dedicated to discussion of assigned theoretical readings and primary source materials in Philippine history, Asian American studies, Afropessimist philosophy, and Indigenous studies grounding our analysis and, it is my hope, mutual commitment to shared discovery of historical models that could aid us in thinking about the deep connection across deep differences in global race relations. The goal for course discussions will be to advance global, expansive thinking and collegial collaboration. Students will be encouraged to chart their own unique pathways of intellectual discovery through course materials (in consultation with the professor) and will be supported in the construction of their own individualized or group-based research projects depending on preference.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course is open to all students, with a preference for sophomores and juniors who are interested in academic research; students who have already completed a research methods course in a social science or humanities discipline; students with a knowledge of other languages especially Spanish, German, or Tagalog. A reading knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended. This course will be limited to six participants. Students will be asked to fill out a brief application elaborating research interests and skills. The professor may request to interview students prior to enrollment approval. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Course discussions will likely be held in English with the possibility of their being held in Spanish depending on language skills.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023332 Cities, Schools and Space
In the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project.Omitted. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2020
335 Transgender Histories
A revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Manion.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
342 Hearing Difference: The Political Economy of Accent
Accents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
344 Point/Counterpoint: Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
345 Migrant Lives
Offered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Spring semester. Professor Boucher.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023348 War in Translation
The “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
349 Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
This research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
351 Critical Sports Studies
Sports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring Semester. Professor Hayashi
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023352 The ABCs of Publishing
A thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023390H Learning by Doing: Internship and Fieldwork Reflection
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
412 Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint
The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Fall 2018
Five College Programs & Certificates
Five College Programs & Certificates
Back- Five College Courses
- African Studies Certificate
- Asian Pacific American Studies Certificate
- Biomathematics
- Buddhist Studies Certificate
- Coastal and Marine Sciences Certificate
- Culture Health Science Certificate
- Ethnomusicology Certificate
- International Relations Certificate
- Latin American Caribbean Latino Studies Certificate
- Logic Certificate
- Middle Eastern Studies Certificate
- Native American and Indigenous Studies Certificate
- Queer and Sexuality Studies Certificate
- Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice Certificate
- Russian East European Eurasian Studies Certificate
- Sustainability Studies Certificate
Colloquia
Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
Colloquium
105 New Women in America
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2019
226 Mobilization, the US Firearms Industry, and Gun Rights in World War I
World War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Spring semester. Professor Obert.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023234 America's Death Penalty
(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
246 Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism, 1930-1970
This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020
248 Secret Lives of the Late-Soviet Stage: the Archive and the Repertoire
How can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020
252 Future People Puzzles
What are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
260 Researching the Dakota Iapi (Language) in History, Culture, and Literature
Working with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023326 Blackness in Asia: Race and Relation between Afropessimism and Settler Colonialism
This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of historical and contemporary texts that treat as a point of departure the ways that the idea of Blackness has been treated in Asia. The course’s framework, which will have an emphasis on the Philippines, will also significantly explore the theoretical intersections of Indigenous thought, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Latinx/American studies. The class will begin with a reading of famed Filipino American journalist Alex Tizon’s confessional essay “My Family’s Slave” published in The Atlantic in 2017 in which he admits to his role in the labor exploitation of a family servant. His family had a live-in servant who resided with them for decades without the ability to return home. Critique of this essay surfaced local histories of debt bondage in the Philippines as well as the histories of the transatlantic slave trade pointing to slippages and overlaps between Asian American and Black American experiences of race, labor, and family. Class meetings will be dedicated to discussion of assigned theoretical readings and primary source materials in Philippine history, Asian American studies, Afropessimist philosophy, and Indigenous studies grounding our analysis and, it is my hope, mutual commitment to shared discovery of historical models that could aid us in thinking about the deep connection across deep differences in global race relations. The goal for course discussions will be to advance global, expansive thinking and collegial collaboration. Students will be encouraged to chart their own unique pathways of intellectual discovery through course materials (in consultation with the professor) and will be supported in the construction of their own individualized or group-based research projects depending on preference.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course is open to all students, with a preference for sophomores and juniors who are interested in academic research; students who have already completed a research methods course in a social science or humanities discipline; students with a knowledge of other languages especially Spanish, German, or Tagalog. A reading knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended. This course will be limited to six participants. Students will be asked to fill out a brief application elaborating research interests and skills. The professor may request to interview students prior to enrollment approval. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Course discussions will likely be held in English with the possibility of their being held in Spanish depending on language skills.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023332 Cities, Schools and Space
In the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project.Omitted. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2020
335 Transgender Histories
A revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Manion.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
342 Hearing Difference: The Political Economy of Accent
Accents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
344 Point/Counterpoint: Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
345 Migrant Lives
Offered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Spring semester. Professor Boucher.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023348 War in Translation
The “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
349 Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
This research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
351 Critical Sports Studies
Sports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring Semester. Professor Hayashi
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023352 The ABCs of Publishing
A thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023390H Learning by Doing: Internship and Fieldwork Reflection
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
412 Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint
The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Fall 2018
Honors & Fellowships
Honors & Fellowships
BackColloquia
Colloquia are interdisciplinary courses not affiliated with a department. Whether colloquia are accepted for a major credit by individual departments is determined for each colloquium separately; students should consult their major departments.
Colloquium
105 New Women in America
This course will examine the emergence of the “New Woman” as a category of social theory, political action, and literary representation at the turn of the twentieth century. Early readings will trace the origins of the New Woman as a response to nineteenth-century notions of “True Womanhood.” Discussions will situate literary representations of women in larger cultural events taking place during the Progressive Era–debates over suffrage as well as their relationship to issues of citizenship, immigration, Jim Crow segregation, urbanization, and nativism. The course will focus on texts, written by a diverse group of women, which present multiple and, at times, conflicting images of the New Woman. Close attention will be paid to the manner in which these women writers constructed their fictions, particularly to issues of language, style, and form. Readings will include texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Anzia Yezierska, and Sui Sin Far.
This is a writing intensive course. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Fall 2019
226 Mobilization, the US Firearms Industry, and Gun Rights in World War I
World War I posed the most significant challenge to American industrial mobilization since the Civil War. This course will delve deeply into the role of firearms makers (in particular, Winchester Repeating Arms) on the political, economic, and social mobilization of the US before, during, and after the Great War. It will offer students a chance to explore the ways in which gun makers reorganized their labor forces, production and sales techniques, and product lines to meet the needs of the US government and its allies. We will also examine how these efforts co-evolved with the growth of the National Rifle Administration (NRA) and other “patriotic” proto-gun rights organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Course research will involve a wide variety of techniques, including primary source analysis, case studies, dataset compilation, and potentially even social network analysis and Geographical Information Systems. It will also provide interested students with an opportunity to collaborate on a research article.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 7 students. Open to Sophomores and Juniors. Spring semester. Professor Obert.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023234 America's Death Penalty
(Offered as COLQ 234 and LJST 334, Research Seminar) The United States, almost alone among constitutional democracies, retains death as a criminal punishment. It does so in the face of growing international pressure for abolition and of evidence that the system for deciding who lives and who dies is fraught with error. This seminar is designed to expose students to America's death penalty as a researchable subject. It will be organized to help students understand how research is framed in this area, analyze theories and approaches of death penalty researchers, and identify open questions and most promising lines of future research. It will focus on the following dimensions of America's death penalty: its history, current status, public support/opposition, the processing of capital cases in the criminal justice system, race and capital punishment, and its impact and efficacy. During the seminar, each student will develop a prospectus for a research project on America's death penalty. This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Spring semester. Professor Sarat.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2024
246 Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism, 1930-1970
This course takes Los Angeles and New York as case studies for tracing different histories related to Native Americans, urbanism, and entertainment. So students can engage a range of interdisciplinary strategies for studying Native American migration in the twentieth century we will draw on materials from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection to practice developing researchable questions. Students will also assist in conducting primary research and data gathering related to Native American actors and entertainers to shed light on the lives they led off-screen and off-stage while they worked in Los Angeles and New York City. To ground our discussions and approach to research students will read secondary sources about the history of Native performance in the United States, especially in relation to cinema. There may be some ethnographic work as well and an introduction to methods from oral history. The main aim of this research tutorial is to have students focus on the ways in which Native people have participated in the film industry as laborers and shapers of culture, and since there are no “official” archives left to us by Native entertainers much of what students will learn is how to conduct research based on clues from a diverse array of sources. For example, by examining articles from Variety, catalogs from the American Film Institute, and papers from social reform institutions, like the L.A. Indian Center and the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City, students will begin to piece together a meaningful understanding of Native people as actors and activists during the twentieth century. Students who can be in residence for part of the summer following the tutorial will visit archives in New York related to the AICH—a non-profit organization that has served the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans in the city since 1969. Additional work over the summer will involve visualization tools from the Digital Humanities, like Gephi, so students can demonstrate what they have learned about the many Native entertainment and activist networks that existed in L.A. and NYC.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020
248 Secret Lives of the Late-Soviet Stage: the Archive and the Repertoire
How can an archive tell the story of a cultural practice that resists the very idea of being archived? If performance, in Peggy Phelan’s formulation, “becomes itself through disappearance,” what might it mean to document this endless disappearance? And what can we learn about the relationship between performance as an artistic project, theater as a cultural institution, and the everyday, intimate existence of those who made performances happen from examining such an archive? We will examine these questions through the lens of the Alma Law Soviet Theater Collection at the Amherst Center of Russian Culture. Over the course of nearly thirty years, Alma Law (1927-2003), the best-informed American scholar of Russian and Soviet theater in her generation, amassed a treasure trove of materials that chronicle the theater scene of the late-Soviet period. Hundreds of interviews with actors, directors, designers, playwrights, critics, and scholars working in Soviet theater at the time, which Law conducted during her frequent research trips to the USSR, are complemented by video and audio recordings of live rehearsals and performances, thousands of photos and over a hundred reels of microfilm. They give us access to very rare testimony about the “backstage” existence of a crucial cultural institution. What kinds of things can we actually learn from these diverse pieces of evidence? The tutorial will begin by exploring key methodological insights from the fields of performance studies and cultural history, which will help us formulate the research questions that we will pursue, individually and in pairs, as we examine Law’s notebooks (diaries and drafts), and card catalogs. These materials were originally created in English, so no knowledge of the Russian language (or Soviet culture or theater studies) is required. Students who are able to read Russian are highly encouraged to participate and will receive research assignments that allow them to employ their proficiency. This tutorial builds on the work, in the spring and summer of 2018, of the pioneering group of Amherst undergraduates who produced a comprehensive inventory of Alma Law’s diaries from one key period of her travels (the early 1990s, when she was working closely with the legendary theater maker Yuri Lyubimov) and an inventory of the hundreds of personalities, on both sides of the ocean, with whom she worked on her Soviet theater-related projects. The research conducted by that group makes it possible to take several important new steps in conceptualizing the material and shaping the first scholarly study of the archive and the world it captures. This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Wolfson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020
252 Future People Puzzles
What are our obligations to future generations of human beings? This question has pressing implications for everything from climate change policy to the accumulation of national debt. Perhaps we owe nothing to future people, since they don’t (yet) exist, or since their future identities depend upon our actions. But if we reject these lines of thought, as most of us do, then how exactly should we weigh the well-being of future people against the lives of those currently living? Should we apply some sort of “discount rate,” and if so, which one? Should we aim for a future population whose well-being is maximized, or should we apply some other standard, perhaps one that includes considerations of justice? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think that human life is, on balance, a positive thing, or are we under an “anti-natalist” obligation not to bring more people into this world? (And how should non-human animals and the environment-as-such figure into our thinking here?) Finally, how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against other factors, such as our reproductive rights, or procedural and historical considerations?
These questions have been the subject of recent work by philosophers and social scientists in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. In this colloquium, we focus on several theoretical puzzles that lie at the heart of this area of inquiry. In conjunction with the professor’s own research on these issues, students will be introduced to the central puzzles of population ethics, and then guided through the process of developing their own research projects.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
260 Researching the Dakota Iapi (Language) in History, Culture, and Literature
Working with rare Dakota-language texts, like the newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection as well as books by Dakota authors Charles Eastman and Ella Cara Deloria that were printed in English, this class enables students to do original research that uncovers the links between language (iapi), nation (oyate), and the strategies of survival Dakota people have used to resist colonial efforts to remove and erase them. By drawing on interdisciplinary tools from Native American and Indigenous studies students will also build connections between history, literature, linguistics, and ethnography to deepen their understandings of Dakota language and culture from the past to the present. Our approach to research will begin with Shaun Wilson’s book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods and will look for models in historical studies, such as, Dakota in Exile by Linda Clemmons and Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, and the award-winning Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate by Chris Pexa, which brings together the literary works and oral histories of Dakota intellectuals. We will collaborate in producing our own translations of material from “Iapi Oaye” by looking at examples of Dakota-language translations like The Dakota Prisoners of War Letters: Dakota Kaskapi Okicize Wowapi by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon. Students will also work with texts by Deloria and Eastman to discover how these authors incorporated Dakota epistemologies in their writings for non-Native audiences. During the summer, students will have the opportunity to dive more deeply into various archived materials in the KWE Collection, written in both Dakota and English, and take an immersive (online and free) Dakota language course, so they can breathe life into the language themselves by speaking it. This summer work will also involve generating content that will be shared in a public website to make this history and these texts more widely accessible and available.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023326 Blackness in Asia: Race and Relation between Afropessimism and Settler Colonialism
This research tutorial will explore a diverse archive of historical and contemporary texts that treat as a point of departure the ways that the idea of Blackness has been treated in Asia. The course’s framework, which will have an emphasis on the Philippines, will also significantly explore the theoretical intersections of Indigenous thought, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Latinx/American studies. The class will begin with a reading of famed Filipino American journalist Alex Tizon’s confessional essay “My Family’s Slave” published in The Atlantic in 2017 in which he admits to his role in the labor exploitation of a family servant. His family had a live-in servant who resided with them for decades without the ability to return home. Critique of this essay surfaced local histories of debt bondage in the Philippines as well as the histories of the transatlantic slave trade pointing to slippages and overlaps between Asian American and Black American experiences of race, labor, and family. Class meetings will be dedicated to discussion of assigned theoretical readings and primary source materials in Philippine history, Asian American studies, Afropessimist philosophy, and Indigenous studies grounding our analysis and, it is my hope, mutual commitment to shared discovery of historical models that could aid us in thinking about the deep connection across deep differences in global race relations. The goal for course discussions will be to advance global, expansive thinking and collegial collaboration. Students will be encouraged to chart their own unique pathways of intellectual discovery through course materials (in consultation with the professor) and will be supported in the construction of their own individualized or group-based research projects depending on preference.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This course is open to all students, with a preference for sophomores and juniors who are interested in academic research; students who have already completed a research methods course in a social science or humanities discipline; students with a knowledge of other languages especially Spanish, German, or Tagalog. A reading knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended. This course will be limited to six participants. Students will be asked to fill out a brief application elaborating research interests and skills. The professor may request to interview students prior to enrollment approval. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Course discussions will likely be held in English with the possibility of their being held in Spanish depending on language skills.
Open to sophomores and juniors. Limited to 6 students. Spring Semester. Professor Bolton.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023332 Cities, Schools and Space
In the United States, a child’s address, more than any other factor, determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting has channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often become harnessed to a narrative of inequality. Yet recent Supreme Court rulings have severely circumscribed the strategies communities might employ to disrupt the linkage between residence and educational opportunity. This research seminar blends urban history with educational policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped educational opportunity since World War II. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Class meetings will alternate between seminar-style discussion and an intensive, hands-on study of one particular community—Cambridge, Massachusetts—noteworthy for the innovative strategies it has utilized to desegregate its public schools. This course involves a significant research component designed to expose students to a range of approaches, including archival analysis and oral interviews. In particular, students will learn to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the spatial evolution of inequality in urban communities like Cambridge and to analyze past, present, and future strategies to equalize educational opportunity in American cities.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to 6 students. Open to sophomores and juniors interested in developing a senior thesis project.Omitted. Professor Moss and Dr. Anderson.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2020
335 Transgender Histories
A revolution in transgender rights in the United States is underway. Once marginalized and denigrated by mainstream society, the medical establishment, the legal system, and even the lesbian and gay rights movement, transgender people are increasingly gaining rights and recognition. This seminar will introduce students to transgender representations and experiences in the past as a researchable subject. Students will be introduced to the three dimensions of historic research: theory, method, and archives. The course will focus on the key theories of gender that have informed historic research for the past forty years, the methodological issues involved in conducting research of sexual and gender minority communities, and effective strategies for defining the parameters of a usable archive. Some questions to be engaged include: What is gender? What is transgender? What constitutes a transgender past? How does the historian determine correct terminology for writing? What role does history play in the present or future? Students will write their own prospectus for a research project in transgender history.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Manion.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
342 Hearing Difference: The Political Economy of Accent
Accents can be global and local, ethnic and national, cosmopolitan and provincial, unconscious and performative, racialized and gendered—often all at once. And yet, although everyone speaks with an accent, some accents are heard as “neutral” whereas others are heard as “accented.” These differences have serious implications: accent can be a passport for entry or grounds for discrimination, leading to the denial or approval of asylum claims and job or housing applications. Indeed, accent has become a lynchpin of the contemporary global economy, with complex industries devoted to the training, detection, neutralization, and monetization of particular accents. This seminar will introduce students to representations of accented speech and the experience of accented subjects as a researchable subject that teaches us much about the political economy of listening and the commodity-status of vocal sounds. The course will be organized into three units: theory, method, and site. During the first half of the course, we will encounter how accent has been theorized in a range of disciplines, including sociology, linguistics, sound studies, literary studies, and film studies. Diverse methods, from ethnography and case studies to close textual analysis and quantitative analysis, are employed in each of these fields. In the final unit of the class we will mobilize these competencies by studying various global sites that demand an approach that is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and methodologically nimble, including the offshore call center and cloud-based voice services. Students will then write their own prospectus for a research project on accent focused on a site that they will identify.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Rangan.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2020
344 Point/Counterpoint: Politics and Poetry
On October 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Amherst College in celebration of the Frost Library and in tribute to his friend, Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. An inspiring meditation on the crossroads where politics and poetry meet, arguably the most important feature of the speech was Kennedy's call for public service, part of a mission that resulted, among other things, in the Peace Corps, established to create a better understanding between Americans and other nations. In what way is Kennedy's call to public service still suitable now? What are today’s young people’s prime concerns in improving our world? And how can politics and poetry work together to achieve these goals? A partnership between Amherst College, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and other institutions, this course explores the reverberations of Kennedy's speech in America and the world from the Civil Rights Era to the present, analyzing the bifurcating paths President Kennedy and Robert Frost took, and reflecting on other famous friendships between political leaders and poets from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and onward to modern Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, of course, the United States. This course will also have a public component. It will be the theme of a speakers’ series in which prominent politicians, poets, activists, journalists, and scholars from all sides of the ideological divide will be on campus and at the JFK Library to reflect, through public conversations, on how politics and poetry interact and the extent to which Kennedy's speech and his friendship with Frost defined their career and what the meaning of public service is in the twenty-first century. The PBS documentary on the topic will be featured as part of the series.
Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2021
345 Migrant Lives
Offered as COLQ 345. Meets the following History major requirements as a related course [EU/TC/TE/TR/TS].
In the decades following World War II, immigration into the U.K. from the decolonizing world transformed what had been a predominantly white nation into a multi-ethnic society. British immigration law initially welcomed these migrants of color as “Commonwealth Citizens.” As subjects of the British empire, they held full rights to live, work, vote, and receive welfare provision in the U.K. In spite of this formal political equality, Commonwealth Citizens experienced various forms of official and unofficial racism upon arrival in Britain. They were frequently – if erroneously – represented as “foreigners” who took jobs, housing, and benefits from white Britons. Changes in immigration law throughout the 1960s cemented this tendency to define Commonwealth Citizens as outsiders. By 1971, migrants to the U.K. needed to prove “patriality” (having a parent or grandparent born in the U.K.) to receive British citizenship, a shift that, in practice, severely restricted the entry of migrants of color into the country.This course explores the postwar experience of Commonwealth Citizens in Britain through the theme of risk. The act of migration itself entailed risks of various kinds, as Commonwealth Citizens left countries rendered politically and economically unstable by the forces of empire and decolonization to seek more secure lives in the U.K. Racism in housing, employment, policing, education, the media, and other realms amplified migrants’ experience of precarity. How did Commonwealth Citizens negotiate these risks? What individual, familial, or community-based strategies did they develop to limit risk and increase security? How did these strategies change migrant lives and communities, as well as British society more generally?This course is part of a tutorial series that engages sophomores and juniors in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Students enrolled in these courses are guaranteed funding for at least six weeks of work during the summer following the academic year in which they take the course. Working together, the six students in this course will conceive, research, write, and pursue publication of an original academic article on a topic related to the course theme. Two of the six weeks of summer work will be dedicated to archival research in the U.K. (Funding for the trip will be provided by Amherst.) Students seeking admission to the course must complete a short application and meet with the professor before receiving permission to enroll.
Limit: 6 students, instructor permission only. As a colloquium, enrollment is restricted to sophomores and juniors.
Spring semester. Professor Boucher.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023348 War in Translation
The “War in Translation” research tutorial aims to allow students the opportunity to identify, analyze and translate a work or body of work of literary and historical significance that has not been previously available in English. Focusing on the personal experiences of a war or conflict during the twentieth century, students will begin by identifying untranslated primary source material that is written in a foreign language in which they are highly proficient. This will entail working with the professor and library staff to identify databases and digitized texts that have not been previously translated. Students will be encouraged to focus on materials such as letters, essays, newspaper articles, speeches and short works of fiction relevant to a single twentieth-century conflict of particular interest to each student, such as the Spanish Civil War, World War II/the Holocaust, the Guatemalan Civil War, or the Argentine “Dirty War.” Students will work closely with the professor and with their classmates to produce a prospectus and sample annotated translation of their selected material, providing relevant literary and historical context. The ultimate goal is to produce a publishable work (online or in print) that will ultimately make this primary source not only available in English but also accessible to scholars and lay readers who may not be familiar with the historical period under scrutiny.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to juniors and sophomores interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Brenneis.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
349 Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
This research colloquium will explore the lawsuit alleging anti-Asian American admissions discrimination as a result of affirmative action policies currently pursued by Harvard College. Students will do background readings on the history of affirmative action and explore several of the major lawsuits that attempted to dismantle the policy. The focus of the semester will be on the current lawsuit: its background, principals, allegations, and directions. We will examine legal, political, intra- and inter-racial contexts, and potential outcomes in the near and long term futures as well as their broader societal implications.
This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Omitted. Professor Odo.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Spring 2019
351 Critical Sports Studies
Sports command a central role in American culture. The media intensively cover professional and amateur competitions and elevate star athletes to celebrity status. Municipalities offer generous financial incentives to attract professional sports franchises to their cities, and families devote significant resources to make their children into better athletes. American colleges and universities offer scholarships to prospective students based on athletic prowess, a practice uniquely widespread in the United States. Athletics are commonly touted by these and other institutions as a pathway to molding character and even an American identity. Scholars and media have increasingly criticized this outsized role of sport in American society. In this course we will examine recent scholarship on the domestic and global influence of American sport, including in relation to issues such as educational equity, race relations, gender identity, and colonialism. We will speak with sports studies scholars about their research. We also will work collaboratively with library and other instructional staff during the semester.
This course is part of a model of tutorials designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Therefore, we will pay close attention to research methodologies especially when conducting interdisciplinary research. Students will explore their own research topic and develop a research plan for pursuing the topic in-depth.
Limited to six students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring Semester. Professor Hayashi
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023352 The ABCs of Publishing
A thorough, experiential course on the ins and outs of book publishing that includes a history of how books became our preferred channel for the dissemination of knowledge and entertainment and as a tool for political, economic, and cultural change. We will discuss the past, present, and future of the book, how it has mutated from Gutenberg to the digital age, and the challenges book publishing faces in the twenty-first century, not only in the United States but in the global scene. The objective is to study book-making and distribution from a critical eye and to come up with new solutions for book publishing in emerging or postcapitalist economies and for disadvantaged audiences. Strategies for acquiring, editing, publishing, and marketing books in the United States and in the global market will be discussed. Topics include budgeting; foreign and domestic rights; corporate, nonprofit, and academic companies; and collaborations with literary agents, translators, librarians, and booksellers. There will be an assortment of guest speakers. Students will participate in ongoing projects at Restless Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Brooklyn devoted to contemporary global literature for children and adults and the classics.
This course is part of a model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Limited to seven students. Open to sophomores and juniors. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023390H Learning by Doing: Internship and Fieldwork Reflection
Learning by doing represents a valuable educational experience for all students. This course provides an opportunity to reflect on an internship or other fieldwork experience and to integrate that experience with key learning outcomes expected in a student’s major. Through class meetings and short essays, students will document the work undertaken during the internship, how it relates to prior coursework, and its relationship to possible career paths; reflect on the positive and less good aspects of the internship experience; identify new skills and the personal growth that developed during the internship; and detail the workflow and process of one or more specific tasks or projects undertaken during the internship. The internship or other fieldwork experience must be done over the summer, with course enrollment and coursework completed the following fall. The Colloquium does not count toward major or college degree requirements. This course may be taken no more than twice during a student’s time at Amherst and cannot be taken until a student has declared a major.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Riondato.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023
412 Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint
The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States, assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic, and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril. This colloquium takes a balanced view of the debate, using the Socratic method to explore its pros and cons without prejudice. Focusing on different forms of oral and written expression, students will engage with works of Voltaire, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, as well as films, travel writing, and poetry from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sponsored by a generous gift of the Class of 1970, the course will feature a number of distinguished guests—activists, intellectuals, scientists, lawyers, journalists, and artists—from various origins and from both sides of the ideological divide.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Stavans.
2022-23: Not offeredOther years: Offered in Fall 2018