[Pre-1900] Drawing on a wide range of primary materials, and taking advantage of the ease of visiting the sites of many of the topics we study, this course offers an introduction to American Studies through an exploration of the Connecticut River Valley that stresses both the fascination of detailed local history and the economic, political, social, and cultural networks that tie this place to the world. Topics may include conflicts and accommodations between Native peoples and English settlers; changing uses of land and resources; seventeenth-century witchcraft trials; the American Revolution and Shays rebellion; religious revivalism of the Great Awakening; abolitionist and other nineteenth-century reform movements; tourism and the scenic including Thomas Cole's famous painting of the oxbow; immigration, industrialization and deindustrialization, especially in the cities of Holyoke and Springfield; educational institutions and innovations; the Cold War, the reach of the "military industrial complex" into local educational institutions, and "the bunker"; the sanctuary movement; feminist and gay activism; present environmental, mass incarceration, and other social equity issues; and of course, Emily Dickinson's poetry.
Limited to 20 students per section. 8 seats per section reserved for first-year students. Fall semester. Professors Couvares and Vigil.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023, Fall 2024This course will explore the imagined and conflicted experience of urban life in the United States through study of the country's first metropolis: New York. Drawing on primary materials—maps, memoirs, film, poetry, fiction, census data, the natural and the built environment—and a selection of secondary sources, we will focus on life in the city from the 18th into the 21st century. This semester, there will be a special focus on the history and experiences of New York’s African American, European immigrant, Chinese, and Latinx communities.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 200 and SOCI 200) Large numbers of students continue to drop out or disengage from American schools each year. Critical educational researchers have argued that many school practices, policies, and cultures “push out” the most marginalized students, or at the very least, do not take sufficient steps to create a culture of belonging. This course examines political, social, and institutional belonging as well as the conditions of schooling that prompt students’ formal and less formal forms of school disengagement. Drawing on theory and research from the fields of education, sociology, and ethnic studies, we will explore how educators and their community partners support students’ access to and engagement in education. We will examine educational reform practices that strive to cultivate a culture of belonging and community in schools. In particular, we will examine programs and schools that forefront community engagement, student participation, critical multicultural education, creative interventions, and restorative justice.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Visiting Professor Luschen.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2019, Spring 2023The goal of this course is to explain how our daily, social environment in the United States is constructed and shapes our lives. We will address such questions as why some succeed at school while others fail; what effect culture has on our behavior; why there are class, gender, and racial inequalities; how socialization takes place; and what role politics plays in our society. This course introduces students to these and other sociological topics as well as to dominant theories and methods used to make sense of such social phenomena. Students are encouraged to bring their own insights to class as we challenge common assumptions of these major issues that refer to all of us.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Dhingra.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 203 and SOCI 203) What do we understand about schools, teachers, and students through our engagement with popular culture? How do we interrogate youth clothing as a site of cultural expression and school-based control? How do race, class, and gender shape how youth make sense of and navigate cultural events such as the prom? Contemporary educational debates often position schools and popular culture as oppositional and as vying for youth's allegiance. Yet schools and popular culture overlap as educational sites in the lives of youth. In this course, we will employ feminist, critical race, and cultural studies perspectives to analyze representations of schooling and youth in popular culture. By doing so, we will consider the historically shifting meaning of youth, interrogate an oppositional stance to school and popular culture, and examine relationships of power and representation in educational sites. Readings, class discussions, and frequent film screenings will support our examination.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Luschen.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 204 and SOCI 202) How do race, immigration, and the state not only shape people’s access to resources but also delimit who belongs to the nation, self-conceptions, and personal relationships? How can ethnic minorities at times be “out-whiting whites” but still be denied full citizenship by the state? What does it mean to grow up within a culture but never fully identify with it? We will answer these questions and more by examining Asian Americans' efforts for belonging and social justice as full members of the United States. Substantive topics include how race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect to influence life chances; immigration laws and trends; how people form ethnic and racial identities while becoming “good Americans”; educational experiences of youth and so-called “Tiger parents”; how family and relationship formations are shaped by race and immigration; media portrayals; inter-minority solidarities and tensions.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Dhingra.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course explores the social and cultural history of sports in American society, focusing on the unique histories of sports such as hunting, soccer, basketball and football and, in particular, their relation to issues of race, ethnicity, and gender. Course materials will include a range of primary and secondary materials: archival photographs, academic monographs and journal articles, documentary films, legal documents, poetry and paintings. The course is discussion-based and includes short writing assignments, collaborative work, and a final exam.
Limited to 30 students. Preference given to American Studies majors and first-year students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Hayashi.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023Why were media and fans so surprised by NBA player Jeremy Lin's success? Asians have proven their athletic prowess well before Lin picked up a basketball. Similarly, why do observers of American football explain Pacific Islanders’ overrepresentation in college and professional football in terms of innate physical traits? Colonial expansion across the Pacific spread American economic and cultural influence, transforming native sporting practices and spurring a transnational flow of athletes, fans, and their communities. This dynamic explains, in part, the prominent role of Pacific Islanders in today’s NFL. Yet, significant societal barriers have limited the opportunities and visibility of Asian Pacific Americans in sport. In this course, we will study the diffusion of Western sports in Asia and across the Pacific, the development of Asian Pacific American sports in Hawai’i and the mainland, and the increasing transnational nature of sports to gain a greater appreciation for Asian Pacific American sports and its historical contexts. Students will conduct research on a related topic of their choice.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offeredThe course is an interdisciplinary, historically organized study of American perceptions of and attitudes towards the human body in a variety of media, ranging from medical and legal documents to poetry and novels, the visual arts, film, and dance. Among the topics to be discussed are the physical performance of gender; the social construction of the ideal male and female body; health reform movements; athletic achievement as an instrumentalization of the body; commercialization of physical beauty in the fitness and fashion industries; eating disorders as cultural phenomena; the interminable abortion controversy; the equally interminable conflict over pornography and the limits of free speech; and adaptations to the possibility of serious illness and to the certainty of death.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Couvares.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 216 and BLST 240 [CLA/US]) Who is an “Afro-Latino”? Are they Latinos or are they Black? Afro-Latinos are African-descended peoples from Latin America and the Caribbean who reside in the United States. In this course, a focus on Afro-Latinos allows us to study the history of racial ideologies and racial formation in the Americas.
We take a multi-layered approach to the study of modern Afro-Latino history (late nineteenth century to the twentieth century). First, the history of Afro-Latinos has been shaped by the historical relationship between race and nation in Latin America. Therefore, we look closely at the varied histories of African-descended peoples in Latin American countries. Second, the historical relationship between the United States and Latin America has shaped the experience of Afro-Latinos who reside in the U.S. The long history of U.S. economic dominance and military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean generated an equally long history of Latin American migration to the U.S. In the twentieth century black migrants came from nations that promoted myths of racial democracy to a nation that practiced racial segregation and violence. Afro-Latino migrants experienced racial segregation and violence in the U.S. in ways similar to but different than other Latinos and African Americans. Therefore, third, we examine the history of Afro-Latinos in relation to Latinos in the U.S. The history of Latinos is at the core of U.S. continental expansion, labor practices, and exclusionary citizenship. The category “Latino” has also been shaped by racial hierarchies. The relatively new category of “Afro-Latino” allows us to examine a history that has been silenced within the broader categories of “Latino” or “African American.”
In this course, we examine how Afro-Latinos maneuvered between different racial contexts in Latin American nations and the United States. It is a history that highlights the competing and conflicting racial ideologies that have shaped the Americas.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor del Moral.
2023-24: Not offered[Pre-1900] The United States has inscribed the separation of church and state into its constitutional order, and yet Americans have for two centuries been more deeply committed to religious faith and practice than any other people in the Western world. This course endeavors to explore that paradox. Topics addressed include the changing meanings of "the city on a hill"; the varieties of millennial belief and utopian community; the relationship between religion, ethnicity, and gender; religious political activism, including abolition, prohibition, anti-war and anti-abortion movements; and the limits of religious tolerance from movements against Catholics and Mormons to recent warnings of a "clash of civilizations" with Muslim cultures.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professors Couvares.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023This course examines archives as rich sites of meaning and memory. We will gain valuable research skills as we develop original projects, collaborate with community partners, and write archive stories. Scholarly readings will foreground the functions of archives and the labor of archivists; local and oral histories will situate specific collections in the Connecticut River Valley. A number of questions will guide our study: In what ways are archives constructed and contested spaces? How do collections shape, narrate, and silence the past? How can we think about archives in social, historical, and communal contexts? What types of stories can and do archives tell? We will work with staff in the Amherst College Special Collections as well as visit Wistariahurst Museum, the Holyoke Public Library, and the Sexual Minorities Archives in Holyoke.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course investigates the practice and ideal of community in America both on a national and a local level, asking students to develop concrete strategies for strengthening the public sphere and fostering community life. We will consider the nature and limits of democracy, the meaning of belonging, the experience of stigma and exclusion, the concepts of civic responsibility and public discourse, and the conflict and compromises inherent in political advocacy. The course will pay particular attention to the struggles of often-marginalized groups to build healthy and just communities. Coursework will include contemporary and historical case studies, literary depictions, and more theoretical readings, as well as a substantial commitment to the observation of civic life at the local level. We will attend: school committee meetings, community organizing strategy sessions, select board meetings, board meetings of local nonprofit organizations and community gatherings. We will bring what we learn from these sessions into our classroom discussions of how to build socially just communities at the local level. Each of you will develop a personal action plan for how you plan to be an active citizen in the near and the long term of your life.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Lecturer Mead.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, January 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2023From the advertising copy and backdrop of truck ads to the democratic rhetoric of politicians, the West as a place of national mythology still permeates American culture. In this course, we will analyze the evolution of the West as a prominent site of American myth and the contemporary representations of it in literature and film, the Neo-Westerns. Students will read works by authors such as Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Sherman Alexi, and Percival Everett, as well as view recent popular films by Ang Lee, Clint Eastwood, and John Sayles. The course will also include readings in history, as well as other disciplines, to contextualize the creative works and to gauge how the myth of the West compares to its reality and how truly revisionist its most current representations are.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Hayashi.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015, Spring 2019, Spring 2020(Offered as AMST 240 [Pre-1900] and SWAG 243) From Longfellow’s Hiawatha and D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature to Disney’s Pocahontas and more recently Moana to James Cameron’s Avatar, representations of the Indigenous as “Other” have greatly shaped cultural production in America as vehicles for defining the nation and the self. This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the broad field of Native American and Indigenous Studies, by engaging a range of texts from law to policy to history and literature as well as music and aesthetics. Film will also provide grounding for our inquiries. By keeping popular culture, representation, and the nature of historical narratives in mind, we will consider the often mutually constitutive relationship between American identity and Indian identity as we pose the following questions: How have imaginings of a national space and national culture by Americans been shaped by a history marked by conquest and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples? And, how have the myths of conquest become a part of education and popular representations to mask settler colonial policies and practices that seek to “erase in order to replace” the Native? This course also considers how categories like race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion have defined identities and changed over time with particular regards to specific Native American individuals and tribal nations. Students will be able to design their own final research project. It may focus on either a historically contingent or contemporary issue related to Native American people in the United States that is driven by a researchable question based on working with an Indigenous author’s writings from the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg (or KWE for short) collection of Native American Literature books in the archives of Amherst College.
Fall semester. Professor Vigil.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2023In recent years, Indigenous acts of resistance have opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the construction of oil pipelines, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. These anti-colonial struggles have their roots in Native communities and epistemologies. This course introduces students to critical theories for understanding Native responses to settler-colonialism, as “a structure, not an event,” through close examination of texts produced by a range of Native scholars and activists. Reading work by Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), Audra Simpson (Mohawk), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), and others, we will interrogate how the colonial state has developed in the United States and Canada and the diverse strategies used by Native nations to respond to this development. We’ll consider how Hawaiian movements for life, land, and sovereignty arose from grassroots initiatives and the ways that scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers have contributed to a Native Hawaiian resistance movement. We’ll also examine the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics by looking at work by scholars who use both literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. This course focuses on Native voices and theories to question and reframe thinking about Native epistemologies, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Classwork will involve seminar-style discussion, often facilitated by student leaders, to further unpack course readings, supplemental materials, and relevant current events. Students will produce short response papers that culminate in a final project which can take any form, including a performance, website, multimedia or other type of creative composition intended to reach a public audience.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 255 and HIST 255 [US]) This course explores the history of higher education in the United States from the nation’s formation to the present. Four themes are woven through a roughly chronological structure. First, readings outline the competing purposes Americans envisioned for colleges and universities. Students analyze debates between proponents of broad training in the liberal arts and supporters of more narrow occupational preparation as well as disagreements over the appropriate relationship between research and teaching. Second, the course explores student life, institutional access, and debates over the relationship between excellence and equity. Readings highlight patterns of exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender that have marked the history of American higher education since its earliest days while also exploring the varied forces that eventually diversified student populations. How universities served as sites where class was both produced and contested in American culture will be a particular focus of analysis. When addressing this theme, we will consider the post-World War II democratization of American higher education, the politics of college admissions, and stratification within and between post-secondary institutions. Third, the course raises questions about the power universities came to hold, in the half century following World War II, as centers of knowledge-making networks. We will examine how federal and philanthropic investment altered the role of the university in the twentieth century United States and created new types of expertise while also exploring how ties between the federal government, philanthropy, and the university affected late twentieth century social thought. Finally, the course explores universities as political sites, with a particular focus on the consequences of student activism in the 1960s–1970s and today. We will ask how university administrators responded to student critiques of the “multiversity”; how African American, Latino, women’s, and ethnic studies programs emerged; and how the demands of student activists altered research priorities, student life, and academic culture.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Lewis Sebring Visiting Professor L. Gordon.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 260 and SOCI 260) Whereas capital, culture, and commerce flow freely in contemporary capitalism, labor does not. Walls—physical, legal and cultural—aim to keep certain people in and “others” out. In this course we explore the sociological forces behind cross-border labor flows and the parallel reality of immigrant life. We focus specifically on the experience of Latinos in the United States. We pay special attention to the linkages between the demand and supply of Latino immigrant labor, social constructions of (il)legality, and the oft-overlooked privileged lifestyles that immigration supports. While this course has a deep theoretical rooting, we use daily immigrant life as the lens through which to explore migration.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Schmalzbauer.
2023-24: Not offeredThis research-intensive course focuses on the history of Jewish experience at Amherst College. Founded in 1821 as an institution for the “education of indigent young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry,” the college motto remains: Terras Irradient, “let them enlighten the lands.” Throughout the semester, we will ask: What did it mean for Jewish men—and later, women—to choose Amherst College? What was the quality of their experience once they arrived? What (if anything) distinguished their experience from other students? Course units will offer an historical overview of Jewish experience in higher education in the last hundred years. We will focus on the era of quotas, when Jewish students were excluded from elite schools; the proliferation and influence of Menorah Societies; the rise of Jewish fraternities; the radicalism of the 1960s; and the role of Hillel. This background will help us discern the ways Amherst Jewish experience aligns with or deviates from larger trends in American Jewish history. Over 75 Jewish alumni have shared their stories in written accounts. In addition to these valuable narratives, we will work with a range of primary materials in the Amherst College Archives; statistical data from the Office of Institutional Research; and materials from college periodicals and published accounts. Students will draw from these resources to produce a final essay of deeply researched institutional history.
Limited to 15 students. Students are encouraged to contact the professor prior to enrolling. Omitted 2019-20. Lecturer Bergoffen.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 280 and ENGL 273) In Penobscot author Joseph Nicolar's 1893 narrative, the Corn Mother proclaims, "I am young in age and I am tender, yet my strength is great and I shall be felt all over the world, because I owe my existence to the beautiful plant of the earth." In contrast, according to one Iowa farmer, from the 2007 documentary "King Corn," "We aren't growing quality. We're growing crap." This course aims to unpack depictions like these in order to probe the ways that corn has changed in its significance within the Americas. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, students will be introduced to critical theories and methodologies from American Studies as they study corn's shifting role, across distinct times and places, as a nourishing provider, cultural transformer, commodity, icon, and symbol.
Beginning with the earliest travels of corn and her stories in the Americas, students will learn about the rich histories, traditions, narratives, and uses of "maize" from indigenous communities and nations, as well as its subsequent proliferation and adaptation throughout the world. In addition to literary and historical sources students will engage with a wide variety of texts (from material culture to popular entertainment, public policy and genetics) in order to deepen their understanding of cultural, political, environmental, and economic changes that have characterized life in the Americas.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professors Brooks and Vigil.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST-296, BLST-296 [D] and SWAG-296). This course explores the transnational politics of race, gender, sexuality, and health from interdisciplinary perspectives. It engages a range of texts and methodologies that locate the historical and contemporary experiences of Afro-disaporic women and girls in the struggle for embodied freedom, autonomy, and reproductive justice. We will draw on examples from Africa and the African diaspora (U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America) as we engage the main debates in reproductive justice around key issues: sexual and reproductive health and rights; HIV/AIDS; sexual autonomy and choice; sterilization; police brutality; the right to bear children; abortion. The course will also introduce students to theories about health and illness, embodiment and subjectivity, critical race theory, ethnography, black feminist theory, and postcolonial health science studies. Class field trips to reproductive justice organizations will also provide an experiential component that grounds our inquiries.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Visiting Instructor Jolly.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 302 and SOCI 302) This course is an in-depth exploration of the increasing global interconnectedness of economic, political, and social processes, what many have come to call “globalization.” We begin by developing a sociological critique of the relationship between inequality, post-World War II global capitalism, and the neoliberal ideology that underlies it. We do this through study of the major institutions and actors that endorse and perpetuate global capitalism. We then explore case studies which critically examine how contemporary globalization is playing out in daily life via experiences of labor, consumption, family and community. We dedicate the last part of the course to investigating diverse examples of grassroots resistance to the current capitalist order. As we strive to achieve a complex analysis of globalization, we will be challenged to grapple seriously with issues of power and social justice and to reflect on our own social positions within an increasingly intricate global web. In accordance, we will focus throughout the course on how intersections of race, class, gender and citizenship influence the human experience of globalization.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Schmalzbauer.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 305, SOCI 305 and SWAG 305) In this course we draw from sociology, anthropology, and geography to explore the gendered dynamics and experiences of Latino migration to the United States. We begin by situating gendered patterns of migration in the context of contemporary globalization and relating them to social constructions of gender. Next we look at experiences of settlement, analyzing the role of women’s and men’s networks in the process of migration, especially in terms of employment and survival strategies. We also analyze how specific contexts of reception influence the gender experience of settlement. For example, how does migration to rural areas differ from migration to traditional urban migration hubs, and how does gender influence that difference? We then look at Latino family formation, paying special attention to the experiences of transnational mothers and fathers, those who have left children behind in their home countries in the process of migration. Finally, we explore the relationship between migration and sexuality.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Schmalzbauer.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 308 and SOCI 308) The relationship between girls’ empowerment and education has been and continues to be a key feminist issue. For instance, second wave liberal feminist approaches sought to make schools more equitable through equal access to educational resources for girls and the elimination of gender discrimination. Yet the relationship between gender and schooling remains a complex site of research and policy.
In this course we will examine how various feminist perspectives have defined and addressed the existence of gender inequality in American schools. We will begin by examining theories that address the production of gendered experiences within the context of U.S. schools and classrooms. Utilizing an intersectional approach, we will explore how the production of gender identities in educational contexts is shaped by the realities of our race, class, ethnic, and sexual identities. We will draw on empirical research and theory to analyze pedagogies, policies, and programs that have been developed to address gender inequality and schooling, including those that address fluid notions of gender. Students will complete the course with a complex view of feminism and an understanding of how feminist approaches have shaped the debates within gender and educational reform.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Visiting Professor Luschen.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 320 and BLST 332) Throughout this course we will consider the "crossroads," marked by an X, as a visual and symbolic point of intersection with undefined meaning and the potential for fateful outcomes. Reading literary and historical texts students will consider how the crossroads X carries specific meanings for an Afro-Native literary tradition. We will bring Scott Lyons's theory of the X mark, as the signature Native people placed on treaties, to issues of coercion and consent in African American literature and history. Thus, this course focuses on texts that speak in a triple voice, inflected by echoes of a Native American oral tradition, flashes of African American vernacular culture, and forms and techniques adapted from various models of modern Western literature. Students will read literary works as well as primary and secondary historical sources that point to the sometimes powerful and also fraught intersections of Black and Indian histories in the United States from the nineteenth century to the decades following the Civil Rights and Black and Red Power movements. Topics of particular attention include land and politics, history and identity, and gender and sexuality. We will also focus on themes of race, place, family, and belonging. Some of the authors featured in this course are Tiya Miles, Craig Womack, Lauret Savoy, LeAnne Howe, and Michael Dorris. In addition to active participation in seminar discussions, students will write a series of short papers in response to the readings and conduct short research assignments.
Omitted 2019-20. Professor Vigil.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 326 and SOCI 326) This course focuses on Latino immigrant youth and the children of Latino immigrants who are coming of age in the contemporary United States, what social scientists have termed the “new second generation.” Currently this generation is the fastest-growing demographic of children under 18 years of age. The majority of youth in the “new second generation” are Latino.
Drawing on sociological and anthropological texts, fiction, and memoir, we will explore the social factors, historical legacies, and policies that in large part shape the lived experiences of Latino youth. We begin by laying a historical and theoretical base for the course, exploring the notions of assimilation and transnationalism. We then move into an exploration of the intersecting contexts of inequality which contextualize daily life for the new second generation. Specifically we investigate how social class, race, gender, and “illegality” intersect with generation to shape the struggles, opportunities, identities and aspirations of Latino youth.
Requisite: Previous course(s) in SOCI, ANTH, AMST, BLST or LLAS. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Schmalzbauer.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course examines the construction of Asian American identity from the late 1800s to the present day by examining literary texts and legal texts and how they have shaped definitions of distinct Asian ethnicities and panethnic identities. We will explore how Asians in America have been defined in the law and literary arts and how work in these distinct spheres of American life—law and literature—have been in conversation. We will focus on such issues as immigration, citizenship, and civil rights and their relation to Asian American identity. Readings will include fiction, drama, poetry, literary criticism, legal cases, legal codes and statutes, legal studies and history, and ethnic studies. Coursework will include essays, oral presentations, and a research project.
Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2019-20. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is a workshop-format class designed for students interested in creative nonfiction writing projects that entail significant original research. The first part of the course will involve reading, analyzing and discussing recently published works of creative nonfiction and discussing research methodology. The rest of the semester will be devoted to students researching, drafting, and discussing their projects in workshop.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Students will be asked to submit a 5-10 page writing sample. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Hayashi.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 345 and SOCI 345) The United States has long struggled with challenges created by the need to absorb ethnic and racial minorities. In the face of seemingly intractable problems, one solution has been to designate a “model minority,” which then appears to divert attention from the society at large. Earlier in the twentieth century, Jewish Americans played this role; today, Asian Americans are the focus. This course examines specific instances in which Jewish Americans and Asian Americans both embraced and rejected the model minority stereotype. Course units will also examine the underside of the model minority stereotype, quotas imposed to limit access to education and employment as well as social and legal actions taken in response to such restrictions. The course will feature a range of materials, including plays, fiction, journalism, and visual works. Students will read scholarship in the fields of American Studies, Sociology, History, and Critical Race Studies.
Fall semester. Limited to 25 students. McCloy Visiting Professor Odo and Lecturer Bergoffen.
2023-24: Not offeredThis seminar examines six major events that fundamentally impacted the history of Asians in the United States. Several of them involved egregious actions by the US government that prompted official apologies from later administrations, the only such cases in American history: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942. The others include Asian Americans and the Cold War, the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 70s, and the Model Minority Paradigm, 1960s to the Present. Throughout, we examine the ways in which memory is made or obscured and the ways in which public history institutions, especially the important national agencies, including the Smithsonian, the National Park Service, Library of Congress, and the National Archives along with documentaries, historic landmarks, and websites, have played a role in public understandings of the events included in this course.
Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. McCloy Visiting Professor Odo.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as AMST 374 and HIST 374 [US]) In the largest incidence of forced removal in American history, the U.S. incarcerated 120,000 people of Japanese descent during WWII, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. Preceded by half a century of organized racism, the attack on Pearl Harbor provided justification for imprisonment of an entire ethnic group solely on the basis of affiliation by “blood.” At the same time, Japanese Americans served in the U.S. military with extraordinary distinction, earning recognition in the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe as the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in American military history. Thousands more served in the Military Intelligence Service using their knowledge of the Japanese language as a “secret weapon” against the Japanese Empire. We will examine the historical background leading to these events and Japanese American resistance to official actions including the cases of Yasui, Hirabayashi, Korematsu, and Endo which reached the U.S. Supreme Court. We will also explore the imposition of the draft upon men behind barbed wire and those who became draft resisters. We will also trace the post-war rise of movements to gain redress, successful with President Reagan’s signing of HR 442 in 1988, and the extraordinary rise of memorials and museums commemorating incarceration and memory-making.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. McCloy Visiting Professor Odo.
2023-24: Not offeredIndependent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024This course aims to provide a "how to" of American Studies from an integrative, multiracial, and socio-cultural perspective. It also takes on the task of surveying the development of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field, while paying attention to the theoretical concerns and bodies of work that have influenced American Studies scholars over the last half century. Students will be exposed to and experiment with a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, gain a working competence in debates and approaches, and study a range of materials—visual, literary, print, digital, audio—via a traditionally interdisciplinary American Studies praxis. In the process they will develop rhetorical analyses, gather ethnographic data, and do close readings of assorted texts, spaces, and buildings. We will read the recent American Studies: A User's Guide by Philip J. Deloria and Alexander I. Olson, in addition to several model monographs that represent central issues in studies of American culture and history and will learn library research, archival research, and legal research skills. Students will complete a "work-in-progress" presentation as part of a public mini-conference, as well as an annotated bibliography, and a research prospectus.
Limited to 18 students. Open to juniors and seniors as a research seminar; or with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Vigil.
Other 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, Fall 2023, Spring 2025A one-semester project—either a shorter essay or some other form of independent interdisciplinary research and production. The capstone project serves as the grounds for a comprehensive evaluation of each student's achievement in the major.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024Spring semester. The Department.
Other 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 2023, Spring 2025