American Studies

This course reviews and analyzes various aspects of economic inequality. Household heterogeneities related to credit restrictions, indebtedness, or marginal propensities to consume out of different sources of income or wealth are important to explain aggregate consumption behavior. Measures that directly aim to affect inequality at the aggregate level, such as wealth taxes, inheritance taxes etc., are often perceived as detrimental to economic efficiency. The course discusses key concepts of the economics discipline such as economic efficiency and welfare as they often are building blocks for economic advice on policy measures. This course sheds light on the trade-offs and distributional consequences of macroeconomic policies and trains students to explicitly articulate the underlying value assumptions. Students should have introductory knowledge in economics and statistics.

This course is designed to provide a comprehensive description and analysis of contemporary United States of America and help the learners to know better about America's current development and the possible future.

This course takes a closer look at some of the historical developments that have shaped North American literature and culture, and have been shaped by them in turn. The course also addresses the question of how an understanding of history is informed by one's standpoint as well as social hierarchies more generally. Some of the topics the course discusses include the ongoing significance of settler colonialism; slavery and its afterlives; the American Revolution; the constitution of the United States; abolitionism; feminism; U.S. imperialism; the Civil Rights Movement, Indigenous rights movements; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the historical roots of the Trump presidency. The course foregrounds an understanding of ongoing historiographical debates and methods of interpreting primary sources.

This interdisciplinary course explores the place of the supernatural in American history and culture from the beginnings of English settlement in North America through the current era. It explores the ways in which the “original sins” of American history, such as the enslavement of African-Americans and the dispossession of Native Americans, have been understood through the figures of ghosts, monsters, and spirits, and how the recurrence of such figures over centuries reflects the novelist William Faulkner’s claim that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”