American Studies

This course introduces key concepts and methods in the study of American society, culture, and history through the lens of science fiction film and television. How do cultural works mediate the historical development of state power, categories of social difference, and our everyday understandings of political belonging and conflict?

The study focuses on prominent works of American science fiction: The Twilight Zone (1960, 1961), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Blade Runner (1982), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Get Out (2017). These primary source materials will anchor our critical engagement with keywords in American Studies scholarship: nation, America, immigration, globalization, ethnicity, Orientalism, Asian, whiteness, white, Black, empire, state, racialization, diversity, and labor. Altogether, this course will familiarize us with the ideas that matter most for studying the United States through social, cultural, and political economic perspectives, while developing an analytical toolkit for narrative and film that you can use in a range of academic settings.

Students in this course should expect to watch one film every two weeks and to read five to 15 pages of American Studies scholarship every week. Students with or without prior study in American history and culture are welcome to take this class.

The course examines key themes in the history of black nationalism in America from the 19th century until the mid-1970s, with some attention to post-1970s developments. Key issues include defining black nationalism, examining bases of support, and explaining the shifting appeal of black nationalism. Accordingly the course investigates different forms of black nationalism, including racial solidarity, cultural nationalism, religious nationalism, and pan-africanism.
 

This course introduces students to a variety of scholarly contributions and concepts used for the analysis of American culture. It focuses on different media and forms of cultural representation including film and TV. Addressed are theories on representation and signs, discourse and power, memory and time, race and privilege, gender and queer studies, and class and popular culture. Students reflect critically on the ways these theories are engaged in the production of knowledge about symbolic and material practices.

The course will deal with the involvement of Jews as a group and as individuals in the civic and political life of the United States, during the period since 1920. The course will be given in English. The students will learn about the complex character of civic participation in a changing American political landscape, in which Jews have expressed their interests and taken part in the discourse of political events and public affairs.

The course introduces students to the extraordinary range of American poetry in the first half of the 20th century, which includes, for example, the radical experiments of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams; the conservative modernism of Robert Frost; the European-oriented neo-classicism of T.S. Eliot and H.D.; the cerebral playfulness of Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens; the political daring and earnestness of Muriel Rukeyser; the marriage of avant-garde irreverence with a democratic openness to popular culture (cinema, jazz) represented by Langston Hughes; or the subtle social, sexual and racial awareness to be found in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks.

This course explores the long history of oratorical performance in the USA, from presidential speeches to University debates, from Native American orature to political activism. In so doing, students are introduced to the necessary tools to understand and critique the rhetorical choices of a range of speakers; to analyze the specific historical and cultural factors that give rise both to the speeches they encounter and the rhetorical choices of their delivery; and to a range of key historical and political events in the life of the USA as well as the range of activists and advocates that give voice to them.