American Studies

This seminar explores several different historical approaches to the abolition of slavery in North America. Abolitionism, centered in the North, was led by social reformers, such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and writers like John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Black activists included former slaves such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and free Blacks alike. In the South, black activists of the Underground Railroad helped slaves escape to the North, Canada, and Mexico. Former slaves ran this secret organization like Harriet Tubman, free African Americans, and white supporters who facilitated the flight of roughly 40,000 people over two decades. At about the same time, religious abolitionists such as the Gileadites took up armed resistance and fought during “bleeding Kansas” against the interests of the slaveowners. The Civil War ended slavery officially, but its effects on the American nation linger on until today.

When thinking of US-Japanese history, the words usually coming to mind are Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Okinawa. But beyond their violent clash in World War II, both countries share a fascinating historical relationship dating back to the 1850s. This seminar introduces the major events, developments, and dynamics that have shaped this relationship from the mid-19th century until the Cold War. The course investigates issues of diplomacy, trade, migration, war, and cultural transmission to show how closely the histories of both countries have been intertwined and shaped by one another.

This course explores some of the relationships between ethnicity, migration, imperialism, place, race, technology, and modernisms in US artistic and literary culture from the turn of the 20th century through to the 1930s. The period under question includes cultural responses to the fallout of late 19th-century governmental Americanisation projects; competing claims for the ‘new’; responses to the Great Depression and New Deal state interventions; and the development of an American modernist aesthetic avant-garde. Students focus on four points of activity: New Mexico, the Mid-West, Paris, and New York. In each case students look at written texts within an interdisciplinary approach that learns from looking at painting and photography, journalism and the world of ‘little magazines’, new styles of dance and, of course, jazz.