American Studies

One of the key features of postmodernist thinking is the assertion of the fuzzy boundaries between reality and fiction: the realization that in everyday lives fictions, projections or hypothesis-building constantly interact with objects and facts of life (you can call this constructivist thinking); the realization that people’s identities are negotiations between social demands and imaginary projects; the realization that people’s senses of reality are heavily influenced by certain hegemonic (dominating) posits in terms of gender, labor (and consumption), media, race and ethnicity. Brian McHale has characterized the resultant tensions, as they are enacted in literature as “worlds in collision.” Cinema, as an art of montage and suturing, seems predetermined to enact these clashes. In this seminar we will explore the fuzzy boundaries discussing postmodern obsessions such as identities, surfaces, worlds, play, parody, high & low, consumer culture, media, gender performances and difference.

This course discusses politics, society, and culture through the history of the United States, focusing on the socially vulnerable in US. history. The course aims to see the United States from a broader perspective as well as multiple angles.

This course provides a broad survey of contemporary methods, approaches, and thematic concerns within the expansive and internally differentiated field of Critical Geography, emphasizing its stakes for grappling with a “long twentieth century” (in Giovanni Arrighi’s words) profoundly shaped by the rise and fall of U.S. hegemony. How might questions of space, time, and cartography need to be rethought, not only in the twilight of the historical period Henry Luce famously dubbed “the American Century,” but in light of the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the geological force of humanity threatens to unfold across a timescale that exceeds even human existence? How might a critical geographic imagination illuminate the uneven prospects and perils of this time of uncertainty and transition? In exploring such questions, we will engage Marxist, feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, posthuman, environmentalist, affective, and abolitionist geographical traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Natchee Blu Barnd, Neil Smith, Katherine McKittrick, Anna Tsing, André Mesquita, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lauren Berlant, among others.

Short stories are sometimes revised into longer texts. This can happen for various reasons, ranging from aesthetic refinements to commercial considerations (for instance, the 1950s trend to rework multiple science fiction short stories published in genre magazines into “fix-ups” so as to capitalize on an expanding book market). This seminar will address a selection of American short stories from the second half of the 20th century and their subsequent adaptation, expansion, or incorporation into novel or novel-like formats. Analyzing the individual texts and the changes they undergo from one version to the next will enable us to consider issues of form, genre, narrative, and intertextuality. Texts will include The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1950); Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin, 1953); Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966); Tracks (Louise Erdrich, 1988), and Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1995/2017).

Since at least the 1980s gender has been considered a "useful category of historical research." In this class we will use this lens in order to understand major events and developments in U.S. history. By focusing on gender as a relation of power in social contexts we will explore changing images of masculinity and femininity as well as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In addition to that, we will also discuss intersectional connections to other categories of identification (e.g. race and class).

This course explores why it is that the coming of age narrative is such an enduring form in US culture. It covers a range of different modes, including autobiography, fiction, film, and music and crosses over the past two centuries to capture the varied historical experience of entering into adulthood within the United States. It has a particular interest in identities, selves, and experiences whose testimonies are antagonistic to the developmental objectives of the genre in its most canonical renderings. Students are also encouraged to reflect on their own experience at university—their own coming of age tale—in order to elucidate and theorize the central critical issues of the course. 

This course examines the complex richness of 'Americanness'. Divided into historically grounded modules (Race; Religion; Gender; Politics; Region), the course will approach each from a variety of angles: the historiographical, the literary, the cultural, the political, the cinematic. It will open lines of interrelation between historical and imaginary forms in the construction and ongoing redefinition of the United States.

This course offers a critical introduction to United States history from the end of World War I to the present day. It is made up of four thematic sections which focus on: the state and political development; gender and sexuality; the US and the world; and race and ethnicity. The course focuses on historiographical questions that occupy scholars and interrogate change and continuity in political and social ideology during the 20th and 21st centuries. 

American sports culture frequently serves as an example of an alleged American exceptionalism; a fact that a relative indifference towards soccer, the exceptional “big four” pro sports leagues, and collegiate sports culture (NCAA) seemingly underline. This course sets out to make sense of and (maybe) trouble the narrative of American exceptionalism by examining the history of modern sports in the United States. We will consider the aesthetic, social, cultural, and political factors that contributed to the development and practice of sports from roughly the middle of the 19th century into our current age. The class will approach sports history with a focus on the relationship between sports and society, i.e. the role that sports has played in shaping ideology and informing popular thought, for example in the context of nationhood and globalization, but also with regard to modern discourses of health and fitness. The ultimate goal of this course is to encourage critically looking at, thinking, and writing about sports as everyday practice and as a professional field, as connected to discourses of health and (the pursuit of) happiness, as media event and content, and as a prominent repository of liberal narratives of meritocracy.