American Studies

This course offers a productive and student-centered entry point to studying, understanding, and appreciating the American cultural mosaic through the (hi)stories that Americans have been telling themselves in an ongoing process of defining who they are—and, who they are not—vis-à-vis other cultural communities. It is through these narrative (hi)stories that first contact is often made not only with American identities, values, and mores, but also historical events and/or eras, ideological fault lines, and social (in)equalities. The course advances students’ understanding of specific American eras, historical contexts, locales, themes, issues, and fault lines through popular cultural "texts," ranging from literary texts and music to film, television, and video games.

The course analyses selected American literary works from the mid-17th century to today. The texts include fiction, poetry, traditional autobiographies as well as hybrid forms. Discussions will focus on aspects such as "truth", gender, race, ethnicity and morals.

This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing, and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, students look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender, and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering, and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.

The course examines the significance of cultural heritage and cultural memory in the United States in historical and contemporary perspectives. It centers on questions about identity, nationalism, politics, and commercialism, how history has been represented in for example monuments, museums, commemorations, political debates, and popular culture, as well as the conflicts that regularly occur in the United States around questions of cultural memory and heritage.

Cuba, the "Pearl of the Antilles" had long been the heartpiece of imperial aspirations. One of the last Spanish colonies after the revolutions in South and Central America, it played a defining role in Spanish imperial identity. Meanwhile in the US, intellectuals had argued all throughout the 19th century that the island was a natural extension to the Nation, and should be conquered as a logical conclusion to the Monroe Doctrine. When after the war of 1898 the island came into American hands, Spain fell into a deep crisis of identity. The United States though took its first steps into the arena of colonial world politics, in turn becoming an empire. All the while, the Cuban’s desire for independence became a mere footnote in the aftermath. The colonial and imperial struggles had another dimension to them: Gender. A common propaganda theme in the US depicted the Spaniards as raping Cuba. While Theodore Roosevelt and his "Rough Riders" came to define the ideal American masculinity after the war, Spaniards questioned if they were still manly enough to belong to the club of civilized European nations. This seminar will follow three objectives: First, understanding the importance of Cuba to Spain and the United States before the war of 1898, as well as the events leading up to the war. Second, comparing the ascent of the American Empire with the decline of the Spanish Empire. Third, introducing the analytical category of gender as a tool to understanding geopolitical conflicts in the age of colonialism.

This course explores the relationship between the natural world and United States culture, considering specifically the visual expression of that relationship: How have Americans imagined “nature” and represented it? How have concepts of land and landscape shaped perceptions about social order, identity, and sustainability? The course provides both a historical framework for thinking about these questions as well as a contemporary perspective, particularly in the context of a potential new era known as the “Anthropocene.” 

This course provides students with an introduction to the anthropological study of the USA, incorporating perspectives on a variety of topics and regions, and referring to research carried out at a range of historical moments. It provides a grounding in key debates. It shows how ethnographic work carried out in the US has influenced the discipline of anthropology. The course takes a (self)-critical look at what area-based foci of study do. Those teaching the course draw from rich ethnographies and from their own fieldwork experiences in the US.

The so-called “Marshall Plan” was only a four-year-program, and yet, it looms large in public memory, especially in Western Europe. This is not a coincidence: The influence that the US government had on the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II came not only in the form of financial investments or material aid. The European Recovery Program (ERP) has also been considered ‘the largest single propaganda operation… ever seen in peacetime’ (Ellwood 2010, 113). This seminar is centered around questions like: What is the image that the US wanted to project during the Marshall Plan years, and why? What did these images, of the US, of Europe, and of the other, look like and how were they perceived? The seminar will be divided into two parts. Part I provides a historical and conceptual frame: It examines the motives behind Marshall Plan ‘aid' and traces the image of the US as ‘a benevolent nation’ (McCrisken and Pepper 2005, 89). Further, it introduces students to historical debates and perceptions of Americanization, and contrasts different conceptualizations of influence, ranging from cultural imperialism to ‘cultural transfer’ (Gienow-Hecht (2000), ‘Westernization’ (Nehring 2004), or ‘soft power’ (Nye 2004). Part II of the seminar will be dedicated to the actual (graphic) images that the US produced during the Marshall Plan years, especially propaganda films. Building on concepts and methods developed in the field of Visual Culture, students will learn to “read” images as primary sources and interpret them within the historical frame of the early Cold War.

This course interrogates the resilient power of racism in American history from the founding of the United States to the recent past. Students survey African American history from slavery through the Civil Rights era, broadly defined, and to more contemporary struggles. Students embed this history in the larger sweep of American history, covering topics such as plantation slavery, abolitionism and emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the "New Negro," the long Civil Rights Movement, and the age of recent presidents. Students discuss the legacy of prominent African-American thinkers, activists, and political leaders, as well as the perspectives of ordinary black men and women. 

The course examines current problems in contemporary American politics. It focuses on a number of themes such as political polarization, demographics, class, religion, voter turnout, election campaigns, and foreign politics. The themes can vary from semester to semester.