Spring 2008
Undergraduate Courses
Dystopian Sci Fi Movies GTA Jake DaSilva (One hour)
101-001: MWF 12:00-12:50 Course meets 1/09/08-2/13/08
101-002: MWF 12:00-12:50 Course meets 2/20/07-04/02/08
What does our future hold? A nation run by rappers, pornographers, and professional wrestling champions? Will we face catastrophic nuclear holocaust? Are we spiraling into oblivion of devolution or idiocy? Could an unchecked microbe ravage the human race turning us into mutant vampiric zombies? Is the end of the world going to get here soon enough? To find answers to these questions we will explore dystopian, doomsdayist, and apocalyptic film and literature.
Hippies, God & Rock GTA Foster Rakestraw (One Hour)
102-001: MWF 11:00-11:50 Course meets 1/09/08-2/13/08
102-002: MWF 11:00-11:50 Course meets 2/20/07-04/02/08
The 1960s counterculture formed a unique group of religious fanatics in the 1970s and 1980s with the Jesus Movement, the formation of cults, and a turn to Eastern religions. What caused hippies to turn to God and religion? What were the results? In this class, we will discuss the different groups that formed and their motivations. We will look at the music of the period including Keith Green, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and more – looking at their evolution as the artists and the hints that can be found in their lyrics of their values, beliefs, and goals – plus their impact on their audiences. We will discuss central figures of the period that influenced the move to religion like Timothy Leary and other more conventional evangelical leaders. We will discover how God, drugs, sex, politics, and rock and roll all came together to form a new and different piece of American culture.
Reading Sex & the City GTA Portia Barker (One Hour)
103-001: MWF 1:00-1:50 Course meets 1/09/08-2/13/08
103-002: MWF 1:00-1:50 Course meets 2/20/07-04/02/08
This course examines the cultural significance of the HBO series Sex and the City using an American Studies approach. By analyzing the content of the show, scholarly articles, and TV culture of the late nineties, students will assess the roles third wave feminism, elitism, sexuality, fashion, and the city of New York play within the series in an effort to determine why this cult phenomenon took place.
151-001 World, Nation, Regions Three hours
(Lecture MWF 10:00-10:50) Professor Edward Tang/Team
This course offers a broad survey of American culture formed by global, national, and regional influences. The first section, “World,” looks at the United States as a product and shaper of global movements, ideas, and cultures from 1500 to the present. The second section, “Nation,” examines the creation of a distinctly American identity between 1790 and 1890 that ultimately incorporated and reflected global issues. The third section, “Regions,” focuses on the South and other regions as contributors to and consequences of national and global interactions. Team-taught by the entire AMS faculty, lectures will include topics on film, music, literature, art, sports, and other cultural artifacts.
200-001 Twilight Zone Culture Three hours
(TR 12:30-1:45) Mr. Larry Fagen
Screenings of 1950s and early 1960s video taped episodes of the television science fiction anthology series “The Twilight Zone, created by Rod Serling, supplemented by selected readings, will develop an understanding of the cultural background for this show’s many- faceted offerings. Serling knew he could use the more fantastic elements of science fiction to address the issues that plagued America: Bigotry, racism, prejudice, nuclear war, ethics, anti-intellectualism, loneliness, mental health, and conformity. He had said, "You know, you can put these words into the mouth of a Martian and get away with it. If it was a Republican or Democrat they couldn't say it."
201-001 Intro to African American Studies Three hours
(TR 11:00-12:15) Professor DoVeanna Fulton
American Studies/African American Studies 201 provides a basic outline of the diversity and complexity of the African American experience in the United States. Using African American socio-cultural history as our point of departure, we will undertake a chronological examination of what we have come to recognize as the discipline of African American Studies. Attention to literature, essays, history, popular culture (music, television, magazines, newspapers, movies, film documentaries), and politics will allow us to explore and interrogate critical discourses shaping and shaped by African American life and culture.
204-001/002 Western Lives Three hours
(001-MWF 9:00-9:50) Mr. Larry Fagen
(002-MWF 11:00-11:50)
This course introduces the salient themes, principal issues, and central developments of the American West both as lived experience and constructed myth. Few subjects in all the American experience loom so large, carry such weight, or provoke the kind of passion that this one does. Fewer still embrace the totality or the complexity of America as idea and experience on anything like its scale. Throughout the term, we’ll examine several key western lives, some real, others imagined, and some that are a little of each, as a way of confronting such crucial themes and concepts as “westering,” “frontier,” “pioneer,” “conquest,” “progress,” “success, ” “individualism,” “equality,” and “democracy,” among others. AMS 204 is a lecture/discussion course, which requires student preparation and participation.
205-001 Working Lives (HU) Three hours
(TR 9:30—10:45) Mr. Larry Fagan
Work is one of the aspects that most shapes individual lives. Who we are (and what we believe about our life) helps to shape what work an individual chooses. The work then further shapes who the individual becomes. This course will use a variety of autobiographies, oral histories, fictional and non- fictional sources to explore these questions. We will use written narratives, music, and films to consider the role of work in individual lives—both on and off “the job.”
222-001 Modern Gay America Three hours
(TR 12:30-1:45) Instructor Joshua Burford
This course will focus on the emergence of the GLBT community in 20th century American Culture. We will look at the ways in which Gay culture developed from a collection of men and women hiding their lives in fear, to a post-Stonewall liberation culture of increased visibility. We will look at the many ways GLBT identity developed in the 20th century by exploring the intersections of science, religion, popular culture, politics, and urbanization on GLBT people. Because the experience of GLBT individuals is so varied, we will use a variety of media to create patterns and connections between this diverse community. We will read biography, watch films, read novels, listen to music, and look at a collection of primary documents to illuminate the vast experience of what it is like to be Gay in modern American Culture. This class is designed to be an introduction to the study of GLBT culture, and students at all levels are invited to participate in the discussion of where this community has been and where it will go in the 21st century.
271-001 Film & Culture (HU) Three hours
(T 2:00-4:30/R 2:00-3:15) Professor Stacy Morgan
This course will offer an interdisciplinary investigation of American culture through selected motion pictures and accompanying texts. For spring 2006, the course will focus on ways in which writers, directors, and performers have utilized various types of crime films as a vehicle to explore larger social questions pertaining to race, gender, class, the family, cultural assimilation, and social justice. Course requirements will include weekly film screenings, student presentations, and regular written work.
326-001 20th Century West (HU) Three hours
(TR 9:30-10:45) Professor Rich Megraw
This lecture/discussion course examines the growth of the American West during the 20th century as both the embodiment of modernity and, as mythic imagination, an escape from the very modernity it represents.
332-001 Popular Culture (HU) Three hours
(TR 11:00-12:15) Professor Stacy Morgan
This course offers a selective survey & analysis of 20th century U.S. popular culture: more specifically, comic books, television, music, sports, & fan culture. By placing these materials within a social history context, the course will examine ways in which popular culture has reflected & shaped such aspects of American society as gender ideologies, economics, race, and regional identity.
340-001 Women in the South Three hours
(MW 2:00-3:15) Professor Micki McElya
This course will examine cultural representations of and/or by southern women from 1900 to the present, paying particular attention to the interconnectedness of gender, race, class, sexuality, and region. We will consider multiple representational strategies, their histories and contexts, and their social, political, and economic impacts. The class draws upon a variety of texts, including historical and theoretical work, visual arts, music, material culture, fiction, and documentary and feature film.
486-001 American Experience II Three hours
(TR 2:00-3:15) Professor Lynne Adrian
This is a lecture/discussion class geared towards graduate students, American Studies majors, and American Studies minors; it is designed to give students an overall view of the transitions in American cultural, social, and intellectual history over the past 150 years. In order to do so, it will focus on major themes and transformations of society. These will include the transition from a society agriculturally based to one industrially based, and then to one based in service and information. It will also trace the rise of urbanization, the changing ethnic and institutional composition of American society, and the rise of the consumer culture. In all of these topics, questions of race, gender, and ethnicity will be carefully considered, since these factors are always important in defining the American Experience. We will also consistently ask questions such as which social groups hold power, what kinds of power and influence they have, what means they use to exercise both, and how and to what extent each identifiable social group's ideas, values, behavior, and purposes permeates, dominate, and redirect our culture and society.
491-001 SEMINAR: THE 1950s Three hours
(M 2:00-4:30) Professor James Salem
This is an interdisciplinary seminar that is intended to probe American culture in a period framed roughly by external actions (the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945) and internal ones (the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963). The period represented by the Fifties is a much maligned decade. The Placid Decade it has been called, The Age of Consensus and Conformity, a boring period in which "nothing was going on." A contemporary joke went: "Have you heard about the Eisenhower doll? You wind it up and it doesn't do anything for eight years." Youth of the 50s were said to be innocent, aloof, and apathetic, but these were the youth who demanded black music, rejected traditional mainstream culture, invented Rock & Roll, established a national, adolescent, Youth Culture, and revealed the hypocrisy between what American society professed and how it actually operated.
Graduate Courses
531 Studies in Popular Culture Three hours
(TR 11:00-12:15) Professor Stacy Morgan
This course offers a selective survey & analysis of 20th century U.S. popular culture: more specifically, comic books, television, music, sports, & fan culture. By placing these materials within a social history context, the course will examine ways in which popular culture has reflected & shaped such aspects of American society as gender ideologies, economics, race, and regional identity.
535 Gender and Culture Three hours (MW 2:00-3:15) Professor Micki McElya
This course will explore gender and culture as categories of critical and historical analysis. Engaging a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, we will examine how these categories are produced and contested over time while paying particular attention to the intersections of gender constructions and identities with race, sexuality, class, region, and nation. We will analyze a variety of modes of representation, including: documentary and feature film, literature, material culture, visual cultures, and historical and theoretical works.
537 Studies in the West Three hours
(TR 9:30-10:45) Professor Rich Megraw
This lecture/discussion course examines the growth of the American West during the 20th century as both the embodiment of modernity and, as mythic imagination, an escape from the very modernity it represents.
586 American Experience II Three hours
(TR 2:00-3:15) Professor Lynne Adrian
This is a lecture/discussion class designed to give students an overall view of the transitions in American cultural, social, and intellectual history over the past 150 years. It will focus on major themes and transformations of society including the transition from agriculturally too industrially to service and information based society; the rise of urbanization; changing ethnicity, and rise of the consumer culture. In all topics, questions of race, gender, and ethnicity will be carefully considered. We will also consistently ask questions such as which social groups hold what kind of power, and how each group's ideas, values, behavior, and purposes permeates our culture and society.
589 Teaching American Studies Three hours
MWF 11:00-11:50 Prof. Edward Tang
Prerequisite: consent of the department. A study of basic approaches to interdisciplinary teaching in American culture at the college level, along with supervised teaching experience.
591 Seminar: The 1950s Three hours
(M 2:00-4:30) Professor James Salem
This is an interdisciplinary seminar that is intended to probe American culture in a period framed roughly by external actions (the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945) and internal ones (the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963). The period represented by the Fifties is a much maligned decade. The Placid Decade it has been called, The Age of Consensus and Conformity, a boring period in which "nothing was going on." A contemporary joke went: "Have you heard about the Eisenhower doll? You wind it up and it doesn't do anything for eight years." Youth of the 50s were said to be innocent, aloof, and apathetic, but these were the youth who demanded black music, rejected traditional mainstream culture, invented Rock & Roll, established a national, adolescent, Youth Culture, and revealed the hypocrisy between what American society professed and how it actually operated.
596 AMS Colloquium II Two hours
T 3:30-4:45 Prof. Rich Megraw
Discussions of methodological and theoretical issues in American Studies. Students must be concurrently enrolled in AMS 586.
597 Topics in American Cultural Analysis: One hour
F 2:00-3:15 Prof. Edward Tang
Coordinating course required of MA candidates in their last semester.
598 Non-Thesis Research One to Three hours
(MWF 11:00-11:50)
(Pass/Fail.)
Fall 2008
Undergraduate Courses
AMS 150 Arts and Values Three hours
( MWF 10:00-10:50) Professor Lynne Adrian & Team
An exploration of the relation between the arts--popular, folk, and elite--and American culture in four selected periods: Victorian America, The Twenties and Thirties, World War II and the Postwar Era, and The Sixties. Class presentations and discussions revolve around novels, movies, slides, music, artifacts, and readings about the periods. (This course is team-taught by all the members of the American Studies faculty.)
AMS 101 Art, Film, & Globalization Three hours
( MWF 12:00-12:50) Instructor Elliott Knight
101-001 Meets 08/20/2008 thru 09/26/2008
101-002 Meets 09/29/2008 thru 10/31/2008
This course will explore the societal exchanges that are taking place in societies that are more connected with the rest of the world than ever before. Creative works of art, music and film will be used to explore issues of globalization from various viewpoints. We will explore works that are possible because of the global integration of contemporary society as well as art that critiques or seeks to offer alternatives to our current systems. The course will be broken down into three units, each focusing on a different medium of creative expression. As part of the visual art unit, we will look at ways potters and other artisans from underdeveloped areas of the world are changing the crafts they produce under gloablized market pressures. We will also explore how graffiti artists around the world are responding to the political and social issues of our times through their street art. The music portion of the course will focus on the emergence of bands such as DeVotchKa, Gogol Bordello and M.I.A. who blend music from around the world for American ears. We will also look at how some musicians and bands such as The Flaming Lips and Michael Franti are using their music as a platform to critique contemporary political and social policies. The film section will feature David Byrne's True Stories and Godfrey Reggio's Quatsi trilogy to explore different ways filmmakers have responded to the contemporary structure of society.
AMS 200 Special Topics: Latino/a Lives Three hours
(MWF 9:00-9:50) Professor Michael Innis-Jimenez
An examination of the lives of the wide variety of individuals who constitute various Latino communities in the United States, both in the past and in the present. Using autobiographies, novels and films, we will learn about both America’s fastest growing population and broaden our understanding of American culture as a whole.
AMS 201 Intro to African American Studies Three hours
(TR 11:00-12:15) Professor DoVeanna Fulton
American Studies/African American Studies 201 provides a basic outline of the diversity and complexity of the African American experience in the United States. Using African American socio-cultural history as our point of departure, we will undertake a chronological examination of what we have come to recognize as the discipline of African American Studies. Attention to literature, essays, history, popular culture (music, television, magazines, newspapers, movies, film documentaries), and politics will allow us to explore and interrogate critical discourses shaping and shaped by African American life and culture .
AMS 204 Western American Lives (HU) Three hours
001- (MWF 11:00-11:50) Mr. Larry Fagen
002- (MWF 1:00-1:50)
Few subjects in all the American experience loom so large, carry such weight, or provoke the kind of passion that this one does. Fewer still embrace the totality or the complexity of America as idea and experience on anything like its scale. Throughout the term, we’ll examine several key western lives, some real, others imagined, and some that are a little of each, as a way of confronting such crucial themes and concepts as “westering,” “frontier,” “pioneer,” “conquest,” “progress,” “success,” “individualism,” “equality,” and “democracy,” among others.
AMS 205 Working Lives Three hours
001- (TR 11:00-12:15) Mr. Larry Fagen
002- (TR 2:00-3:15)
Work is one of the aspects that most shapes individual lives. Who we are (and what we believe about our life) helps to shape what work an individual chooses. The work then further shapes who the individual becomes. This course will use a variety of autobiographies, oral histories, fictional and non- fictional sources to explore these questions. We will use written narratives, music, and films to consider the role of work in individual lives—both on and off “the job.”
AMS 231 Contemporary America Three hours
(TR 9:30-10:45) Professor Stacy Morgan
This course analyzes the changing nature of American values for the period dating from the early 1970s to the present. We will do this by examining key developments in the everyday life patterns and cultural expressions of Americans in contexts that range from the local to the international. By placing materials drawn from literature, film, the visual arts, music, and popular culture within broader social & historical contexts, we will explore the values affirmed and/or challenged by these works. This course also will serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary research methods used in the field of American Studies.
300-001 Special Topics: Latino/a Experience Three Hours
(MWF 12:00-12:50) Professor Michael Innis-Jimenez
Using a wide variety of sources we will explore the Latino experience in the United States from 1898 to the present. Our sources will include historical accounts of a variety of Latino communities from those who have lived in the United States for generations to the most recent immigrants from a variety of Latin American and Caribbean nations, novels, songs, and films.
330-001 America Between the Wars Three Hours
(TR 9:30-10:45) Professor Rich Megraw
This course explores the first two decades of America’s “Modern Times.” Adjusting to modernity required Americans to square old values with new departures, something that makes this period more than merely two decades linked by the calendar and the Stock Market Crash. Top to bottom, between 1919 and 1941, Americans redefined themselves and their society, embracing and debating (sometimes hotly) old beliefs, new conceptions, and the implications of a machine-driven modern mass society. The course is intended to focus of many points of that debate, especially as they are reflected in such crucial areas as popular culture and the visual arts.
485-001 American Experience 1620-1865 Three hours
(TR 2:00-3:15) Professor Edward Tang
This advanced-level survey addresses certain specific themes and issues that occurred within American culture from about 1500 to 1865. The period begins with conceiving new worlds, in which European, African, and Native American populations engaged and influenced one another in profound and sometimes unexpected ways. Through primary sources like travel narratives, autobiographies, paintings, fiction, and music, we will also explore the following topics: the emergence of colonial societies; the creation of a revolution; nineteenth-century manners, communities, and institutions; and the cultural politics behind slavery and the Civil War.
491-001 Seminar: The West in Our Eyes Three Hours
(W 2:00- 4:30) Professor Rich Megraw
Since its creation toward the close of the 19th century, the western has been the most popular genre in American film history. Critics generally designate a western, “The Great Train Robbery,” (1903) as the first American “film.” Its star, Bronco Billy Anderson, together with such other early western heroes as William S. Hart and Tom Mix, number among the first generation of American movie stars. Other, more recognizable names appearing in westerns ever since include Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Alan Ladd, and Gregory Peck. Many of the country’s most influential directors have worked within the genre, including D.W, Griffith, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, George Stevens, Sam Peckinpaugh, Anthony Mann, and Clint Eastwood. Then there is John Ford, arguably the most influential American film maker of the 20th century, whose credits include such “classic” titles as "Stagecoach"(1939), "Fort Apache" (1948), "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949), "Rio Grande" (1950), "The Searchers" (1956), and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962). Ford’s leading man on each of those occasions and several others was John Wayne, more than a quarter century after his death, still among the country’s favorite film stars and a man whose on-screen persona remains linked with the mid-twentieth century definition of “Americanism.”
Suffice to say that over the years no popular genre has generated anything like the kind of sustained attention, enthusiasm, interest, passion, anger, or debate as the American western. Which is the focus of the course: a chronological treatment of the on-going relationship between the western film and the meaning of modern America.
532 Studies in Art Three hours
(TR 12:30-1:45) Professor Stacy Morgan
This course will examine ways in which African American art has alternately reflected, shaped, and challenged such important historical events and currents as the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights & Black Power movements, and postmodern identity politics. Equally important, the course will evaluate the contributions of selected artists in relation to such key art movements as modernism, social realism, abstract expressionism, and performance art.
535 Studies in Ethnicity Three Hours
(MWF 12:00-12:50) Professor Michael Innis-Jimenez
Using a wide variety of sources we will explore the Latino experience in the United States from 1898 to the present. Our sources will include historical accounts of a variety of Latino communities from those who have lived in the United States for generations to the most recent immigrants from a variety of Latin American and Caribbean nations, novels, songs, and films.
536 Studies in Social Experience Three Hours
(TR 9:30-10:45) Professor Rich Megraw
This course explores the first two decades of America’s “Modern Times.” Adjusting to modernity required Americans to square old values with new departures, something that makes this period more than merely two decades linked by the calendar and the Stock Market Crash. Top to bottom, between 1919 and 1941, Americans redefined themselves and their society, embracing and debating (sometimes hotly) old beliefs, new conceptions, and the implications of a machine-driven modern mass society. The course is intended to focus of many points of that debate, especially as they are reflected in such crucial areas as popular culture and the visual arts.
585 American Experience 1620-1865 Four Hours
(TR 2:00-3:15 & R 3:30- 4:30) Professor Edward Tang
An exploration of the formative years of the American cultural experience, from early European encounters with the New World to the attainment of continental nationhood. The course will draw upon insights from many disciplines and will include several kinds of cultural evidence (for example: literature, art, and photography; religious, political, and social thought and behavior; economic, technological, and geographical development) as well as consideration of recent major synthetic works of cultural scholarship. Topics covered include: the growth of colonial societies; the Revolutionary movement and the political foundations of the American Republic; the Market Revolution and the rise of middle class culture; the Ante-bellum South and the emerging West; and the origins and evolution of American cultural diversity.
588 Teaching Internship One Hour
(MWF 11:00-11:50) Professor Lynne Adrian
Required of all American Studies graduate teaching assistants in AMS 150. Includes administrative techniques and test construction.
591 Seminar: Contemporary America Three Hours
(M 2:00-4:30) Professor Stacy Morgan
This seminar will analyze the changing nature of American cultural values for the period dating from the late 1960s to the present. Making use of studies that examine consumer culture, the workplace, economies of pleasure, cyberspace, television, film, music, and the arts, we will examine key developments in the everyday life patterns and cultural expressions of Americans in contexts that range from the local to the international. In so doing, the seminar will expose students to a sampling of the range of interdisciplinary methodologies applicable to work in the field of American Studies.
595 Colloquium: Research and Methods Two Hours
(T 3:30-4:45) Professor Rich Megraw
Discussions of methodological and theoretical issues in American Studies. Students must be concurrently enrolled in AMS 585.
597 Topics in American Culture Analysis One Hour
(MWF 11:00-12:00) STAFF
Coordinating course required of MA candidates in their last semester.
598 Non-Thesis Research One-Three Hours
(MWF 1:00) STAFF
Pass/Fail
NOTE: Unless otherwise specified, all courses earn three hours credit
Interim/Summer 2006
INTERIM 2006 SCHEDULE OF AMERICAN STUDIES CLASSES
Class Days Time Room Instructor
300 U.S. South on Film MTWRF 9:00-12:00 TH102
531 Studies in Popular Culture
(See Entry for 364)
534 Studies in the South
(See Entry for 300)
536 Studies in Social Experience
(See Entry for 367)
SUMMER 2006 SCHEDULE OF AMERICAN STUDIES CLASSES
Class Days Time Room Instructor
First Half of Term
300 Hollywood's West MTR 1:00-3:50 TH103 Megraw
400 Internship TBA
405 Directed Study TBA Staff
500 Internship TBA Staff
505 Directed Study TBA Staff
536 Studies in Social Experience
(See Entry for 330)
Second Half of Term
300 History of Rock 'n' Roll MTWRF 10:00-11:45 TH103 Salem
400 Internship TBA Staff
406 Directed Study TBA Staff
491 Seminar in the 1950s MTR 1:00-3:50 TBA Salem
500 Internship TBA Staff
506 Directed Study TBA Staff
591 Seminar in the 1950s MTR 1:00-3:50 TH 102 Salem
597 Topics Amer Cult Analysis TBA Salem
598 Non-Thesis Research TBA Staff
NOTE: Unless otherwise specified, all courses earn three hours credit
