Courses -- Fall 2025

This seminar explores the history of American gender through the history of the American film industry from the first features in the 1910s through the crumbling of the Hollywood Studio System and Production Code in 1968. 

The United States, often thought of as a nation where since its origins all foreign languages spoken by immigrants have withered away upon exposure to English, has actually always harbored a complex mixture of languages and dialects. This course will examine the history of language in America.

This course explores the place of Shakespeare in American literary and political culture from the Revolution to the present. We will explore the ways in which American poets, novelists, presidents, essayists, polemicists, and humorists over the past two hundred years have turned to Shakespeare, time and again.

As Tocqueville observed, "scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question." As a consequence, the Supreme Court of the United States has been at the center of many of the most significant developments in American history. This seminar will explore the Supreme Court’s role in American society by examining its decisions on key issues throughout its history.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is considered a classic study on the United States. In this seminar we will focus on Tocqueville’s psychology and the light it might shed on American culture.

The concepts of democratic backsliding, regime cycles (between oligarchy and populism, democracy and dictatorship), hybrid regimes and reverse waves, were devised with regard to newly democratized and/or insufficiently institutionalized democratic regimes.

This course provides an interdisciplinary perspective on Native peoples of present-day New York and New England and their interactions with colonial empires (French, Spanish, British, US). Most of the reading will be by Native authors.