Spring 2026
COURSES
Jeremy Dauber
AMST1010 SEC. 001 - T, R 8:40 - 9:55 AM
[Fulfills AMST Core Requirement]
How can one approach America, what it has been, and what it has produced? Given the length, breadth, diversity, and complexity, of American history and culture, how does one even begin to answer that question? In this panoramic look at some of the most interesting, important, and emblematic work that has been created in the first centuries of American history, we attempt to approach the question – and, really, it’s not just a single question - from a wide variety of perspectives, befitting the variety and diversity of the Americans who created that work. Students will be asked to acquaint themselves with a wide variety of material, including but not limited to works of prose fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, theater, visual art and architecture, and radio and film.
Office hours: Tuesday & Thursday 10:00 am - 11:00 am on Zoom
Andrew Delbanco, Roger Lehecka
AMST3931 Sec. 001 - T 2:10 - 4:00 PM
In this seminar, we examine the roles colleges and universities play in American society; the differential access high school students have to college based on family background and income, ethnicity, and other characteristics; the causes and consequences of this differential access; and some attempts to make access more equitable. Readings and class meetings cover the following subjects historically and in the 21 st century: the variety of American institutions of higher education; admission and financial aid policies at selective and less selective, private and public, colleges; affirmative action and race-conscious admissions; what "merit" means in college admissions; and the role of the high school in helping students attend college. Students in the seminar are required to spend at least four hours each week as volunteers at the Double Discovery Center (DDC) in addition to completing assigned reading, participating in seminar discussions, and completing written assignments. DDC is an on-campus program that helps New York City high school students who lack many of the resources needed to succeed in college and to be successful in gaining admission and finding financial aid. The seminar integrates students' first-hand experiences with readings and class discussions. Download the application here and submit to [email protected]
Office Hours:
Prof. Delbanco: by appointment
Prof. Lehecka: Wednesday 10 am - 12 pm in Hamilton 319
Jessica H. Lee
AMST 3931 Sec. 002 - R 10:10 AM -12:00 PM
This seminar will examine foundational texts in American political and cultural history. The inherent tension between “freedom” and “citizenship” will serve as the organizing theme. The course is conceived on the model of Contemporary Civilization (CC) and, as in that course, we will focus exclusively on primary texts, the order of readings will be roughly chronological, and the class will be discussion-driven. We will begin with readings from the Puritan settlement of New England and continue with documents surrounding the Revolution, the early republic, the Civil War, Reconstruction, liberalism, the Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary debates about the nature of American national identity and its place in the world. In addition to the classroom requirements, students will serve about four hours a week with the Freedom and Citizenship Program, a high school humanities program run by the Center for American Studies.
Office hours: Friday 11:00 am - 1:00 pm in Hamilton 319
Randolph Jonakait
AMST 3931 Sec. 004 - W 4:10 PM -6:00 PM
This course will examine the influence of race and poverty in the American system of confronting the challenge of crime. Our focus will be on the social, political, and economic effects of the administration of our criminal justice system, with emphatic examination of the role of conscious and unconscious racism, as well as community biases against the poor. We will reflect on the fairness of our past and present American system of confronting crime and consider the possibilities of future reform. Readings will include historical texts, analytical reports, some biographies, and a few legal materials. We will also watch documentary films that illuminate the issues and problems.
Office hours: Wednesday 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm in Hamilton 319
Tunç Şen
AMST3942 Sec. 001 - R 2:10-4:00 PM
This seminar explores the intertwined histories of the Ottoman Empire and the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through migration, mobility, and cultural exchange. It examines why diverse Ottoman subjects (Armenian, Greek, Arab, Turkish, Jewish, etc.) migrated to the United States and how they navigated life and contributed to the country’s evolving social and cultural fabric. Students will analyze migration experiences, community formations, and identity negotiations while considering how race, religion, class, and gender shaped the lives of transnational Ottoman communities in America. The course also investigates how Americans imagined the Ottoman world through missionary writings and journalism, and how Ottoman migrants themselves influenced these representations. Combining global and local perspectives, the seminar draws on historical, cultural, and sociological approaches and literature. Field-based learning, including visits to historic sites in New York City once home to Ottoman immigrant communities, complements classroom discussions.
Office hours: by appointment
Jeremy Dauber
AMST3944 Sec. 001 - T 4:10-6:00 PM
“The business of America is business,” President Calvin Coolidge famously said in 1925. But what he said next is far less known, and central to the aims of this course: “They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world.” How, exactly, did that concern develop over the course of American history, in response to particular historical and cultural conditions? How did it shape, and how was it shaped by, other American concerns? And how do those concerns, anxieties, challenges, and opportunities manifest in today’s business landscape – and what does that mean for America’s place in the world tomorrow? To find out, we’ll engage in a largely chronological analysis of the history of American business, focusing primarily on the last 150 years, and using a range of primary and secondary sources, ranging from Revolutionary-era documents to AI company press releases to business school case studies. It should be noted that there is no background in economics or finance required to take this course.
In addition to the readings, we will use Columbia’s largest advantage for the study of this subject – its location in New York City, the historical and still unquestioned home of American business – to bring in senior guest speakers from leading New York companies, offering unique perspectives on the past, present, and future business environment. We are fortunate that Matt Anestis, a former BlackRock managing director, Boston Consulting Group partner, and member of the Board of Visitors of American Studies, has agreed to actively support these efforts and provide extensive real-world business insight to students throughout the term, along with opportunities to visit top New York City businesses in various industries and meet with employees over coffee. These opportunities – ungraded and optional–will supplement the course and provide real-world complementary insight into what life is like on a world-class investment trading floor, Silicon Alley Startup office, publishing office, etc. The schedule and choice of companies will reflect the goals and interests of students in the class.
Office hours: Tuesday & Thursday 10:00 am - 11:00 am on Zoom
Maura Spiegel
AMST3945 Sec. 001 - M 4:10-6:00 PM
Here are certain stories we tell ourselves over and over and over, and many film genres are built around these stories. This course examines Hollywood genre not only as a system of conventions but as a structure of feeling, a way of organizing fantasy, reproducing ideology, and sharing collective experience. They evolve with shifts in politics, technology, and taste, and each era’s films reveal something about how America imagines itself and grapples with its contradictions. We will engage a range of Hollywood genres, following their increasing self-reflexiveness, genre-bending, and hybridity. Our orientation will be formal as well as social and historical, as we identify codes, tropes, and conventions of generic illusion and verisimilitude; the look and sound of different genres; genre and acting style; and different expressions of heroism. Genres will include: the romantic comedy, the western, superheroes, dystopian and “Indiewood” films, and television limited series.
Office Hours: Monday. 6:10 PM - 7:10 PM, Wednesday. 4:10 PM - 5:10 PM and by appointment in Philosophy Hall 402
CROSS-LISTED COURSES
Ross Posnock
ENGL3832 Sec. 001 - W 4:10-6:00 PM
The nation’s most distinguished homegrown network of thinkers and writers, the New York intellectuals, clustered in its major decades from the late thirties to the late sixties up and down Manhattan, centered mainly in and around Columbia University and the magazine Partisan Review on Astor Place. Although usually regarded as male-dominated—Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, and Dwight Macdonald were among the leaders—more recently, the three key women of the group have emerged as perhaps the boldest modernist thinkers most relevant for our own time. Arendt is a major political philosopher, McCarthy a distinguished novelist, memoirist, and critic, and Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual in the last quarter of the 20th century. This course will explore how this resolutely unsentimental trio—dubbed by one critic as “tough women” who insisted on the priority of reflection over feeling—were unafraid to court controversy and even outrage: Hannah Arendt’s report on what she called the “banality” of Nazi evil in her report on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann in 1963 remains incendiary; Mary McCarthy’s satirical wit and unprecedented sexual frankness startled readers of her 1942 story collection The Company She Keeps; Susan Sontag’s debut Against Interpretation (1966) turned against the suffocatingly elitist taste of the New York intellectuals and welcomed what she dubbed the “New Sensibility”—“happenings,” “camp,” experimental film and all manner of avant-garde production. In her later book On Photography (1977), she critiques the disturbing photography of Diane Arbus, whose images we will examine in tandem with Sontag’s book.
Hilary Hallett
HIST4481 Sec. 001 - W 4:10-6:00 PM
This course examines how Americans have used culture as a means to respond to, interpret, and remember acute social crises over the last century. Why do some periods of social upheaval create breaks in cultural forms and practices while others encourage an impetus to defend cultural practices, thereby facilitating the “invention of tradition”? How are the feelings released in such moments—whether trauma, outrage, rage, insecurity, or fear—turned into cultural artifacts? What is at stake in how they get memorialized? To answer these questions, this course examines responses to the lynching of black Americans, the Great Depression, World War II, and the black freedom struggle during the postwar period. We will examine a wide range of individually and collectively produced artifacts about these events, including photography, plays, songs, movies, comic books, novels, government-sponsored programs, and world fairs.
Andrew Gelman
POLS4280 Sec. 001 - M, W 10:10 - 11:25 AM
This course, offered jointly in Political Science and American Studies, will cover the development of modern social science and its relation to American history and culture. The different strands of the course are indicated by its title, where “rationalizing” refers both to attempts to understand society through rational means and to the role of social science in providing a justification or rationale for existing social structures. Quantitative thinking and social science have become increasingly prominent in our society. But modern discussions of the political relevance of social science do not always account for the ups and downs of particular ideas. For example, Freudianism was huge in mid-century, both within psychology and in the culture at large, but has faded for both intellectual and economic reasons. The Keynesian revolution dominated economics from the 1930s through the 1960s, but then was contested by later paradigms in response to the stagflation of the following decade. Trends in criminal justice policy have followed ideas from anthropology, psychology, and economics, and political theories of international relations have affected and been informed by developments in foreign policy. This course provides students with an opportunity to learn about these and other examples of the development and influence of theories in social science, and to form a larger connection between intellectual, social, and political history.