Fall 2026
SEMINARS
Prof. Casey Blake
(AMST 3930UN_001) - R 2:10-4:00 PM
This course is an intensive seminar on American cultural criticism since the late 19th century, with particular emphasis on debates over modernist currents in the arts from the 1910s through the 1960s. Readings will consist primarily of works by major interpreters of American culture, including John Dewey, Constance Rourke, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Allan Kaprow, Ralph Ellison, Paul Goodman, and Susan Sontag. Each student will write a research paper on a major critic or controversy in 20th-century culture.
Prof. Caroline Miller
(AMST 3937UN_001) - W 4:10-6:00 PM
The midterm elections offer a prime opportunity to examine, in real time, the critical role the press plays in the American political process and how that role has been disrupted in the digital era. We'll look back at some classic pieces of 20th-century political journalism, from Theodore White to Hunter Thompson, and compare them to coverage of the 2024 campaign. How have social media and hyper-partisan news sites changed the discourse? Who’s covering groups underrepresented (or misrepresented) in legacy media? And what happens to the decisions voters make when disinformation is exploding and the fact base is under assault?
Prof. Ryan Carr
(AMST 3943UN_ 001) - R 4:10-6:00 PM
In the contemporary USA, free speech is often understood as a legal doctrine or a branch of Constitutional Law. But it can also be understood as a tradition, a way of life, part of American culture. In this class, we will explore the hypothesis that America’s free speech tradition has been shaped primarily by people who aren’t lawyers or lawmakers: by beatniks, pamphleteers, abolitionists, Red Power activists, queers, feminists, Free Lovers, poets, preachers, and hackers. This course provides a transnational, cultural perspective on the history of free speech that decenters the First Amendment from its quasi-sacrosanct place in the historiography of American liberty. Instead of looking at legal arguments and decisions, we will survey the very wide range of social contexts in which struggles over free speech have taken place in American history, from the Pueblo Revolt in seventeenth-century New Mexico to the rise of MAGA in our own time.
Prof. John McWhorter
(AMST 3946UN_001) - TBD
American Popular Music, 1890–1950 will cover the formative period of what has become the most influential popular music in human history.
Well past the Civil War, popular music known to most Americans consisted largely of marches, waltzes, ballads, and other genres continuing from Europe. In the late nineteenth century, Black musicians fused African-derived approaches to rhythm and vocalization to a European template. The result was a music unlike any known in the United States – or the world -- before. The initial manifestation was ragtime, which evolved into 1) America’s musical theatre music and 2) with a jolt from blues singing, jazz, which started out as a kind of ragtime but evolved into swing, bebop and Rhythm and Blues. Meanwhile, rural white music became what we know as country music, which eventually joined Rhythm and Blues to become rock and roll.
This seminar will enlighten students about the evolution, importance, and artistry of what to them can seem like a formless fog of “old-time” music associated with old cartoons and even older people.
Prof. Jeremy Dauber & Prof. Paul Levitz
(AMST 3933UN_001) - W 2:10-4:00 PM
The course seeks to combine literary and historical approaches to investigate one of the most rapidly growing, increasingly influential, and increasingly critically recognized forms of American popular literature: the graphic novel. A historical overview of the medium’s development, complete with analysis of relevant broader institutional and cultural factors illuminating the development of American media culture more generally, will be complemented by a study of a series of recent works illuminating the medium’s explosive maturation. Authors read include Eisner, Crumb, Spiegelman, Bechdel, Thompson, and Hernandez.
Prof. Benjamin Rosenberg
(AMST 3930UN_002) - Mondays 6:10 – 8:00 PM
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. It has played significant roles in, for example, (1) the creation of the young republic and the achievement of a balance between states and the federal government, (2) race relations, including the institution of slavery, (3) the rights of workers, (4) civil rights, and (5) elections. This seminar will explore the Supreme Court’s role in American society by examining its decisions on key issues throughout its history.
CROSS LISTED COURSES
Prof. Rebecca Kobrin
(AMHS UN3462_001) - M 10:10 am - 12:00 pm
For centuries, New York City has served as a primary gateway city for immigrants to the United States. In the early twentieth century, according to the 1910 Census, New York City’s population was roughly 40％ foreign-born. The problems these immigrants presented to government officials, doctors, religious leaders, industrialists, the police, and educators in New York City transformed not only the local debate on immigration but the national discussion of “Americanization” as well. According to the most recent census, approximately 40％ of the city's population is foreign-born. Like their predecessors at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary immigrants, arriving from the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, Asia, and Europe, have posed serious challenges to the civic, educational, and political institutions of New York City. How are these foreign-born residents reshaping the city today? This seminar explores the intersection of immigration, race, culture, and politics in New York City, both from the perspective of history and in relation to contemporary realities as it explores the forces shaping the century-old encounter between immigrants and New York City.
Prof. Catherine Fennell
(CSER UN3303_001) - R 4:10 pm - 6:00 pm
Scholars of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race have long been preoccupied with the terms, categories, and processes through which the United States has excluded or qualified the citizenship of particular groups, including women, immigrants, indigenous nations, and descendants of enslaved Africans. Yet it has spent less time interrogating the unqualified content of Americanness, and the work that the imagination of a "default" American identity does in contemporary political life. This seminar introduces students to this problem through an unspoken racial dimension of American political belonging -- the presumed whiteness of ideal American citizens. Readings drawn from several disciplinary traditions, including anthropology, linguistics, sociology, history, and journalism, will ground students in the course's key concepts, including racial markedness, the history of racialization, and public sentiment. Students will mobilize these tools to analyze several cases that rendered white sentiment explicit in politically efficacious ways, including the "panic" incited by the destabilization of race-based residential segregation, the "paranoia" of conspiracy theorists, the "sympathy" associated with natural disasters, and the "resentment" or "rage" associated with the loss of racial privileges.