Spring 2027
COURSES
Jeremy Dauber
AMST1010UN SEC. 001 - T, R 10:10 - 11:55 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.
Jeremy Dauber
AMST3944UN Sec. 001 - T 12:10 - 2:00 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.
Heather Clark
AMST3947UN Sec. 001 - W 2:10 - 4:00 PM
Between the end of WWII in 1945 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, American poetry underwent a profound transformation. Poets like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde began writing about shame, madness, women’s bodies, homosexuality, and race—subjects that had been largely invisible in American poetry. These poets were rebelling against the Cold War ideology of “containment,” yet ironically, their focus on individualism led the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom to promote some of them as soft power weapons in the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. In this course, we will explore the relationship between Cold War politics and American poetry, and grapple with the following questions: How did Cold War anti-communism shape American postwar poetry? What relationships emerged between poets and state power? How did mid-century American poets write about war, nuclear anxiety, surveillance, madness, gender, and race? How did these writers challenge dominant American narratives of freedom and democracy? And finally, what was their legacy and lasting effect on American culture?
Jean Cohen
AMST 3941UN Sec. 001 - W 12:10 PM - 2:00 PM
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. Yet today even long consolidated, wealthy Western democracies seem to be at risk. This course will focus on the case of the United States. While domestic and external threats to American constitutional democracy are not new, there is widespread concern today that both liberal constitutionalism and American democracy are at grave risk. Our inquiry will involve an in-depth study of the political theory and American politics literature on the relevant concepts and dynamics. In the first part of the course, we will discuss the basic concepts and theories regarding democracy, oligarchy, constitutionalism, and regime cycles developed in classical and early modern political thought. The second part of the course will focus on the U.S., the oldest constitutional representative democracy and typically deemed the exemplar of a successfully consolidated democratic regime. We analyze the processes, dynamics, reversals, and limits to democratization in the US focusing on key tipping points from the founding to the present. We focus on four sets of factors and modes of explanation for the relevant shifts: constitutional, political, socio-cultural, and economic. We conclude with an analysis of the contemporary conjuncture and current threats to American constitutional democracy.
Jessica H. Lee
AMST 3931UN Sec. 002 - R 12:10 AM - 2:00 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.
Timm Woods
AMST3948UN Sec. 001 - M 2:10 - 4:00 PM
Games are often treated as distractions: private amusements, children's pastimes, or cultural ephemera. This course examines the multitude of functions games serve in American culture– not only as rules and objects, but also social practices, commercial products, literary figures, legal problems, technologies, rituals, simulations, and ways of organizing conflict. The study of games offers many ways to ask how Americans define freedom, competition, chance, skill, work, leisure, fairness, and social order. This class explores how games and gameplay have evolved in the United States, from early analog tabletop games to modern digital activities, examining their cultural, social, and technological influences and impact. We will be looking at foundational games and other influences in American gaming, the advent and migration of wargames and games-as-training, the rise of tabletop roleplaying games and home gaming, and the impact of the success of arcade, home console, and online multiplayer games within the digital space. The course analyzes how mechanics, narratives, and player-driven communities reflect the historical contexts of their time and the shifting values of the cultures from which they emerged. We will consider games from a multifaceted perspective, viewing them alternatively as art, education, entertainment, economic products, psychological motivators, and transmedia connection points. Through critical readings, gameplay analysis, and discussion, students will learn to understand games not only as recreational activities, but as the meaningful cultural artifacts which they represent. The global, ancient, and universal nature of gaming supplies concepts and institutions that later American game cultures inherit, commercialize, contest, and transform. Throughout the course, students will read games themselves as historical evidence, through the medium of “actual plays,” asking questions such as who was invited to play, who wrote the rules, who did the work, what forms of knowledge the games made possible, and what kinds of social worlds did the games ask players to inhabit.
Tunç Şen
AMST3942UN 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.
Mark Lilla
AMST3941UN Sec. 001 - M 12:10 - 2:00 PM
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is considered a classic study of the United States. But more fundamentally, it is an analysis of the democratic human type (l’homme démocratique) with his or her distinctive passions, fears, aspirations, prejudices, and self-image. In this seminar we will focus on Tocqueville’s psychology and the light it might shed on American culture.
CROSS-LISTED COURSES
Andrew Gelman
POLS4281GU Sec. 001 - T, R 2:40 - 3:55 PM
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.