Past Courses

Shakespeare in America
James Shapiro
The seminar explores the reception and influence of Shakespeare in the United States from 1776 to the present. Readings include poems, stories, plays, and essays by a broad range of writers, including: Irving, Emerson, Maungwudaus, Aldridge, Bacon, Hawthorne, Lincoln, Melville, Lowell, Dickinson, Whitman, James, Twain, Booth, Addams, Keller, Hughes, Berryman, Thurber, Ransom, McCarthy, Plath, Mori, Ozick, and Smiley. Requirements include an in-class presentation and a term paper.

The Supreme Court in American History
Benjamin Rosenberg
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. 

Equity in Higher Education
Roger Lehecka
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 21st 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.

Freedom and Citizenship in the United States
Roosevelt Montàs
This seminar will examine foundational texts and debates in American political and cultural history.  The inherent tension between “freedom” and “citizenship” will serve as the organizing theme.  The course is conceived in 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. In addition to the classroom requirements, students will serve a minimum of four hours a week at the Double Discovery Center (DDC) in connection with the Freedom and Citizenship Project, which DDC conducts in partnership with the American Studies Program.

Language Contact
John McWhorter 
This course will explore the results of language mixture, as demonstrated on the North American continent as well as beyond. All human languages are hybrids to an extent, but post-Neolithic technological developments have made population movement ever more common, resulting in mixture between peoples and the languages they speak. The result has been a panorama of language mixtures of a kind rare to nonexistent before roughly ten thousand years ago, including what are called creoles, pidgins, koines, "vehicular" languages, and nonstandard dialects that straddle the boundary between these categories. Such languages are usually felt as new and/or illegitimate, such that they have had various fates in the media and education, and also occasion vigorous controversies even as to their origins. This seminar will explore America's -- and the world's -- newest, and in some ways most interesting, languages.

Give it Away: The History and Ethics of Philanthropy
Tamara Mann Tweel
In this seminar, we will examine the history and ethics of American philanthropy. We will explore the early divide between charity and philanthropy and discuss the moral challenges of both keeping money and giving it away. We will look at the great accomplishments of American philanthropy as well as the longstanding critique that charity fails to address structural inequality. This course is designed to help students analyze and evaluate how philanthropic organizations have addressed major public problems. For this reason, students will complete a final project that offers an in-depth analysis of a particular social problem, past solutions, and opportunities for productive intervention.

American Cultural Criticism
Casey N. Blake
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. 

American Graphic Novel
Jeremy Dauber with Paul Levitz
The course seeks to combine literary and historical approaches to investigate one of the most rapidly growing and increasingly influential genres of American popular (and, increasingly, critically recognized) literature: the graphic novel. A historical overview of the genre’s development, along with analysis of relevant broader institutional and cultural factors illuminating the development of American media culture more generally, will be complemented by study of a series of works that illuminate artistic approaches taken within the genre to the classic themes of the American experience: politics, ethnicity, sexuality, and America’s place in the broader world, among other themes. Authors read include Eisner, Crumb, Spiegelman, Bechdel, Sacco, Thompson, and Hernandez.

American Studies Senior Project Colloquium
Casey N. Blake
This course is for American studies majors planning to complete senior projects in the spring. The course is designed to help students clarify their research agenda, sharpen their questions, and locate their primary and secondary sources. Through class discussions and a "workshop" peer review process, each member of the course will enter spring semester with a completed 5-8 page prospectus and bibliography that will provide an excellent foundation for the work of actually writing the senior essay. The colloquium will meet every other week at a convenient time for the participants, and is required for everyone planning to do a senior research project.This course is only open to American Studies Senior Majors.

 Contemporary American Fiction
Adam Kirsch
In this seminar, we will read some of the leading writers to emerge in American fiction in the last twenty years. Analyzing the work of writers like Wallace, Lydia Davis, Gary Shteyngart, Claire Messud and Tao Lin, we will explore what, if anything, constitutes a "literary generation," and see how the work of this period addresses issues of politics, technology, immigration, sincerity and impersonation, realism and experimental form, and the threatened place of literature in society.

A Cultural History of Wall Street
Steven Fraser
This seminar examines the impact of Wall Street on American life from the American Revolution through the dot.com boom of the 1990s, its collapse at the turn of the millennium, and the current financial meltdown. Discussions and readings explore the ways the Street has been integrated into the country’s economic, political, and cultural life, and examine how Americans have handled their ambivalence about whether the Street has been a force for good or evil. We focus on some of the principal iconic representations of the Street as they have appeared in cartoons, political tracts, movies, economic treatises, sermons, novels, histories, and other cultural artifacts.

Disability, Embodiment, and Social Justice
Rachel Adams
What does it mean to be disabled in America?  This course approaches disability less as a medical condition affecting individual bodies than as a social, environmental, and historical phenomenon.  We will investigate the role of culture in shaping and reflecting on disability in contemporary American culture.  How have philosophers, policy makers, authors and artists framed the political and ethical debates surrounding the status of disability?  How have imaginative representations in literature, film, and the visual arts contributed to and/or challenged those understandings?  Given that nearly every one of us will be disabled at some point in life, these questions could not be more important.  This course seeks to address them by considering a broad array of texts, including philosophical debates about morality and ethics, history, and literary, filmic, and visual representations.  In addition to our consideration of cultural representations, an experiential learning requirement will also give students the opportunity to work closely with an organization dedicated to serving the needs of people with disabilities.

Elites In America (SOC)
Shamus Khan
In this class we will seek to better understand elites and the conditions of advantage, identifying how elites influence inequality. Over the past forty years increases in inequality are not explained by the declining wages of the poor and middle classes; instead, it is the massive increase in the income share of the highest earners that has driven inequality. Wealth, not poverty, is the engine of inequality. Poverty cannot be understood as a thing in and of itself. Instead, it must be understood in relation to both wealth and overall social organization. Yet scholars have dedicated almost all their time to the disadvantage side of inequality and spent little time on understanding the "other side" of the relations of inequality: advantages. This course is dedicated to that other side.  It is important to engage with the conditions of advantage because in situating advantages in a context related to disadvantage, those who acquire and enjoy advantages might better understand the social contract which ties them to those less fortunate than themselves. This course aims to provide the tools to think about elites within democratic societies. What is the place of an elite within a democracy? How have elites contributed to and fought against the reproduction of social inequality?

Equity in Higher Education
Andrew Delbanco, Roger Lehecka 
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 21st 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

Freedom and Citizenship in the United States 
Roosevelt Montás
This seminarwill examine the historical development of ideas of freedom and citizenship in the American context.  The course will focus exclusively on primary texts, and the order of readings will be roughly chronological.  The first weeks of the course will be dedicated to reading and discussing foundational texts in Western political history that frame the 17th century founding of the American colonies.  The rest of the course will situate the American case in this historical development, beginning with an examination of the Puritan migration to New England, and continuing with the study of major documents surrounding the Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary debates about the meaning of American citizenship. In addition to the classroom requirements, students will be expected to volunteer a minimum of four hours a week with the Double Discovery Center (DDC), in connection to the Freedom and Citizenship Project, which DDC conducts in partnership with the American Studies Program.

Food and American Culture
Rachel Adams
Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," wrote the 19th century French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.  While this may seem like a straightforward equation, it is anything but.  This course investigates Brillat-Savarin´s dictum by examining the varied ways food is produced, prepared, and consumed in the United States.  Beginning with what seem to be highly individualized and embodied questions of taste, we will expand outward to consider how food shapes personal, regional, national, and global identities.  We will treat cookbooks and recipes, diet guides, works of art, and food television as cultural texts that can provide insight into the meaning of food and eating.  We will also study issues of hunger, poverty, and food justice, the gendering of food preparation and consumption, questions of eating and body image, and restaurant culture.  In addition to reading and writing assignments, this course will also include an experiential component, which will give students opportunities to volunteer in a soup kitchen or food  pantry, work on an urban farm, and enjoy some of the culinary  delights of New York City.

Foundations of American Literature
Andrew Delbanco
Introduction to American thought and expression from the first English settlements to the eve of the Civil War. Writers include the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville. Themes include the rise of an American national consciousness, the transformation of religion, ideas of nature and democracy, debates over immigration, race, and slavery. The course proceeds through a combination of lecture and discussion with the aim of deepening our understanding of the origins and development of literature and culture in the United States. In addition to the two lectures, a weekly discussion section is an integral and required part of the course for all students.  Required of all American Studies majors.

Gender History and American Film
Hilary Hallett
Motion pictures have played a unique role in shaping and reflecting new ideals and images of womanhood and manhood in the modern United States. Throughout the 20th century, movies and their stars have had a complex relationship to transformations affecting the lives of Americans. This seminar examines motion pictures and movie stars as primary sources that, when juxtaposed with other kinds of historical evidence, indicate changes in the gendering of work, leisure, sexuality, family life, and politics. We will consider how the changing institutional history of American film production during the 20th century connected to the gendered images it sold. For much of the period under review, Hollywood used specific genres to target particular audiences and movies were not afforded the protection of free speech. This made films and movie stars peculiarly reflective of, and vulnerable to, the nation’s changing fantasies and fears regarding sexuality and gender roles.

Hispanic New York (CSER) 
Claudio Remeseira
New York City contains a wide spectrum of immigrants from all over Latin America and the Caribbean, including a large number of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Because of this rich diversity, New York is both one of the leading Hispanic cities in the U.S. and a pivotal node of Latin American culture. This seminar is a survey of the cultural heritage that sustains this diversity. It explores the history and the demographic evolution of New York's Latino and Latin American population, its racial, ethnic, and religious make-up, and its long-standing tradition in arts, music, and literature. Readings include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry originally written both in English and Spanish (English translations are provided for students who don't read Spanish). The course also analyzes the connections between New York's Hispanic cultural tradition and the broader U.S. culture, as well as New York's place in the Spanish-American intellectual world. Finally, the seminar addresses some of the most pressing sociological issues related to the immigration flow from Latin America and the increasingly decisive role played by Latinos in New York politics.

The Holocaust and American Culture
Rebecca Kobrin
When the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. opened in 1993, people asked why a ?European? catastrophe was being memorialized alongside shrines to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. One answer is that in the years since World War II, the experience and memory of the Holocaust have deeply shaped American culture. The course explores how Nazism and the Holocaust have been understood, interpreted and constructed by American scholars and the larger American society since the 1930s.  This course considers how American scholars and laymen saw these phenomena through the analysis of different types of sources that lay bare the numerous conflicting perspectives on this regime and its policies present in American society. We will examine documentary films, television shows, memoirs, survivor testimonies, as well as legal documents and other scholarly and popular representations of the Holocaust. This course highlights how the codification of the Holocaust as a specific historical epoch and Nazism as a movement changed America in the following ways: by engendering a distrust of the masses among liberal intellectuals; by promoting civil liberties and religious toleration; by encouraging a view of the Soviet Union as equivalent to Nazi Germany; by making the imperatives of protecting human rights and stopping genocide central to foreign policy; and by providing a new focus for American Jewish identity. Contact the History Department for more information

Immigrant New York
Rebecca Kobrin
For the past century and a half, New York City has been the first home of millions of immigrants to the United States. This course will compare immigrants' encounter with New York at the dawn of the twentieth century with contemporary issues, organizations, and debates shaping immigrant life in New York City. As a service learning course, each student will be required to work 2-4 hours/week in the Riverside Language Center or programs for immigrants run by Community Impact.

Introduction to American Studies 
Casey Blake and Maura Spiegel
An introduction to fundamental themes and debates that span four centuries of American culture. Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, we will explore themes such as the question of national character, immigration, assimilation and the color line, opportunity and the pursuit of property, self-making, meritocracy, consumerism, Americans at work and leisure, American religion and spiritual life, educational ideals, and Americans at war. A partial list of authors includes: John Winthrop, Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, R. W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln, W.E. B. DuBois, Andrew Carnegie, Horatio Alger, Theodore Roosevelt, John Dewey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Thorstein Veblen, Nella Larsen, and Gish Jen. Conducted as a lecture/discussion, with weekly discussion sections.

Languages in America
John McWhorter
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, including the robust role of German in colonial times and beyond (once as commonly heard in America as Spanish); creole languages such as Gullah, Louisiana Creole French and Hawaiian "Pidgin" English; Black English including its history and present; Native American languages and modern efforts to preserve them; and the history of Asian languages in modern America, including Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Hmong. The course also serves, in ancillary fashion, as an introduction to the variety among languages of the world and to a scientific perspective on human language.

Language Contact
John McWhorter
This course will explore the results of language mixture, as demonstrated on the North American continent as well as beyond. All human languages are hybrids to an extent, but post-Neolithic technological developments have made population movement ever more common, resulting in mixture between peoples and the languages they speak. The result has been a panorama of language mixtures of a kind rare to nonexistent before roughly ten thousand years ago, including what are called creoles, pidgins, koines, "vehicular" languages, and nonstandard dialects that straddle the boundary between these categories. Such languages are usually felt as new and/or illegitimate, such that they have had various fates in the media and education, and also occasion vigorous controversies even as to their origins. This seminar will explore America's -- and the world's -- newest, and in some ways most interesting, languages.

Museums, Memory and Public Culture
Professor Valerie Paley
Americans are living through a boom in museum attendance and museum construction that recalls the creation of cultural institutions at the end of the nineteenth century. Believing that culture could enrich the nation’s cities as it had the great European capitals, American civic leaders created museums that would soon rank among the best in the world. This seminar will explore the transformation of cultural institutions in the United States and consider the continuing contemporary debates on the practices and public role of museums. How do museums—both large and small—serve the needs of the local communities in which they are located and the private interests of their founders? How have history museums in particular shaped debates about public memory and national heritage? In addition to exploring the historical evolution of such institutions, we will examine the theory and practice of exhibitions and education in museums, with an emphasis on institutions in New York. The seminar will host conversations with speakers representing different aspects of public culture and feature a hands-on analysis of a current exhibition redesign plan at a local museum.

Post-wars: The Cultural Consequences of Modern American Wars
Hilary Hallett
War is an engine of change like no other. This interdisciplinary seminar aims to take the measure of war?s impact on American culture by examining the costs and consequences of its aftermath in particular historical moments, beginning with the Civil War and concluding with the ?War on Terror.? The class will consider how cultural production reflects war?s making and remaking of family structures and gender roles, racial categories, federal policies and public discourse about the constitution of national identity in the wake of conflicts involving deadly force.

Race, Poverty and American Criminal Justice
Cathleen Price
This course will examine the influence of race and poverty in the American system of confronting the challenge of crime.  Students will explore some history, including the various purposes of having an organized criminal justice system within a community; the principles behind the manner in which crimes are defined; and the utility of punishment.  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.  Students will examine the larger implications for a community and culture that are presented by these pernicious features.  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 biography, and a few legal materials. We will also watch documentary films which illuminate the issues and problems. 

Shakespeare in America
James Shapiro
The seminar explores the reception and influence of Shakespeare in the United States from 1776 to
the present. Readings include poems, stories, plays, and essays by a broad range of writers, including: Irving, Emerson, Maungwudaus, Aldridge, Bacon, Hawthorne, Lincoln, Melville, Lowell, Dickinson, Whitman, James, Twain, Booth, Addams, Keller, Hughes, Berryman, Thurber, Ransom, McCarthy, Plath, Mori, Ozick, and Smiley. Requirements include an in-class presentation and a term paper.

Salinger, Lowell, McCullers: Freaks & Aesthetes in 1950s Families
Ross Posnock
We will read J.D. Salinger's Glass Family fiction, which features a group of hyper-articulate New York prodigies who experiment with Eastern religion, Robert Lowell's prose and poetry in  Life Studies, a breakthrough in "confessional" subject matter, and Carson McCuller's novel A Member of the Wedding,about the coming of age of a Southern tomboy. We will also watch and discuss Nicholas Ray's film Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean, the most famous portryal of teenage rage and angst. All these works narrate crises of conformity in postwar America--the much advertised sense of "alienation"--and dramatize the possibility of alternative values and improvised families

Senior Research Seminar
Casey Blake
A seminar devoted to the research and writing, under the instructor's supervision, of a substantial paper on a topic in American studies. Open to American Studies seniors only.

The Sixties
Todd Gitlin
This seminar aims to recover the period from its many slogans and myths, both from the outside (via history, analyses of demographic, social, political, and economic trends) and the inside (personal reminiscence, music, film, and television), with attention to penetrating accounts from movements, counter-movements, and establishment alike.   Among the topics:  civil rights; the causes and meanings of affluence; television; youth culture; the university boom; the growth of the political Right; domestic violence; tensions in liberalism; the Cold War; Vietnam; the Pill and sex; feminism; black power; and gay rights.  Film and TV footage will supplement class discussion.

The Supreme Court in American History 
Benjamin Rosenberg
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.

Transmedia
Paul Levitz
Transmedia, widely regarded as the future of entertainment, raises crucial questions about how an individual creator’s role changes as the creative project grows. Translation from one medium to another becomes a more tightly controlled form of storytelling where creators must navigate between the desire to add excitement and the threat of diluting impact. In today’s entertainment industry, properties like Batman become simultaneously films, cartoons, video games, online webisodes, and re-appear in multiple versions beyond their original expression (comics, in this example)—all with the aim of enlarging their commercial potential, and connecting with many audiences. Increasingly, writers and creators are being enlisted to build these variations even before the first incarnation of the project is released. This course will explore transmedia in the present, and speculate about its future. It will also explore its history as exemplified by such works as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. We will examine the tensions between creative and commercial goals, and between contradictory audiences. Guest speakers will include writers, artists, and people involved in projects ranging across the media, including Broadway adaptations. Readings and viewings will include primary sources (novels, graphic novels, films, etc.), criticism and theory, and intellectual property law. Students will be expected to compose 2 response papers and either give a presentation on a transmedia property of their choice or write a research paper.

US Intellectual History
Casey Blake
This course examines major themes in U.S. intellectual history since the Civil War. Among other topics, we will examine the public role of intellectuals; the modern liberal-progressive tradition and its radical and conservative critics; the uneasy status of religion in a secular culture; cultural radicalism and feminism; critiques of corporate capitalism and consumer culture; the response of intellectuals to hot and cold wars, the Great Depression, and the upheavals of the 1960s.