Department of American Studies

ASTD 1000 - Intro to American Culture: Movements, Myths, and Methods

0 or 3 Credits

What does it mean to be American? Is it citizenship or geographical location? Political ideals or shared culture? How does it change over time? This course introduces interdisciplinary methods to answer such questions, including analysis of images, literature, music, popular entertainment, and diverse experiences of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nation.

Attributes: UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 1930 - Special Topics

1-4 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Attributes: American Studies Electives

ASTD 1980 - Independent Study

1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Attributes: American Studies Electives

ASTD 2100 - Studies in American Photography

3 Credits

This course introduces students to methodologies for studying American photography. Using foundational texts about photography and American Studies approaches to visual culture, we examine the cultural and political work that photographs perform at particular historical moments. We explore how photographs shape ideas about race, gender, class, nation, and citizenship.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Electives, Fine Arts Requirement (CAS)

ASTD 2101X - Introduction to Sexuality Studies

3 Credits

This course examines the lived practices, social meanings, and cultural representations of human sexuality. This introduction to the interdisciplinary field of sexuality studies samples a variety of intellectual approaches in examining sexuality as a source of personal and community identity and as contested political and ideological terrain. No prerequisites.

Attributes: UUC:Identities in Context, WGST Elective

ASTD 2110 - U.S. Ethnic Studies

3 Credits

This course examines the ethnic diversity that has from the beginning been the material of American society and examines the implications of this diversity.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Minor, American Studies Electives, Global Local Justice-Domestic, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, UUC:Social & Behavioral Sci, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 2200 - American Homefronts, Global Wars

3 Credits

Most of the 21st century has seen the United States embroiled in a series of global wars. This course uses the lens of American involvement in international conflict to focus on the social experiences and cultural impacts countries at war have experienced on the homefront and in the aftermath of war. Scheduled readings will focus on five major periods: WWI, WWII, Cold War, Vietnam, and the post-9/11 War on Terrorism. Issues covered include transnational public support or resistance to the war, meanings of patriotism, images of the enemy, perceptions of soldiers, post-war memorials and cultural memories, and post-war experiences of veterans, migrants or refugees, and homefront citizens whose lives were impacted by war. While the U.S. involvement in war defines the four periods, our readings and other class materials includes attention to many other nations both during and after the war.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, Global Citizenship (CAS), UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Global Interdependence

ASTD 2220 - Public Memory in the U.S.

3 Credits

Every day Americans interact with traces of the past through monuments, memorials, and museum spaces. In this course, students will learn the skills essential to critically approach American sites of public memory while also decoding the new and old historical interpretations present within these locations. We will also challenge the boundaries of “public memory” to consider cultural productions and popular narratives. Readings and assignments give particular attention to the role of public memory in creating, reinforcing, and contesting social identities through specific lenses like race, class, region, and religion.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context

ASTD 2300 - Americans Abroad

3 Credits

This course explores the history of the modern United States' changing relationship with the world by tracing American activities on the global stage: as travelers, consumers, teachers, students, missionaries, soldiers, and workers. Students will examine global encounters and exchanges through a variety of primary sources, including film, photography, and memoir.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, Global Citizenship (CAS)

ASTD 2350 - Global Media & U.S. Culture

3 Credits

We live in cultural and media saturation in the 21st century. Our experiences are now filtered through cultural productions; digital platforms allow many cultural productions to reach a global audience. With global markets for media, how do cultural productions form connections across borders and support international power structures? How do dominant forms of culture socialize us and provide materials for individual and collective identities? How can and do marginalized groups participate in and resist dominant media messages to create their own cultural and independent media? We will examine American and international mass media and alternative productions such as film, television, music, art, and social media.

Attributes: American Studies Practices

ASTD 2400 - Immigration in U.S. History and Culture

0 or 3 Credits

This class will introduce students to U.S. immigration history, focusing on immigration flows, policies, and debates from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of immigration in U.S. culture, using a variety of sources—including photography, film, poetry, memoir, and a board game—to examine how ideas, policies, and practices regarding immigration have been tied to key concepts such as race, gender, sexuality, disease, and empire. Students will read scholarly essays and primary sources and conclude with a short, primary-source-based independent research project.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Electives, Educ American History, MLIC Elective, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Global Interdependence, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 2500 - American Identities

3 Credits (Repeatable up to 9 credits)

Scholars and observers have long noted the important roles that apparently marginalized or “outsider” groups play in creating an American nation and culture. Whether looking at religious outsiders, racial and ethnic minorities, or other social categories of difference and identity that define American experience, this course asks we consider this often complicated and even misleading dynamic between margin and center, community and nation, insider and outsider.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Minor, American Studies Electives, Service Leadership Social Just, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 2550 - American Leisure and Pastimes

3 Credits (Repeatable up to 9 credits)

What do you do in your free time? This course explores the who, what, where, and how of popular (and unpopular!) pastimes and leisure activities in the United States. We will examine how race, gender, class, and other identities shape individual and collective access and approach to leisure. How do pastimes reflect and create communities? Americans relax and play at individual and group levels, and we will consider the access and meanings that leisure has to diverse groups. This class will use an interdisciplinary model to look at topics such as gaming, cooking, reading, arts, crafts, sports, the outdoors, fashion, collecting, and consumption and their intersection with Americans’ free time. Using leisure as a lens, we will think critically about contemporary political and social issues, as well as some historical legacies.

Attributes: American Studies Identities

ASTD 2600 - American Places

0 or 3 Credits (Repeatable up to 9 credits)

Through interdisciplinary analysis, research, and writing, this course examines the role of place in shaping American culture, including race and ethnicity, gender, and class. Places may include regions (like the South, Midwest, or West), cities or suburbs, sites like internment camps or reservations, or conceptual places like frontiers and borderlands.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Urban Poverty- Introduction, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 2650 - American Metropolis: Place, Policy, & Power in the US City, 1945–Present

0 or 3 Credits

Interdisciplinary investigation of the dramatic, wrenching, yet occasionally heartening ways that American urban and suburban areas have been reconfigured from WWII to today. Participants examine urban changes in realms such as culture, politics, planning, demographics, and geography. They consider approaches developed by policymakers, social activists, and ordinary residents to address urban challenges, as well as how Americans make sense of changing urban landscapes through art, literature, popular culture, and social criticism. Throughout, the class emphasizes how processes of marginalization along lines of race and class, as well as resistance to those processes, shape the nation’s urban past and present.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, Educ American History, Urban-Cities Society & Justice, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, Urban Poverty - Cycles Exclusn, UUC:Social & Behavioral Sci

ASTD 2700 - Gender, Race, and Social Justice

0 or 3 Credits

This course the intersection of gender and race with other categories of analysis (class, religion, sexuality, nation) in historical and contemporary social justice movements in the United States. Topics include the role of race in movements for gender equality, as well as the impact of gender on movements for racial justice.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Electives, Service Leadership Social Just, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, Urban Poverty - General, UUC:Social & Behavioral Sci, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 2700X - Feminisms in the U.S.: Intersectional Approaches

3 Credits

This course introduces students to different interpretations of feminism across ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities in the U.S. We take as our starting point the intersection of major systems of oppression such as gender, race, sexuality, social class, colonialism and nation, and examine how different racial and ethnic communities respond to those systems when developing feminist consciousness. This survey of intellectual work, activist movements, and worldmaking places the work of women of color and indigenous women at the center of efforts for gender justice.

Attributes: UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, UUC:Reflection-in-Action, Diversity in the US (A&S), WGST Elective, WGST Diversity and Identity

ASTD 2750 - Stuff: American Consumer Culture in a Capitalist World

3 Credits

This class will investigate stuff in North America: where it comes from, how it comes to us, how we store it, what it means to us, and what happens when it is no longer ours. The class will cover topics like fast fashion, bespoke craftsmanship, container ships, supply chains, garbage, hoarding, family heirlooms, souvenirs, wills, and museum and archival collections. This class will give students opportunities to connect ecology and economy in North America while also encouraging reflection on the satisfaction and contentment that humans receive from nature and the working world.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Minor, American Studies Electives, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc

ASTD 2800 - Sports in American Culture

3 Credits

What can watching a Cardinals game teach us about American culture? How do recreational facilities reflect or shape their local environments? Should celebrated athletes speak out on American politics? Are sports leisure or business? How have sporting contests functioned as allegories for national crises over race or gender? These questions and more form the center to this course, which uses sports as a lens to examine the diversity of American culture in terms of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and more.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Electives, Nutrition, Health, Well Elective, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 2880 - Race and Citizenship in St. Louis History and Culture

3 Credits

A major urban center since the late 19th century, St. Louis sits on the geographic and cultural borders between Midwest, West, South, and North. This course examines St. Louis history and recent events through the lenses of race and citizenship, within its regional and national contexts. We will pay particular attention to African American experiences, and to social protest in the 20th century. Readings that focus on St. Louis and its surrounding area will occasionally be supplemented with materials that bring national movements and contexts into our discussion.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Minor, American Studies Electives, Service Leadership Social Just, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Urban-Representing the City

ASTD 2930 - Special Topics

1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Electives

ASTD 2980 - Independent Study in American Studies

1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Attributes: American Studies Electives

ASTD 3000 - American Decades

3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Close examination of a brief span of time in America as a way to reflect on intertwining currents in social, political, and intellectual life. Students explore changes and continuities in religion, philosophy, consumption, popular culture, architecture, and daily life. Course provides intensive focus on primary sources and their interpretation.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3020 - American Mosaic: Literature & Diversity

3 Credits

This course presents a broad spectrum of ethnic American literature, using narrative and other literary forms as a way to put U.S. ethnic experiences into comparative dialogues.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Electives, Literature BA Requirement(CAS), Literature BS Requirement(CAS), Urban Poverty - Cycles Exclusn, Diversity in the US (A&S), WGST Elective

ASTD 3030 - History and Fiction

3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

This course interrogates the boundary between history and fiction; it considers literary questions of 'historical' texts, and historical questions of 'literature' for the purpose of deepening our understanding of both history and fiction.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Electives, Literature BA Requirement(CAS), Literature BS Requirement(CAS), UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture

ASTD 3040 - Religion and U.S. Global Activism

3 Credits

This class explores the American history of faith and international activism. We will analyze the aims, experiences, and ethical frameworks of U.S. missionaries, reformers, and relief workers. Case studies include Christian missionaries in nineteenth-century China, Jewish relief programs in World-War-I Europe, and current debates about global feminist advocacy.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Identities, American Studies Minor, American Studies Electives, Global Citizenship (CAS), Law, Religion and Politics, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Global Interdependence

ASTD 3050 - American Soundscapes

3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

This course explores the role of popular music in American culture, examining how genres like the blues, jazz, country, rock, and hip-hop have provided far more than simple entertainment; indeed, for artists, fans, and critics, music has been an important mode of cultural and political expression, and meaning-making about race, gender, sexuality, and nation. Course may be repeated for credit with different subtitles.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Electives, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3100 - Making the American City

3 Credits

Course examines the cultural history of the U.S. city, 1880s-present. Using numerous primary sources, students will learn how urban cultures and representational practices are shaped by the changing city environment.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, Global Local Justice-Domestic, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, Urban Poverty - Applied, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3200 - The Urban Crisis

3 Credits

This course examines the roots and dimensions of the urban crisis that has transformed American metropolitan areas since World War II. Students investigate major urban problems such as racial segregation and poverty, white flight and suburban sprawl, public housing and urban renewal, riots and insurrections, job loss, and industrial change.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, Global Local Justice-Domestic, Public Health Major Elective, Social Science Req (A&S), Urban Poverty - Applied, Urban Poverty- Introduction, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3300 - Workshop in the City

3 Credits

Provides unique opportunity to study urban environments up close. The metropolitan region of St. Louis is an excellent case study, with its complex interplay of people, processes, neighborhoods, geographies, and natural features. Students will undertake individual and group projects, tours, and fieldwork exercises in consultation with the instructor.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, Global Local Justice-Domestic, Urban Poverty - Applied

ASTD 3400 - American Incarceration

3 Credits

This course uses history, literature, theory, and popular cultural sources to explore incarceration in the United States. Topics may include religion, disability, juvenile justice, race, class, sexuality, and gender. Using history, social theory, film, fiction and autobiography, the course surveys the cultural history of incarceration in America, and examines the place of incarceration in American culture.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Minor, American Studies Electives, Global Local Justice-Domestic, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Urban Poverty - Cycles Exclusn, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3440 - Neoliberal Capitalism, Emotion, and the Self in US Popular Culture

3 Credits

The course asks how the self and society are co-created through emotions we often consider private or personal but in fact carry great political and economic meanings we may not always consider. We will explore how popular culture discusses, produces, manages, and mandates certain emotions—feelings like anger, love, fatigue, envy, nostalgia, fear, and compassion—to justify and sustain capitalism in the United States. Analyzing popular magazines, books, fundraising appeals, television shows, film, social media posts, and political rhetoric, amongst others, we will discuss topics such as emotional labor, self-care, rest, the self-help industry, charity work, and consumer culture in general. The course will ask how gender, race, and technology make and remake our feelings and what those feelings say about American culture—and ourselves—both in the past and today.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, UUC:Dignity, Ethics & Just Soc, WGST Elective

ASTD 3500 - Religion & American Culture

3 Credits

This course uses historical, literary, and popular culture sources to explore the relationship between diverse religious beliefs, values, and practices and American cultural formation. Topics may include church and state, social questions, and lived religious experience.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Electives, Global Local Justice-Elective, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context

ASTD 3550 - Introduction to Museum Studies

3 Credits

In this class, we will study the history, politics, and design of museums. We will trace museums' development from private cabinets of curiosity to public educational institutions in the twentieth-first century. We will especially focus on the politics of display, that is, controversies over how museum interpret cultures and nature.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Electives

ASTD 3600 - American Food and Cultures

3 Credits

This course investigates American foodways through the lens of agriculture, labor, landscape, festival, the body, ethnicity, ethics, and gender. Its goals are to teach students about the meaning of food and how the simple act of eating can reveal interconnections among so many diverse aspects of society and the environment.

Attributes: American Studies Practices, American Studies Electives, Nutrition, Health, Well Elective, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3700 - America in the Global Age

3 Credits

This course examines America's role in the era of rapid globalization, from the late 19th century to the present. It also considers the impact of major global events and processes on American society and culture, such as labor and capital mobility, third world insurgency, technological and environmental change.

Attributes: American Studies Contexts, American Studies Electives, Global Citizenship (CAS), Global Local Justice-Global

ASTD 3800 - Women's Lives

3 Credits

Examines the historical experiences and literary productions of women from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Topics and sources considered may include: novels, diaries, letter-writing, temperance, abolition, suffrage, and political leadership.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Electives, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3880 - Power, Culture, Race and Ethnicity

3 Credits

This course uses popular culture, social science, literature and history to interrogate the impact of race and ethnicity in American culture. Topics covered include: intersections of lived experience, cultural ideas, and structures in the lives of various communities in the U.S. including African American, Native American, Latine, Asian American and other racial or ethnic groups.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Minor, American Studies Electives

ASTD 3900 - Multiracial America

3 Credits

Despite popular images of American as a 'melting' both of races and ethnicities, our institutions, values, and practices have often tried to create or maintain spatial and social distance between groups defined as racially different. This course will explore that ways in which Americans have transgressed those boundaries or found other ways of interacting across cultural lines, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine popular cultural perceptions of people of mixed ancestry, their social experiences, the development of various mixed-ancestry communities, and historical attempts to limit interracial socializing, relationships, and marriage.

Attributes: American Studies Identities, American Studies Electives, Global Local Justice-Domestic, UUC:Aesthetics, Hist & Culture, UUC:Identities in Context, Diversity in the US (A&S)

ASTD 3910 - Internship in American Studies

1-3 Credits

Designed to enable students to make intellectual connections between American Studies academic training and its applications in workplace, community, and institutional settings. Students work with local non-profit organizations, public history and arts institutions, government agencies, activist and neighborhood groups, media outlets, and foundations. They develop projects consistent with American Studies concerns and methods of reflection, while preparing final reports that position them to apply their skills in related areas following graduation. Internships may be paid or unpaid.

Prerequisite(s): CORE 1500^*; (CORE 1000 or UUC Ignite Seminar Waiver with a minimum score of S)

^* Concurrent enrollment allowed.

Restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to students with a program in American Studies.

Attributes: American Studies Community Eng, American Studies Electives, UUC:Reflection-in-Action

ASTD 3930 - Special Topics

3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

ASTD 3980 - Independent Study in American Studies

1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Attributes: American Studies Electives

ASTD 4930 - Special Topics

3 Credits (Repeatable up to 12 credits)

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Attributes: American Studies Electives

ASTD 4960 - Senior Workshop: Crafting the American Studies Thesis

3 Credits

The finale of the American Studies major comes with the Senior Workshop. Under close faculty guidance, students apply a diverse range of American Studies methods while crafting a significant piece of scholarship exploring their main areas of passion and interest. Junior-level ASTD majors by instructor permission.

Prerequisite(s): Minimum Earned Credits of 90

Restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students with a classification of Senior.

Enrollment is limited to students with a program in American Studies.

ASTD 4980 - Advanced Independent Study in American Studies

0-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Attributes: American Studies Electives

ASTD 5000 - Perspectives in American Studies

3 Credits

Survey of theoretical frameworks for the interpretation of American culture over time. Examines the intersection of history and theory in the interdisciplinary study of the American experience from colonial encounters to the present. Critical readings in Marxism, feminism, semiotics, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, race theory, and queer theory. Offered every year.

ASTD 5010 - African American Politics, Culture & Identity

3 Credits

This interdisciplinary seminar explores politics, culture, and identity in African American experiences and public movements. Covering the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we will focus on activism, representation, and the multiple strategies within a diverse community, paying attention to issues of gender, class, religion, region, and national identity.

ASTD 5020 - Frontiers & Borderlands: Contact & Conquest in the American Imagination

3 Credits

Examines the diverse meanings of the 'frontier' in American culture: as a physical and metaphorical site of cultural exchange, ambiguity, and conflict. The course focuses on the interactions between European explorers, traders and settlers, Native Americans, and African migrants to North America.

ASTD 5050 - Public Humanities

3 Credits

This course addresses the theory and practice of public humanities. We will learn what scholars have said about the public and its willingness to engage with history and culture, discuss the possibilities and limits of sharing authority with the public, and explore projects like museums, house museums, digital exhibits, oral history, documentaries, and others. We will also engage with the public through projects that take us into the community. We will leave class with a deeper understanding of public humanities and how the lessons learned from public humanities can be applied both inside and outside academia.

ASTD 5440 - Cultures of American Religion

3 Credits

This course will introduce students to religion as a topic and category of analysis in the interdisciplinary study of modern U.S. history and culture. We will begin by exploring definitional and theoretical questions: what is this thing we call "religion"? What are the kinds of things we might be able to say about it? We will also analyze some of the major grand narratives scholars have produced about American religious history. What is the shape of the story they tell about religion in the United States? What are the major question, themes, and turning points? What is included, what gets left out, and how has this changed over time? And, finally, we will explore some of the most exciting recent scholarship on religion and American culture, focusing in particular on the themes of race, gender, sexuality, material culture, religious pluralism, medicine, capitalism, the law, and the state.

ASTD 5550 - Visualizing Race

3 Credits

This seminar examines cultural depictions of race and racial otherness in visual images, primarily in the late-19thand 20th century U.S. Drawing on theories of visual culture and racial constructions, we look at the uses of racialized images as political speech, as cultural expression, and as entertainment. To study race through this lens highlights the inherent tension of using race as a category of analysis: what does it mean to visualize race? How does the project of “seeing” race fit into our understanding of the highly flawed scientific and popular definitions of race and racial differences? Students will become familiar with a variety of approaches to visual analysis, as well as with the historical development of visual images of racial others and race itself in the U.S. As always, we will pay close attention to the intersections of race with gender as well as other categories of identity.

ASTD 5700 - Metropolitan America

3 Credits

Introduction to the study of American urban and suburban life. Course examines American cities, their cultures, and their built environments as these change over time. Students engage scholarship, develop visual literacy for 'reading' the metropolis, and analyze the ways in which built environments shape and reflect American cultural meaning.

ASTD 5900 - Practice of American Studies

3 Credits

Facilitates sound professional development to accompany graduate work in American Studies. Students analyze universities as diverse social institutions, review key aspects of academic labor, examine the purposes and stages of graduate training, and survey the broad range of professional options available with the M.A. and the Ph.D.

ASTD 5910 - Graduate Internship in American Studies

3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Designed to enable graduate students to make intellectual connections between American Studies academic training and its applications in workplace, community, and institutional settings. Students work with local non-profit organizations, public history and arts institutions, government agencies, activist and neighborhood groups, media outlets, and foundations. They develop projects consistent with American Studies concerns and methods of reflection, while preparing final reports that position them to apply their skills in related areas following graduation. Internships may be paid or unpaid.

ASTD 5930 - Special Topics

3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

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ASTD 5980 - Graduate Independent Study in American Studies

1-3 Credits

Graded as a seminar course.

ASTD 5990 - Thesis Research

0-6 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

6 hours for students writing a Master's thesis. Required while students are working on their research and writing. Students must meet with advisor at least once per semester when taking thesis hours. Grade is either IP or U, except for the semester in which the student graduates, when the grade is S. Students aren't always enrolled in 5990 in the semester when they graduate, but normally they would be.

ASTD 6015 - Many Midwests: Race and Citizenship in the Heartland

3 Credits

The Mid-West as a region has received relatively little attention in the historical and cultural study of race, citizenship, and civil rights. Much work has been done that focuses on these issues in Midwestern locations, but little of it considers the heartland as a region. What happens when we bring a regional focus into research on race and rights? We examine studies that theorize Midwestern regionality as a geographic and cultural entity with ambiguous borders, local studies of developing race relations, civil rights movements, and other struggles around citizenship in specific Mid-Western cities and states.

ASTD 6020 - American Political Thought

3 Credits

This course focuses on selected ideas, issues, and institutions that have been central to the U.S. Constitution and the practice of American constitutionalism, from the founding era to the present. Readings emphasize seminal works in American political thought, which are supplemented by historical accounts, illustrative literature, and contemporary analyses. Offered every year.

ASTD 6100 - Dissertation Colloquium

3 Credits

This course is designed to facilitate the dissertation-writing process. Seminar discussions will focus on peer review of student generated works-in-progress. Required of all Ph.D. students. May be repeated for credit at adviser's discretion.

ASTD 6200 - Visual Culture Theory

3 Credits

Introduction to the theoretical models and questions that inform the wide-ranging critical practices of visual culture studies. Course examines foundational texts in visual theory as well as many different cultural forms available to visual cultural analysis such as vision itself, material culture, museums, photographs, films, and television. Offered every other year.

ASTD 6250 - The Cultural Studies Movement: Origins and Contemporary Practice

3 Credits

Seminar covers the rise of cultural studies and its influence on American Studies and related disciplines. After examining the development of British cultural studies as an intellectual movement, participants explore theoretical approaches characterizing distinct phases of cultural studies research, while engaging with American Studies works that continue or challenge this tradition. Offered occasionally.

ASTD 6350 - Native American and Indigenous Studies

3 Credits

Students in this course will read key texts in the history and culture of Indigenous peoples in North America. Participants will gain a familiarity with Indigenous studies methodologies and Native American historiography. Topics will include individual tribal histories, Indigenous political movements from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries, and historical and contemporary discussions of Indigenous public humanities.

ASTD 6400 - Transnational America

3 Credits

This graduate course introduces students to the history, the intellectual trajectories, and the institutional impact of the 'transnational turn' in American Studies and related scholarship. Focusing on 19th- 20th-century cultural, economic, political, and religious encounters in Africa, Asia, and Europe, we will investigate the varied manifestations of U.S. global engagement in the world.

ASTD 6500 - Visions of U.S. Empire

3 Credits

This course will familiarize students with theoretical approaches to, and key studies of, empire and imperialism in U.S. history and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore the imperial at home and abroad, and pay particular attention to literature, gender, policy, and visual culture.

ASTD 6650 - Civil Rights, Activism, and Cultural Memory

3 Credits

Recent historical and cultural studies scholarship has challenged almost every aspect of our collective narrative of the civil rights movement. Continuing debates over the roles of women, gender, class, race, religion, and region bring new interpretations to the strategies of activists and the multiple levels of campaigns against segregation and discrimination. The Civil Rights movement is now Long, or is it still short: was it New, or was it a direct development from activism in the early twentieth-century, was a Southern phenomenon or also a Northern one? Did men lead and women organize?.

ASTD 6700 - Cold War Cultural Politics and the "American Century"

3 Credits

This graduate seminar explores the culture of the Cold War era in the United States from 1947 to 1963. In particular, we will examine the ways in which political and international forms of conflict shaped American society in areas ranging from shifting gender configurations to new forms of youth culture, artistic ideologies to the transformation of urban a suburban space, evolving racial formations to the politics of mass culture.

ASTD 6800 - American Food & Culture

3 Credits

This class studies food production and consumption through themes such as labor, environment, gender, ethnicity, globalization, identity, and power. The course's goal is to learn about the meaning of food and how the simple act of eating can reveal interconnections among so many diverse aspects of society and the environment.

ASTD 6910 - Graduate Internship

1-6 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Specific requirements vary depending on the site of the internship and the individual contract for that internship. Grading is the same as for a seminar.

ASTD 6930 - Special Topics

3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

ASTD 6980 - Graduate Independent Study in American Studies

1-3 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

Graded as a seminar course.

ASTD 6990 - Dissertation Research

0-9 Credits (Repeatable for credit)

12 hours for students writing a dissertation. Required while students are working on their research and writing. Students must meet with advisor at least once per semester when taking dissertation hours.

Attributes: Special Approval Required