AMST 0070. An Introduction to Africana Studies (AFRI 0090).

Interested students must register for AFRI 0090.

AMST 0085. The Christian Right (RELS 0085F).

Interested students must register for RELS 0085F.

AMST 0090A. 7 Hours and 55 Minutes: Sex, Work, and Migration in Global Contexts.

Diving into global debates, surround gender, sex, migration, and labor, this course considers forms of work that are inflected by race, gender, class, nation, and ability. Our course title, “7 Hours and 55 Minutes,” draws its inspiration from an advocacy game developed by the Empower Foundation, Thailand’s first sex worker rights organization. The game asks participants to consider Thai sex worker understandings an of sex work, within the context of an 8 hour working day. It examines how the global legal and civilian regulation of gendered bodies is met with vital forms of resistance and community organizing. Each week, our seminar will explore one book, article, documentary film, cultural artifact, or the mixed media artistic productions.

AMST 0150B. Boston: A City Through Time.

This interdisciplinary seminar for first year students will examine the City of Boston from its seventeenth-century origins to the present day. Among the topics covered will be architecture, city planning, physical expansion, political leadership, urban renewal, historical preservation, park development, racial and ethnic tensions, and suburban sprawl. Includes a Boston tour. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AMST 0150C. Bodies of Knowledge: Gender, Race and Science.

This course examines how science and medicine have located racial and sexual differences in the human body and gendered the natural world from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will consider historical changes in the production of scientific knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality, as well as debates about who participates in scientific work.

AMST 0150D. The West in the American Imagination.

No region has such a purchase on Americans' collective imagination as the West. No region is so drenched in misrepresentation and mythology. In this seminar, we will use fiction, film, and works of history to explore the American West as both historical reality and wellspring of collective myth. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AMST 0150E. Skill: From Flint-knapping to the Maker Movement.

What does it mean to be skilled? How do mechanical and material knowledge, expertise in the use of tools, and physical ability allow us to make and repair things? How do actions, words, images and artifacts embody skills? How do skills fit into social and cultural settings? How have ideas about skills changed over time? In this course we will read the writings of skilled craftspeople, scholars, and cultural critics; observe skilled practitioners in a variety of areas; learn new skills, and write about them.

AMST 0150F. What Does A Woman Want?.

This course is an introduction to psychoanalysis and its vexed and productive relationships to women and feminism. Freud asked his famous question: "What does a woman want?" after years of clinical practice and theoretical speculation. Woman's desire remained a mystery to him, but the attempt to solve it has given rise to a rethinking of human sexuality, of gender, of social structures, and of creativity. We will read foundational texts by Freud and by feminist disciples and critics of psychoanalysis theories. The literary texts will be read as critiques of theoretical positions, as well as examples of particular historical constructions of gender. The course is broadly interdisciplinary and explores the boundaries and intersections of different disciplinary practices and frameworks. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AMST 0150I. Race, Sex, and Biology: A Cultural History of Differences.

Are your race, gender, and sexual orientation biologically pre-determined? This course traces the history and cultural implications of theories of racial and sexual differences. We examine three "scientific" theories -- Darwinism, eugenics, and genetics -- in popular culture, public policies and social movements, and consider how these social constructs both empowered and disempowered women, homosexuals, and racial minorities. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AMST 0150J. The Boy Problem.

Focusing on the beginning, middle, and especially concluding decades of the 20th century, this course examines the ways in which both expert and popular discourse in the US have conflated male adolescence with social pathology and have constructed an image of the teenage boy as both symptomatic of and responsible for the nation's ills. Particular attention will be paid to issues of gender, race, and class. Primary source readings and original research will be emphasized. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AMST 0150K. Culture, Communities, and Change.

Studying varied organizations such as museums, community arts groups, rock bands, and dance companies, this seminar works on three levels. Students consider the role of cultural production in local, national, and international economies and lives; think about methods for studying creative communities; and write the "biographies" of Providence cultural organizations. Issues of tourism, representation, hierarchy, urban space, and social change as well as questions about who puts culture to work and the role of cultural workers will be addressed. We will consider public humanities, engaged scholarship and community organizing as methods as we explore the Providence cultural scene. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students.

AMST 0150L. Object Histories: The Material Culture of Early America (HIST 0550A).

Interested students must register for HIST 0550A.

AMST 0150M. 95 North: New York Fictions.

In this course we will consider humanity’s fate in twentieth-century and postmillennial Gotham. Through a broad range of literature and film that treats New York as a destination unto itself, 95 North examines the city’s representational status as our nation’s de facto capital by focusing on its most undemocratic and antisocial features (e.g., widespread disaffection, racial animus, gentrification, vice, and criminality). Writers include James Weldon Johnson, Saul Bellow, LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara, Samuel R. Delany, Jay McInerney, Diana Son, and Teju Cole.

AMST 0150N. Color Me Cool.

This seminar is an introduction to graphic novels produced in the U.S. since 1985 and will train you in critically interpreting graphic novels. We will pay close attention to the relationship between the visual and textual components of the novels. While we will draw on many critical reading tools, we will use Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to give us a shared critical vocabulary. I may use one superhero graphic novel as a point of contrast, but the course will focus on graphic novels such as Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings and the like.

AMST 0150P. The Teen Age: Youth, Society and Culture in Early Cold War America.

An interdisciplinary and multimedia exploration of the experiences, culture, and representation of youth in the United States from the end of World War II through the beginning of the Vietnam War. Enrollment limited to 19.

AMST 0150R. Science in the Public Eye.

This course examines the relationship between science and popular culture in modern America. We will examine the representation of science and technology in films, museums, education, and advertising, as well as the role of political culture in scientific practice and controversies. Topics will range from the history of debates about vaccines to concerns about nuclear power. We will also consider the role of science and medicine in reinforcing as well as challenging social and racial inequalities over the past century.

AMST 0170A. American Slavery On Screen.

Since the advent of American cinema, antebellum slavery has remained an abiding topic of interest for filmmakers and theatergoers alike. From Thomas Edison’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) to Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave (2013), our infatuation with the peculiar institution appears be as relevant to our nation’s ongoing discussions about race and civic belonging as it was to those antislavery debates that precipitated the Civil War. This course examines the various ideological ends to which cinematic slavery has been put to use.

AMST 0170C. Race, Class, and Girlhood.

This seminar provides an introduction to girlhood studies, both historically and theoretically, and positions girls at the center of popular culture analysis. In particular, this course examines the intersections of race, class, and gender in the construction of “girlhood” within the U.S. Through an analysis of different forms of popular culture, students in this course will gain an understanding of the politics of production and consumption and the diverging disclosures around what it means to "be a girl".

AMST 0170D. Musical Youth Cultures.

This sophomore seminar explores how and why young people form communities around popular music. We will discuss readings and documentary films about musical subcultures, media circulation, and how young people make music meaningful in their lives. The course requires critical engagement with a variety of popular music genres and cultures, as well as reflection on our own musical production and consumption practices. Major topics include punk, hip-hop, metal, rock, and club music; popular music and intersectional identity (including race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability); fan communities; activist musical collectives; music-sharing technologies; the politics of style; and ethnographic theory and method.

AMST 0170E. Black to the Future: Race as Science Fiction.

Charting an interdisciplinary path, this course will teach students literary and visual analysis through fiction, film, comics, and graphic novels to explore debates in the 20th and 21st century around how to read blackness. What is the relationship between the history of African Americans and the speculative genre? What tools does it afford African American writers and artists that other genres of fiction do not? How does Black science fiction in both literary and visual form, teach us how to see and read blackness otherwise? Key artists include George Schuyler, W.E.B. DuBois, N.K. Jemison, Janelle Monae, Octavia Butler, among others.

AMST 0190A. Selling Love, Selling Sex: Romance in Popular Culture.

Where do our beliefs about love and romance come from? Is it true that "sex sells"? This course examines representations of love in advertising and popular culture from the 1920s, 1950s, 1980s and the present. We'll compare texts such as Ladie's Home Journal, I Love Lucy, and Dynasty to Maxim, Desperate Housewives, and Mad Men. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190B. Histories of Memory/Memories of History.

This course examines the role of historical narratives in popular culture and politics, using memoir, films, newspapers, political cartoons, and scholarship to think about how such narratives build and break local, national, and transnational communities, serve and interrupt different kinds of political agendas, and reform the way we orient ourselves to the way we live and to those with whom we live. How is the past made? By whom? Topics will include the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, Columbus, memorials, and holidays. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190C. American (Mass)culinities: Sexuality, Race and Aesthetics.

This course explores masculinity in American popular cultures since 1945. Starting with theories of homosociality, racial and gender formation at the turn of the century, to modern and post-modern cultural productions that visualize or narrativize "masculinity" including novels, films, and video. Through frameworks of psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and critical race theory we think about masculinity as narrative, as a set of discourses, an epistemology, an aesthetic and privileged form of Americana. How we understand the politics of race and sexuality through images of male bodies? What it means to decouple masculinity and men? What are the relationships between gender/genre? Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190D. Popular Music and the City.

This course will examine the relationship between popular music and its sociocultural context by concentrating on three urban music forms; blues, soul, and hip hop. Readings will focus on: (1) concepts such as audiences, the music industry, cultural infrastructure, and race; (2) processes such as urbanization, demographic change, and the politicization of popular music. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190E. It's the End of the World As We Know It: Zombie and Apocalypse Narratives in American Pop Culture.

Zombie narratives originated as part of racist colonial ideologies prevalent in Haiti and the Caribbean, and have since become a means of social and political critique. This course charts how the zombie has been re-appropriated and redeployed in American culture. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we examine zombie and apocalypse narratives in film, literature, comics, and video games. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190F. Beyond the Tourist Trap: The Past, Present, and Future of Asian American Urban Spaces.

Beyond the lure of the "exotic" food, cultural festivals, and distinctive architecture of Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, Filipinotowns, Koreatowns, Little Saigons, and Little Indias, Asian American spaces are at once historical remnants of an exclusionary past and the current embodiment of the diversity of ethnic communities. This class seeks to understand such spaces by considering the people involved — those within and outside of the community — and the complex relationships among community groups. Texts will include histories, maps, works by urban planners, and a field trip to Boston's Chinatown. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190G. The Fringe is the Fabric: Anti-Immigrant Movements in the United States.

This course traces nativist anti-immigrant movements and violence in the United States. Starting in the colonial period and ending with contemporary issues, the course demonstrates how anti-immigrant movements occur across place and time and serve to police the boundaries of U.S. citizenship. The course relies on fiction, documentary films and other historical texts to highlight continuing violent conflicts. We focus on the use of "vigilante" violence and put contemporary discussions of immigration in a new frame. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190H. Junkies, Robots, and Fight Clubs: Revisioning the "American Dream" in US Popular Culture.

From fembots to fightclubs, this course explores our obsession with revisions of the American Dream. We examine film and literary translations of three recycled stories—Rags-to-Riches, the Open Road, and Domestic Bliss—to better understand how we narrate the "American" experience and consider how these nationalizing narratives construct race, class, and gender. Films and texts include "Stepford Wives," "Easy Rider," and "Wall Street." Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190I. Re-Thinking Political Aesthetics: Beauty, Modernity, and Justice in the Americas.

The United States and the Americas have always been spaces of intertwined artistic, political, and religious expression. Yet, in the growing field of political aesthetics, works of European modernism are prized while examples from the Americas are rarely mentioned. This course examines the philosophical texts used to frame the field of political aesthetics, as well as food in the colonial diet of New Spain, painting during the Civil War, photography and the New Negro movement, jazz and the Beat generation, and other case studies of American expression that engage, complicate and re-construct the relationship between art and politics.

AMST 0190J. Four-Color Creatures: Race, Gender, and Monstrosity in American Comic Books and Popular Culture.

This course explores the relationship between race, gender, and monstrosity in American popular culture, particularly in comic books and graphic novels. Utilizing the concept of the monster as a metaphor, we examine the intersection of these discourses to interrogate how monstrosity informs our collective understanding of the other and affects the representation of race and gender in contemporary print ephemera and visual culture. To compliment our understanding of these materials, we engage with scholarship in the emerging fields of Monster Studies and Comic Studies to highlight the way that these artifacts embody larger trends within American society.

AMST 0190K. The American War/Vietnam War: Politics, Struggle, and the Construction of History in the US/Vietnam.

What Americans call the "Vietnam War," the Vietnamese remember as the "War of Resistance against the United States for National Salvation." This class seeks to explore multiple American and Vietnamese perspectives on a prolonged conflict that profoundly shaped the nations' political, social, and cultural landscapes. We focus on differences and similarities in Vietnamese and American interpretations of the origins, conduct and denouement of the war. We examine war memories through memoirs, monuments, movies, documentaries, magazines, and newspapers, as well as in foreign and domestic policies. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190L. Cry for Justice: Asian American Literature of Social Activism.

The fact that Asian American literature has a protest tradition makes it a powerful site to highlight and re-animate Asian Americans’ overlooked histories and struggles for social justice. Through reading a variety of genres including poetry, fiction, autobiography, and memoir by authors from different Asian American communities, this course will examine the hidden history of Asian immigrant radicalism, dismantle stereotypes against Asian Americans, explore solidary and sustainable activism, and assert that literature has been and remains a fundamental site for Asian Americans’ active resistance to racial, class, gender and sexual oppression.

AMST 0190M. Ecological (De)colonization: North American Environmental History, Justice, and Sovereignty.

This course investigates how historical and contemporary issues of resource capitalism, environmental justice, and settler colonization in the North American context are entangled. Students will come to understand that Indigenous sovereignty, and thus decolonization, is fundamentally concerned with land and water (i.e. the other-than-human environment). Students will receive an introduction to environmental history, learn to use primary sources, develop a theoretical toolkit to approach topics concerning settler colonialism and environmental/climate justice, and explore political and environmental solutions to the problems discussed.

AMST 0190N. Health as Morality in American Life.

This course examines the many ways in which the idea of health is morally constructed in American society and culture. Students investigate health as a moral value and study how conceptions of health affect individuals, shape culture, and organize society. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we investigate how “health” constructs norms, stigma, and the experiences and practices of day-to-day life. Choosing from such topics as addiction, diet, vaccines, cigarettes, illness, disability, genetic testing, sex, and obesity, students write analyses about how moral constructions of health shape and are shaped by media, history, capitalism, politics, race, gender, and class.

AMST 0190O. Expressway Worlds: Landscape and Life on the Margins of U.S. Highways.

This course explores the history, legacy, and material presence of U.S. highways from the mid-twentieth to the present. Bridging diverse fields and ways of knowing, from cultural history to road ecology, it endeavors to de-familiarize a ubiquitous feature of life and landscape in the contemporary United States, the federal highway system, and invites students to critically re-encounter the same.
We will practice seeing, hearing, and feeling the lively traces of human and multi-species habitation in our midst. And we will consider the effects of interstate roads across time and space; on societies, ecologies, and landscapes.

AMST 0190Q. Archival Interventions: Tracing Knowledge, Power, and Memory through the Archives.

This course will examine the ways that power, knowledge, and memory are instantiated through a variety of record keeping practices. Through an exploration of analog and digital storage media, the institutions in which they reside, and an engagement with social justice approaches, feminist theory and queer theory, this course will seek to answer the questions: how are categories formed and what are the social ramifications of these choices? How do records enter certain institutions? Who is represented, in what ways, and who is excluded? This course will include guest lectures and field trips to local archives and libraries.

AMST 0190S. Los Angeles Plays Itself: Culture and Critique in the City of Angels.

Explores the history of culture produced in and about Los Angeles during the last century, examining representations of the city in literature, film, television, music, and theory. Texts ranging from detective novels to teen dramas to hip-hop songs will reveal the ongoing conversations and conflicts among Los Angeles's diverse inhabitants that have shaped its physical, cultural, and social landscapes. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190T. Talking Social Reform: From Populism and Progressivism to Obama and McCain.

This course argues that two broad "languages" of social reform, coming out of the Populist and Progressive Movements of the late nineteenth century, have shaped the ways in which Americans understand politics. Students consider how the possibilities for contemporary reform and change have been informed by these languages. We will examine political texts discussing the New Deal, the eugenics movement, the Cold War, liberalism, and the New Left, among others. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190U. Sports Mediated: Athletics and the Production of Culture in 20th Century America.

When we watch sports, we're watching more than a game. Newspapers, radio, television, and the internet produce athletic spectacles within certain cultural boundaries determined by profits, as well as by race, gender and class. The course questions how sports media played a generative role in late twentieth century American culture through three case studies: Michael Jordan's rise to sports stardom; the emergence of skateboarding as an "alternative" sport; and controversies surrounding transgender and transsexual athletes. Non-sports fans are welcome and encouraged! Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores. Instructor permission required.

AMST 0190V. Reading the City: Literary Tourism in New York, Los Angeles, Santo Domingo and Manila.

What shapes our conception of a city we haven't visited? Is it the novels we read or the films we watch? How do our ideas change when we tour or live there? This course investigates New York, Los Angeles, Santo Domingo, and Manila through the various social, political and sexual experiences portrayed in novels, creative nonfiction, poetry, and film. Mindful of our own role as reader-tourists, we will compare depictions of reading, visiting, touring, and living in cities especially with regards to issues of identity and its transformation. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190W. Displaying Activism Then and Now: Making an Exhibition for Social Justice.

We will investigate the possibilities for activism and social relevance through museum exhibitions. We will create an exhibition at the John Hay Library that displays historical and contemporary activism, based on student choices of possible movements including queer rights, animal rights, and environmental concerns. Students choose objects, write labels, and act as curators for the exhibit. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190X. Gendered Mobility: Migrant Women Workers in a Globalized Economy.

Today's women workers migrate at a historically unprecedented rate. This class looks at Third World women who migrate for work in global cities. We examine their experiences through the intersectional lens of gender, race, class, and nationality. We also question the social, political, and economic forces that drive migration and draw women workers to specific destinations. Finally, we will look at the multiple inequalities these workers confront and the ways in which they negotiate and challenge them. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190Y. Dead or Alive?: The American West in Popular Culture.

This course traces the imagined Western frontier as seen in television, film, photographs, museum exhibits, art, tourism, amusement parks, performance, video games, and science fiction. It explores these imagined spaces through the lenses of popular and visual culture, placing the West within the larger social, cultural, economic, and political histories of the US. Both real and imagined, these images defined and consolidated the identities of Westerners and those who wanted to be Westerners. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0190Z. Queering the Archive: History and the Politics of Identity.

How is history made? Who makes it? Who benefits from how stories of the past are told? How might we queer the making of histories and how could this influence our futures? This course follows feminists, queer theory scholars, and activists in their journeys to critically analyze historical archives and open up queer readings of the past. We will spend time with variety of cultural texts including Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman, Lara Kramer’s performance piece NGS (Native Girl Syndrome), and Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred to think about historical knowledge production and its relationship to identity formation.

AMST 0191B. Race and Nation in the U.S.: Belonging, Longing, and Resistance.

This course examines how representations of race continue to be critical to the formation of the American nation. We will look at cultural and historical texts that grapple with how “race” is used to (1) define who does and does not belong to the U.S., (2) configure feelings of longing for a homeland, and (3) resist dominant narratives of national inclusion through visual art, performance, and stand-up comedy. The course will use Middle Eastern Americans as its primary case study of these larger themes, and will also incorporate many readings that touch on African American and Latinx experiences.

AMST 0191C. Race and Space: Segregation, Suburbanization, and Sites of Encampment.

Through a range of historical examples from the 20th century, Race and Space: Segregation, Suburbanization, and Sites of Encampment examines how interconnected forms of racial and spatial difference are produced, reproduced, and transformed in various U.S. locales. This class will provide students with a unique opportunity to conduct primary-source research in a number of archives and apply the course themes to local historical issues of race and space. Students will gain exposure to a wide variety of case studies, disciplines, methodologies, and approaches in which scholars are writing, thinking, and publicly displaying issues of race and space.

AMST 0191D. Cry for Justice: Asian American Literature of Social Activism.

What insights can literary genres, including poetry, fiction, autobiography and memoir, provide into the struggle for social justice and fight for inclusion in the United States? What role can Asian American literature play in addressing and illuminating past and present injustices? With these questions in mind, through reading protest literary works by Asian American authors, this course will examine the hidden history of Asian immigrant radicalism, dismantle stereotypes against Asian Americans, and assert that literature has been and remains a fundamental site for Asian Americans’ active resistance to racial, class, gender and sexual oppression.

AMST 0191E. Objects as Texts: Materializing Race, Gender, and Sexuality.

What is the relationship between objects and identity? This course analyzes how material objects reflect and produce representations of identity, which map onto the body. Alongside a survey of cultural studies, feminist theory, and critical race studies scholarship, we will use specific objects—including, sugar, milk, vibrators, and Spanx—as case studies to critically consider how material culture informs and signals identity. With an emphasis on race, gender, and sexuality, we will read objects as texts and explore how materiality shapes politics, performance, and power.

AMST 0191F. No-No Boy: Experimental Scholarship on Asian-America.

This unique course seeks to bridge artistic work and scholarship in an exploration of the Asian-American experience. In this course, Julian Saporiti’s No-No Boy, a concert project which fuses songwriting, video editing and academic research to look at topics such as Japanese Incarceration, Vietnamese Refugees, and the Asian diaspora more broadly in the US, serves not only as a course outline, but also as a model and jumping off point for those interested in using creative practices to pursue scholarly research and reach a public audience.

AMST 0191G. TV on History: Representations of the American Past on Commercial Television.

This course explores commercial television's influence on our understanding of the American past and the way that this sense of history, in turn, helps audiences to form cultural and political identities. We will discuss foundational methods for critical analysis of television as we use this inquiry to examine some of the guiding themes of American Studies. This class, which has a significant viewing component, traces the evolution of history-based programming in many genres and considers the message and impact of programs such as Ken Burns' Civil War, Roots, Colonial House, and Mad Men. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191H. "My Body, My Choice"?: Reproductive Politics in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade.

From waiting periods to mandatory ultrasounds, a record number of provisions aimed at restricting women's access to abortion were enacted in 24 U.S. states in 2011. Dubbed the "war on women" by numerous observers, these legislative battles evidence the difficulty in determining reproduction's "proper" place in governmental politics. But is there more to this battle than abortion? Beginning with Roe v. Wade, this course explores how welfare, labor, citizenship, the family, religion, and activism alter mainstream conceptions of reproductive politics. Using a variety of sources, including films and websites, we will consider what an expansive reproductive freedom might entail. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191I. Identities on the Move: South Asian Americans In Popular Culture.

Interdisciplinary course looks at the migration, representation and cultural productions of the South Asian diaspora in the United States. We'll examine how category of "South Asian" was created as well as the ramifications of such a label: what does it mean to be South Asian in the United States? Through the examination of academic texts, as well as literature, television and film, we'll explore how South Asian Americans navigate the United States while at the same time, maintaining (or, in some cases, disrupting) connections to countries in the South Asian subcontinent. Enrollment limited to 17.

AMST 0191J. These Are The Breaks? Rethinking Black Performance in the 20th Century.

In this course students will look critically at cabaret, documentary film, theatre, dance, popular music, and museum exhibitions, rethinking the ways that Black performances have been configured in debates about American identity in the 20th Century. Rather than try to understand Black performance, and performers, in reductive aesthetic and political frameworks, students will read and write about them as heterogeneous and complex. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191K. New Jack(ed) Cinema: Negotiating Race, Criminality, and Place in the Hollywood Film.

This interdisciplinary course engages critically with film to examine issues of race and criminality, and to better understand our collective, spatial, and personal identities. We study a sub-genre of films, from the 1990s, and investigate how these films interact and intersect with other cultural texts and narratives of race, criminality, sexuality, gender, and the American dream. Films studied include "Colors"; "New Jack City"; "Clockers"; "Boyz 'n the Hood"; and "Menace II Society"; while readings come from film studies, sociology, history, memoir, and policy studies. Enrollment limited to 17 first-year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191L. Are You Creative?: The Rise of a Modern Virtue.

Are you creative, or, even, a "creative"? Do you plan to be an entrepreneur, a writer, or an artist? Today, "creativity" is championed by education activists, fringe artists, and corporate CEOs alike. This course gives a critical perspective by tracing the biography of an idea through various fields. We will look everywhere for signs of creativity and focus on the relationship between creativity, work, and economic development, taking of Providence, RI, the "Creative Capital" as an example. We will talk to people involved in various aspects of the city's creative strategy to observe the effects of this powerful idea. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191M. The Vietnam War and Visual Culture.

This course examines how our understanding of one of the most mediated armed conflicts of the twentieth century has changed. Why has "Vietnam" become a metaphor for imperial wars and how has it figured in cultural production within and beyond the United States? Considering photographs, films, and personal narratives beginning during the war and continuing into the present, we recognize the fictive and flexible nature of history and how even the worst experiences are made available for collective memory and mass consumption. The course works to decenter the United States and takes into account long-range ramifications and multiple voices. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191N. Beyond Entrepreneurs, Adoptees, and G.I. Wives: Korean American Experiences.

What does it mean to be Korean American? This course explores the historical and contemporary experiences of people of Korean descent in the United States. In the broader context of U.S.-Korean/Asian relations and through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, this course will examine the connections and differences in the lives of diverse Korean populations. The composition of these populations ranges from adoptees, military wives, and entrepreneurs to secondary migrants from Latin America. Throughout the semester, students will be familiarized with the central themes in immigration and ethnic studies such as diaspora, transnationalism, racial formation, and community formation. Enrollment limited to 17 first years and sophomores.

AMST 0191O. Revolting Bodies: Aesthetics, Representation, and Popular Culture.

Our understanding of ourselves and others are formed by visual images and bodily feelings that are social in origin. They make us feel (un)comfortable, sublime, ridiculous, grotesque. In this course we will examine how the materiality of the body grounds our metaphors about identity and subject formation. This course moves between cultural studies, queer theory, disability studies, science fiction, drama and film asking how representations structure they way we "know" and "see" bodies. Ultimately we will explore how revolting bodies--bodies that disgust, repulse, signal their difference--can become bodies in revolt--bodies that resist and imagine new possibilities.

AMST 0191P. Beyond Chinatown: The Past, Present, and Future of Asian American Spaces.

Beyond the "exotic" dishes, cultural festivals, and distinct architecture of Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, Little Manilas/Filipinotowns, Koreatowns, Little Saigons, and Little Indias, Asian American spaces are both historical remnants of racial oppression and the current home of diverse ethnic communities. Using field trips, films, first person accounts and scholarly explorations, this class examines such spaces by considering the people involved—tourists and residents—and how their complex relationship creates urban and suburban ethnic spaces. Students will workshop and revise papers as well as gain a grounding in approaches to Asian American studies, urban studies, and to the study of public spaces. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191Q. Disbelieving the Evidence: Popular Opposition to 20th Century Public Health Initiatives.

Why do Americans reject programs that make them healthier? Many of the most effective public health initiatives in the 20th century encountered deep resistance. This course explores three initiatives (vaccination, fluoride, and black lung) that continue to generate skepticism or outright opposition. Students will practice several different styles of writing intended for different audiences, including an op-ed and a Wikipedia entry. This writing-designated course will appeal to students of public health, politics, and those interested in the social impact of medical research, as well as those wanting practice in science writing. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191R. Fat, Messy, and Late: Unregulated Bodies in American Capitalism.

This course examines disorganized bodies in 19th and 20th century US history and how slenderness, neatness, and timeliness became virtues. Through these lenses we study capitalism working upon individual bodies; the way these "moral virtues" generate forms of self-regulation; and the way these forms of self-regulation perpetuate the status quo. We draw upon history, sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, starting each section in the 19th century and moving to the present. Using our personal experiences, we examine how belief systems become internalized. This interdisciplinary course welcomes community health and biology concentrators as well as humanities and social science concentrators. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191S. Visualizing the Middle East: From National Geographic to the Arab Spring.

American visual media remains flooded with images, inspiring and hopeful, or horrifying and terrifying, of the peoples and places of the Near East. By examining National Geographic photography, Hollywood cinema, televised news programs, and images and videos encountered online, we examine how visual culture has both reflected and actively helped shape the relationship between the U.S. and the Near East. Students will experiment with a diverse methods of visual analysis, work with a class Tumblr site, and write and revise a series of essays. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.

AMST 0191T. American Identities: Memoir and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century.

How do we think about our own place in history? This writing-intensive seminar examines how individual Americans have explored the relationship between their identity and historical events, and introduces the legitimacy of using individual experiences to understand history. Themes include the gendering of domestic and public space, the formation of identity within families, class alignments, societal expectations of gender/sexuality, how American exceptionalism manifests itself at the individual level, and narrative (un)reliability. Our discussions center on autobiographies, memoirs, and films from authors such as Audre Lorde, Harry Crews, Malcolm X, Alison Bechdel, and Tobias Wolff.

AMST 0191U. Imagining the American Mind.

How are theories about our minds and brains represented in American culture? We use literature and film, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, history and sociology to investigate how we imagine our minds, and the consequences of those representations for our ideas about race and gender, for our social lives and responsibilities, for our means to communicate to one another and, even, to know ourselves. Writing in different formats, students bridge the gap between the humanities and the human sciences. Concentrators in biology and neuroscience consider the cultural history of their research while humanities/social science students explore how culture ties to science.

AMST 0191V. American Capitalism and Its Critics.

In the wake of the Great Recession, many Americans have become disenchanted with capitalism, wondering whether the market economy harms more than it helps. This course introduces students to writers, artists, and activists from the past who shared that feeling and in plays, essays, films, and photographs protested the rise of capitalism in the United States. We will explore issues of power, poverty, profit, and equality through in-class discussions and four writing assignments. Students interested in history, art, literature, and economics will learn more about class, capitalism, and the history of American politics.

AMST 0191W. American Indian Law and Legacies.

From the U.S. Constitution to MTV and Urban Outfitters, this course traces the history and legacies of American Indian law and policy. Using a case studies approach, students will read legal documents alongside film, television, literature, blogs, poetry, photography, fashion, news articles, manifestos, and Twitter to explore the ways in which American Indian law and policy manifests in the daily lives of contemporary Indian people and Native nations. All students welcome! This course will be of special interest to those studying indigenous histories and cultures, American government, representations/memory, and law.

AMST 0191X. Troubled Pasts and Visual Cultural: Comparative Models from Providence to Pretoria.

This course examines the intersections of visual culture, commemorative politics, and individual and collective memories to analyze the politics of memory. We will look at debates over formal and informal engagements with the memory of three traumatic events: the "Dirty War" in Argentina, South African apartheid, and September 11th, 2001 in the US. Looking at the past as contested ground we will explore the challenges, ethics, and controversies around representing these events across a variety of mediums including film, art, music, and memorials. This class will be of interest to students of visual culture, cultural politics, and memory studies.

AMST 0191Y. Cradle of Democracy?: Race, Childhood, and U.S. National Identity.

From Elian Gonzalez to Trayvon Martin, children play an important role in political narratives concerning domestic and international affairs. Engaging with a range of texts—including blogs, films, and online exhibits—students will consider how the idea of childhood and the bodies of children have constructed our gendered and racialized sense of self. Such ideas about difference and belonging also emerge through children’s material culture, and so students will create a children’s book and multimedia website as well as visit the Providence Children’s Museum.

AMST 0191Z. Food and Gender in U.S. Popular Culture.

Why is salad coded as feminine and steak as masculine? This course examine how gender is constructed and performed in sites across the U.S. food system, taking in farm fields, supermarkets, home kitchens, and restaurants. We explore food production, cooking, feeding, eating, and dieting, through a variety of food texts, including cookbooks, advertisements, and the Food Network. We will engage all of our senses (especially taste!), as we explore how gender intersects with other significant cultural categories and shapes everyday food experiences in the United States.

AMST 0192A. Unsettled Things: Objects and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America.

This course explores the history of collecting, with a focus on local museum and university collections. College Hill is home to numerous accumulations of things, from Civil War relics to Old Master paintings and fragments of taxidermy. Where did these objects come from? Why were they collected? How have their meanings and uses changed over time? How might we reconsider them today? Students will examine objects; read about collecting and the development of natural history, anthropology, history, and fine art; write research papers that incorporate material culture methodology; and co-curate an exhibition.

AMST 0192B. Give Me Color: Performing Interraciality in Film and Literature.

Through a reading of select critical theory, literary texts, and films, students will look critically at the ways in which race has been constructed and figured in U.S. culture post-1945, through the lens of interraciality. Decentering the dominant narrative of black-white interraciality, we will give equal attention to the role that Asian bodies play in complicating this binary. We will also investigate the potentiality of texts to challenge social norms or reclaim injurious identities. Authors include Jhumpa Lahiri, Celeste Ng, and Peter Ho Davies. Visual texts range from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) to "San Junipero" (2016)

AMST 0192C. Race in the Museum.

From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture to Walt Disney World’s EPCOT theme park, this course examines how museums and cultural institutions address issues of race and identity. We will think critically about the display of race and difference in sites of leisure and consider how such institutions can be reclaimed as spaces for dialogue and action. At the end of the course, students will propose an original exhibition plan exploring these issues. This course will be useful for students interested in public history, visual culture, and critical race studies.

AMST 0192D. Social Memory and the 60s: From Nixon to Nostalgia.

The 1960s were watershed years in the US. From the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War, women’s liberation to Woodstock, a series of revolutions occurred during this decade. How do we remember the 1960s? How do we understand its legacies embodied in texts, images, music, memorials, and rituals? This class uses the interdisciplinary methods of memory studies to answer these questions by analyzing primary sources and learning new collaborative research methods. Students interested in sociology, anthropology, and history will find new approaches to enduring questions about how societies remember and forget crucial events and experiences.

AMST 0192E. 20th Century American Borderlands Place, Politics, and Memories of Transition.

20th Century American Borderlands: Place, Politics, and Memories of Transition interrogates the shifting relationships among constructions of borders, race, and citizenship in the United States. This course offers a comparative analysis of the ways in which many ethnic groups in the 20 th century encountered—and challenged—various geographic and political borderlands. The first half of the course offers a history of the Mexican and Canadian borders; the second half considers sitesof “ambiguous belonging” within the United States. Students will consider categories of the “citizen,” the “refugee” and the “immigrant,” and how each is represented within contemporary U.S. contexts. WRIT DIAP

AMST 0192F. Whose Land? Tracing History and Memory in the Native Northeast.

This course explores local histories of the Native Northeast to introduce relationships between land, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. Students will learn about the Native peoples of present-day New England through readings of origin stories, historical documents, material culture, documentaries, poetry, mapping projects, and academic texts. We will consider the ways history is produced and reiterated in historical writing, popular narratives, and the land itself. Students will gain proficiency in decolonizing historical research methods and learn strategies for interpreting primary and secondary source documents in multiple short writing assignments, with opportunities for revision throughout the semester.

AMST 0192G. Japanese American Incarceration: Past & Present Encounters with the Racial State.

How do we situate the history of World War II Japanese American incarceration not as an exceptional moment of wartime hysteria, but as one example of an American tradition of racialized exclusion and incarceration in the service of white supremacy? How does public memory surrounding Japanese American incarceration shape our understanding of the relationships between immigration, race, exclusion, and incarceration today? Drawing from interdisciplinary sources from photographs to literature, academic texts, films, exhibits, and poetry, this course traces the history of incarceration in the United States as a mechanism of racialized social control by focusing on Japanese American history.

AMST 0192H. Blurred and Faded: Disrupting the Color-Line Through Photography.

Blurred and Faded: Disrupting the Color-Line Through Photography explores visual and literary representations of racial mixture. Focusing on Harlem Renaissance photography, this course considers the impact that depictions of racial-mixture have had on systems of racial classification. Over the semester, we will trace the visual resonance of these historical images in our contemporary moment. Readings include Nella Larsen's Passing And Jessie Redman Fauset's Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral.

AMST 0192I. Mapping Desire: Queer Spaces in Contemporary Literature.

What makes a space queer? How are queer spaces mapped, remembered, and debated within queer communities but also American culture at large? And what sorts of access does literature provide us to these spaces? This introductory course in American Studies aims to engage with these questions by setting students loose in the back roads, closets, and dance clubs of queer literature. Though issues of sex and sexuality will be at the heart of this course, our readings will also explore questions of race, gender, and nation. Authors include James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Ocean Vuong, and Maggie Nelson.

AMST 0192J. Religion, Politics, and Culture in America, 1865 - Present (HIST 0253).

Interested students must register for HIST 0253.

AMST 0192K. Rethinking Sex: Critical Approaches to Compulsory Sexuality.

This course explores nonsexual ways of being and being-in-relation, investigating the ways in which our lives are structured not just by compulsory heterosexuality, but also by compulsory sexuality. Challenging the Freudian supposition that all human beings are sexual subjects, we will think critically about naturalized assumptions regarding sex, intimacy, attraction, and desire, opening up new frameworks, orientations, and language informed by queer and feminist discourse. We will engage sex as a form of political power whose influence extends far beyond the act of heterosexual intercourse itself, pervading and organizing our everyday lives along the lines of race, gender, ability, class, and religion. Texts will draw upon queer and feminist theory, cultural studies, disability studies, feminist science and technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture.

AMST 0192L. Making Metropolitan "Man”: The Politics of Human Being in Modern Urban Space.

The modern human subject, what is often understood as Man, is not a natural evolutionary state but an historically contingent and contested idea of what it means to be a person. This course places critical theories of the human into conversation with urban and geographic studies. How have dominant concepts of Man and its Others – Black, Indigenous, femme, queer; machine, animal, environment; and so forth – been constituted and challenged through cities and space? How might urban space make possible alternative humanisms that refuse metropolitan modernity’s subjecting projects? The course takes a translocal lens while focusing on the American-Atlantic World since European conquest. Theory-intensive readings draw upon cultural studies; queer, ethnic, and Black studies; geography; history; and literary/aesthetic arts.

AMST 0192M. Martinique and the Black Radical Imagination.

What is the Black Radical Imagination? What are some of its most ardent sources of inspiration? What kinds of political horizons does it animate? How is it practiced? And how is it abused or misappropriated? This course analyzes the influence of the Caribbean island Martinique on contemporary discourses concerning the “Black Radical Imagination.” We will survey literature from Martinican artists and theorists such as Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Simone Yoyotte, Lucie Thésée & Édouard Glissant. This course will also serve as an introduction to various idioms, methodologies, and paradigms in the field of American Studies.

AMST 0192P. Black Internationalism.

What is Black Internationalism? Who are Black internationalists? What are their motivations, demands, and strategies? This course explores African descended people’s global collective struggle against white supremacy, more specifically, the political, intellectual, and artistic dimensions of the struggle, with a focus on U.S.-based actors. Crucial topics that the class will study include the international aspects of the Black freedom struggle in the United States, anti-colonial movements, struggles for social justice, Black feminism, and foreign policy. Class discussion will be framed around questions of gender, class, nation, and empire as well as the production of historical narratives. Students will engage with scholarly texts, most of them historical, as well as a wide range of primary sources produced by Black internationalists, including essays, speeches, and plays.

AMST 0192Q. Adjustment Dis-order: Social Science, the State, and Culture in 20th-Century America.

What do the social sciences claim to tell us about “us?” This course examines the history and politics of social scientific knowledge in the United States. We consider the emergence and deployment of ideas such as objectivity, rationality/rationalization, control, therapeutics, and privacy. What is the relationship between social science and social order? How has what is understood as “normal” served as description, prescription, and a locus of power? What role have the social sciences played in defining the ideal life in America? This course uses approaches from the disciplines of history, science and technology studies, and gender and sexuality studies to critically examine and interrogate the construction and maintenance of intersecting hierarchies of gender, class, and race, paying particular attention to their basis in material socioeconomic relations, reification in state authority, and their reflection in various forms of cultural production.

AMST 0192R. Art Writing: Politics of Viewing and Making.

In this seminar, we will examine texts in which the author writes about, toward, and to an art object. We will be interested in texts that demonstrate how writing about art reveals relations and politics. How does art orient itself toward various audiences, establishing intimacy, community, or antagonism, and how can art writing expose these triangulated relationships between the artist, art object, and audience? How do we live with art and how does it determine not only the content of our writing but our lives? Our readings will include a variety of ekphrastic texts, including poetry, memoirs, personal and lyric essays, academic essays, and theory, in addition to screening films and viewing visual art, performance, and digital media. We will connect aesthetics to theories of race, gender, decoloniality, diaspora, and queer and feminist of color critique.

AMST 0192S. Producing the Body: The Body as Performance of Power, Violence, and Possibility.

What is the relationship between bodies, violence, and liberation? When Black and brown bodies have historically been sites of colonial and gendered violence, what does it mean to center the body as a site of knowledge production? This course draws upon the emergent performance and aesthetic practices as disruptions of colonial violence; and their relationship to racialized, gendered, and sexual power dynamics. This course will deeply consider what it means to be (in)human, erotic reconfigurations of being, and fugitive practice. We will draw from frameworks in performance studies, Black feminism, women of color feminism, and queer theory to understand the body as a living archive of memory, violence, and liberation. Such attention to performance and aesthetic practices entail not only histories of conquest and genocide, but the creative and life-bearing practices that transcend these conditions of captivity and loss.

AMST 0253. Religion, Politics, and Culture in America (HIST 0253).

Interested students must register for HIST 0253.

AMST 0310. Theory and Practice of Engaged Scholarship (SOC 0310).

Interested students must register for SOC 0310.

AMST 0601. Health and Healing in American History.

Surveys the history of American medicine in its social and political contexts, including changing understandings of disease, treatment practices, and medical institutions. Focuses on how gender and race have informed how patients and healers have made sense out of pain and disease.

AMST 0610A. Black Queer Life.

This course explores how Black writers and artists represent and theorize a diverse array of Black genders and sexualities. We will begin with a series of conversations on the origins of Black queer theory, and then use these conversations to anchor us in our readings of Black queer life in literary and popular culture. Reading across a range of genres, including film, music, poetry, comics, and short fiction, we will collectively consider the ways sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, class, ability, and nationality to demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to Black people. We will learn from theorists, writers, and artists including Audre Lorde, Cathy Cohen, E. Patrick Johnson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Danez Smith, Janelle Monae, among many others.

AMST 0610B. Fictions of Science: Time Travel in Physics and Film, in Real Life and in Literature.

This is a reading, writing, and discussion-based class about the relationship of science and fiction. It is meant for STEM students and for Humanities students alike. Focusing on close readings of popular film, novels, and scientific papers related to time travel, "Fictions of Science" considers why, despite this extraordinary relationship, we often rely on the most simplistic gizmo - that aforementioned time machine - to serve as an explanatory shortcut. And why we miss the exciting truth: that science and fiction are joined together in incredibly complicated ways, with consequences for design, imagination, and exploration. One of the goals of the class is to trouble the relationship between science and fiction, which is often reductively understood as either antagonistic or ornamental. The class emphasizes close reading, short essay writing, and critical thinking.

AMST 0610D. Introduction to Native and Indigenous Feminisms.

Settler colonialism is a structure that aims to dispossess, erase, and replace Indigenous peoples in ways that are both racialized and gendered. Throughout this course, students will become familiar with the role Indigenous Feminisms have played in responding to settler colonial policies, violences, and erasures. Students will become cognizant of the contributions Indigenous Feminists make to art, literature, theory, and organizing work. Students will trace a genealogy of Indigenous Feminisms while attending to the debates that have both punctuated and propelled its theoretical and practical application. This introductory lecture course is part of the American Studies Questions series, offering a gateway to the AMST concentration, and has no prerequisites.

AMST 1010. Introduction to American Studies: American Icons.

Why do certain American photos, novels, and films become 'iconic?' What does the very word 'icon' mean? Studying a collection of American images, texts, places, and practices, this course investigates the key themes of American Studies.

AMST 1090. Black Freedom Struggle Since 1945 (AFRI 1090).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1090.

AMST 1100X. Black Speculative Fiction:World-Making + Alternative Universes,Science Fiction + Fantasy(AFRI 1100X).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1100X.

AMST 1110. Race and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction.

This virtual course explores narratives of black girl and womanhood through the intersections of Afrofuturism, black feminist thought, and black queer studies in speculative fiction authored by black women and gender-diverse people. This course will address how envisioning black futures is profoundly connected to the work of reimagining black pasts. Together we will explore how black women have long engaged the political practice of writing themselves into the future, even as others were writing them out of it. Students will be introduced to a range of texts—literary, cinematic, sonic, and visual—that range from Harriet Jacobs, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Janelle Monaé.

AMST 1200A. Scraps of the Archive: Race, Theory, Performance.

Using a variety of media including critical theory, cultural history, photographs, audio, and digital archives and collections, this course will explore the ways that the act of collecting, and various approaches to collections, have been used to produce contesting ideas of personhood. Focusing on African American collecting and archival histories and using Black Studies methodologies, the course looks to the often overlapping formations of collections and archives to approach intersecting representations of race, gender, class, citizenship, nation, memory, history, and solidarity. For our final project, we will collaborate on building a digital collection in Scalar using Brown’s Special Collections.

AMST 1200B. Music, Race, and Identity.

This course is an exploration of race and culture and their influence on each other as examined through the specific cultural product of music. It is designed to introduce students to understanding the social construction of race, the social construction of music, genres, and the relationship between them. A key aspect of the course will be to further the understanding of how music, which is an important aspect of most people’s lives, shapes society, identity, and social interactions. Students will be encouraged to think critically, and apply the concepts learned to a variety of music through class activities and projects.

AMST 1200C. Indians, Colonists, and Africans in New England (ANTH 1624).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1624.

AMST 1200X. The Art and Imagination of Josephine Baker (AFRI 1200X).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1200X.

AMST 1220. Boatbuilding: Design, Making, and Culture.

This course introduces the study of the design, work, material culture and history through the construction of a traditional workboat. As the class builds the boat we’ll gain a hands-on understanding of issues of design, skill, and workmanship. At the same time, we’ll do historical research and visit museums to gain insight into the history of small craft and their builders and users from the nineteenth century to the present, and also consider philosophical issues of tradition, creativity, and knowledge in engineering and making. Weekly writing assignments, including a journal, will connect hands-on work and research.

AMST 1250A. American Folk Art.

Examines material expressions of folk culture in America from the 18th century to the present. Focuses on the study of regionally idiosyncratic artifacts decorated beyond necessity and emphasizes the importance of the cultural context in which they were made and used. Visits to local burying grounds and museum collections during class and a Saturday field trip. Concludes with an original research project and final paper.

AMST 1250B. Gravestones and Burying Grounds.

Students examine gravestones and burying grounds as material evidence of American cultural history. Themes include the forms of written language and visual imagery in colonial New England, changing roles of women and minorities in society, historical craft practices, implications of stylistic change, attitudes towards death and bereavement, and the material evidence of discrete cultural traditions. Includes field trips.

AMST 1250E. The Neoclassical Ideal in America, 1775-1840.

This course examines the art, architecture, and domestic furnishing of America in the early national period. It focuses on visual culture as a reflection of the new nation's self image as a democratic and enlightened society. Includes class visits to local burying grounds and museum collections, and a Saturday Boston field trip.

AMST 1250F. Topics in Material Culture: Houses and Their Furnishings in Early America.

Old houses and the objects used to furnish them are interpreted as material evidence of domestic life in colonial and early national America. Through slide lectures and field trips, this class examines Providence's historic buildings, museum collections, and public archives as primary documents in the study of cultural history.

AMST 1250G. Topics in Material Culture Studies: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1880-1920.

In the 1880s an international movement to reform the design of buildings and their furnishings took hold in America. Its proponents wanted to improve visual life in America by advocating the pride and honesty of craftsmanship and by embracing the ideal of unity of design--by which means they hoped to change the way Americans lived and worked. This course examines the architecture, furniture, silver, ceramics, and printed works of the Arts & Crafts Movement in America from 1880 -1920. Understanding and interpreting material life is emphasized through local field trips and first-hand experience with the collections of the RISD Museum.

AMST 1500A. Research and Transnational Communities: Qualitative Fieldwork Methods.

This course will equip students with the skills to design and implement their own transnational American Studies or Public Humanities research project. We will consider different qualitative social science research methods including, ethnographic participant observation, formal and informal interview techniques, and survey data analysis. Students will learn how different methodologies lend unique insights into specific research questions, and will be able to identify different methodological bases for empirical findings across diverse transnational social problems. Throughout the course, we will explicitly engage the personal, public, and ethical concerns involved with conducting research with transnational communities, including researcher positionality, privilege, ethics, and responsibility.

AMST 1500B. Broadway Modern: Race, Gender, Class, and the American Musical.

What is musical theatre? What makes the Broadway musical quintessentially "American"? And what do these brightly colored, mesmerizing, beguiling spectacles reveal about the troublesome workings of race and class, gender and sex, nation and world? Searching for answers to these and other questions, students in this course will survey, critique, and theorize the complicated, strange, and often disturbing history of the genre, from its 19th century roots in minstrel performances, Shakespeare, and European opera, through the heyday of the mid-20th century, and, finally, right up to to the current, provocative productions of "Hamilton" and "Shuffle Along."

AMST 1510. Museum Collecting and Collections.

This course will explore and examine the methods, practices, and theory of collections management in a museum setting including collections development, museum registration methods, cataloging, collections care, and interpretation. Through readings, discussion, workshops, site visits, and exhibitions, students will explore what it means to be physically and intellectually responsible for museum objects. This course places heavy emphasis on experiential learning and will include several project-based assignments.

AMST 1520. Technology and Material Culture in America: The Urban Built Environment.

A slide-illustrated lecture course that examines the development of the urban landscape. Covers American building practices and the effects of human-made structures on our culture. Examines technological and behavioral aspects of architectural design and urban development. Topics include housing, factories, commercial buildings, city plans, transportation networks, water systems, bridges, parks, and waterfronts. A companion course to AMST 1530.

AMST 1530. Technology and Material Culture in America: The Automobile in American Life.

Examines the cultural significance of the automobile. Employs materials and methodologies from various disciplines to study this machine and the changes it has produced in our society and our landscape. Slide-illustrated lectures cover such topics as the assembly line, automobile design, roadside architecture, suburbs, auto advertisements, and the car in popular culture.

AMST 1540. Public Humanities: History, Theory, Practice.

This course introduces students to the idea of the public humanities, both as a field of scholarly inquiry as well as a set of interrelated professional practices of knowledge production and dissemination around arts, cultural, museum, library, and university institutions. The course focuses on the histories of this field. It considers the field’s intellectual underpinnings in conceiving of diverse “publics” and models for inclusivity; sources of authority and strategies for cultivating it; and methods of connecting, building, and engaging communities. Foundational work in understanding communities, power, and knowledge production draws on work from ethnic studies/labor history.

AMST 1550. Methods in Public Humanities.

A survey of the skills required for public humanities work. Presentations from local and national practitioners in a diverse range of public humanities topics: historic preservation, oral history, exhibition development, archival and curatorial skills, radio and television documentaries, public art, local history, and more. Enrollment limited to 50.

AMST 1560. Comparative Cultural Heritage: Hong Kong and New England.

This 8-week summer course begins with four weeks in Hong Kong, exploring the ways that private individuals, institutions, and government have preserved the city’s cultural heritage, examining the conflict and negotiation of economic and political interests in urban renewal and heritage conservation and preservation. The second four weeks are in Providence, where students will explore the history and present-day philosophy and politics of preserving sites and stories from Colonial times to the present, exploring historical archaeology, historic preservation, museum exhibition, and oral history. This is a double credit course. Enrollment limited to nine Brown students and nine from Hong Kong. S/NC

AMST 1570. Site- Specific Writing in Brown's Historical Spaces.

Using on-site writing techniques, students will write, workshop, and direct research-based site-specific short plays to be performed by local actors in historic Providence mansions. Class discussion will explore local history (class includes a walking tour), performance texts, and types of site-specific work. Students will emerge having written and directed a research-based work in a National Historical Landmark. Enrollment limited to 13. S/NC

AMST 1580A. Artists and Scientists as Partners: Theory to Practice (TAPS 1281Z).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1281Z.

AMST 1596. Education Beyond the Classroom Walls: Teaching and Learning in Cultural Institutions.

Explore teaching and learning beyond classroom walls. We will focus on teaching/learning in cultural institutions (museums, historic houses, children’s museums). We will begin with our own experiences with this kind of learning, then explore the pedagogical methods, underlying philosophies and learning theories, debates, and goals of informal education today. What kind of learning happens in cultural institutions? How does it compare to learning in schools? Which pedagogical methods are most common in cultural institutions today and how do they align with stated goals? What are the debates within the field and what are our visions for the future of the field?

AMST 1600B. Global China: Flows, Forces, and Friction.

This course will provide an overview of contemporary issues surrounding Global China, including the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as their regional and global influence through migration, culture, multinational trade, and labor manufacturing. We will study institutions (the government, family, and education), forces of globalization (rural to urban migration, ethnicity and identity, human trafficking, diaspora communities, labor production and consumption, and cultures of resistance (underground music, human rights movements, radical internet blogging, environmental justice activism and Chinese contemporary art).

AMST 1600C. The Anti-Trafficking Savior Complex: Saints, Sinners, and Modern-Day Slavery.

How can we understand the global movement to combat human trafficking within critical frameworks on "industrial complexes"? Drawing from scholarship on the prison industrial, non-profit industrial, and white savior complexes this course examines human trafficking through the lens of race, class, gender, and national forms of power and subjectivity. Readings will problematize the so-called saints and sinners of the movement, investigating various global helping projects that exist to stop "modern day slavery."

AMST 1600D. Sports in American Society.

This course seeks to understand, analyze, and criticize sport--seen here as one of the primary institutions in the lives of Americans. Working from the basis of sporting events in the Durkheimian sense of symbolic community, we will elevate them to the status of religious and educational institutions in our everyday lives. Using the primary lenses of gender and race this class examines sports at five different levels--professional, Olympic, NCAA, scholastic, and youth--and uses the "Big 3" sports of baseball, basketball, and football to understand how athletics have impacted, and will continue to impact, American Society.

AMST 1600E. Performance, Politics, and Engagement (TAPS 1680).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1680.

AMST 1600F. Blacks and Jews in American History and Culture (JUDS 1753).

Interested students must register for JUDS 1753.

AMST 1600G. Contemporary Black Women's Literature (ENGL 1711L).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711L.

AMST 1600H. Monsters in our Midst: The Plantation and the Woods in Trans-American Literature (ENGL 1711N).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711N.

AMST 1600I. American Literary Naturalism: Form and Economics at the Fin de Siècle.

American naturalism was the first literary movement to consciously grapple with the cultural, political, and economic significance of the transition from a free market system to corporate capitalism. This course explores how naturalist fiction around the turn of the twentieth century responded to and shaped the organization of the economy in ways that remain highly relevant today. By placing economic forms in their cultural contexts and cultural forms in their economic contexts, students will develop tools for understanding the relationship between culture and changing forms of economic organization from the industrial corporation to financial markets.

AMST 1600J. Believe It or Not: Mediating the Unthinkable, Past and Present.

How do we respond when confronted with something that seems impossible? When Robert Ripley first invited audiences to “believe-it-or-not” at his Odditorium in 1933, many responded by fainting. However, as modern forms of media and technology perpetually shrink the scope of the implausible, the places we confront the un- (or non-) believable continue to evolve as well. From 9/11 to the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo movements, students will analyze instances that challenge established notions of the unthinkable to explore how social groups come to understand objects, ideas, and events that don’t fit within their own experiences and worldview.

AMST 1600K. Memory and Forgetting in Popular Culture.

Is it always good to remember? Does forgetting always imply failure? While it is easier than ever to document and access information, the rise of ephemeral media such as Snapchat indicates a growing desire for the past to remain past, and to not become a burden on the present. This course explores the tension between remembering and forgetting as it is portrayed in film, literature, and technology, to examine what they reveal about our belief in—and anxieties towards—human memory.

AMST 1600L. Nationalizing Narratives: Race, Nationalism, and the American Novel (ENGL 1710M).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1710M.

AMST 1600M. Contemporary Black Women's Literature (ENGL 1711L).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711L.

AMST 1600N. Caribbean Literature (ENGL 1762M).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1762M.

AMST 1601. Health and Healing in American History.

Surveys the history of American medicine in its social and political contexts, including changing understandings of disease, treatment practices, and medical institutions. Focuses on how gender and race have informed how patients and healers have made sense out of pain and disease.

AMST 1601A. Migrants, Political Activism and the Racialization of Labor (POBS 1601M).

Interested students must register for POBS 1601A.

AMST 1605P. Channeling Race: Television and Race in America (MCM 1505P).

Interested students must register for MCM 1505P.

AMST 1610A. American Advertising: History and Consequences.

Traces the history of American advertising, particularly in the 20th century, to understand the role advertising plays in our culture. Topics include the rise of national advertising, the economics of the advertising industry, the relation of advertising to consumption, the depiction of advertising in fiction and film, and broadcast advertising.

AMST 1610C. American Popular Culture.

This interdisciplinary course examines the history of popular culture in the industrialized United States, drawing on methodologies from different fields, and using a variety of evidence, including minstrel song sheets, amusement parks, television, and romance novels. We look at the audience, the producers and the texts presented by American popular culture both domestically and internationally.

AMST 1610F. Asian America Since 1945.

Since the end of WWII the Asian American community has undergone radical transformations. This course will examine the shifting political and cultural status of Asians in America, the demographic revolution in Asian America ushered in with the Immigration Reform Act of 1964, Asian Americans and globalization of the US economy, and Asian Americans in contemporary US race relations.

AMST 1610G. Asian American History.

This course focuses on Asian America as a historical subject and on Asian Americans as makers of their own histories. It is loosely chronological but principally organized around the emergence of an Asian American historical voice. Films, personal accounts, and historical analyses will be read. Many of the texts feature photographs, which we will engage primarily as historical documents. Examining the material realities they represent or suggest, we will also probe their political, economic and cultural dimensions. As weapon, commodity and heirloom, photography has been integral to shaping Asian Americans' visibility and therefore their social position in the United States.

AMST 1610H. Asian Immigration to the Americas.

Asian America is an extremely diverse community including fifth generation Californians and yesterday's arrivals: Hmong from Laos, Indians from Guyana, Japanese from Brazil, native born Americans, immigrants, refugees, adoptees, doctors, garment workers, physicists, poets, and storekeepers. The patterns of migration and settlement from Asia to the Americas-U.S. and Canada, the Caribbean and Latin America-over the past two hundred years are examined.

AMST 1610I. Beyond Chinatown: Asian Communities in the United States.

From Manila villages in 18th-century Louisiana, to Punjabi-Mexican families in early 20th-century California, to today's "little Saigons" and Asianam cyberspace, Asian Americans have built a diverse array of communities in the U.S. The historical circumstances, social forces, and political movements that have shaped these communities are examined. Particular attention paid to the dynamics of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in the development of these communities.

AMST 1610J. Body and Soul: Health and Sexuality, 1860-1920.

Examines the history of women/gender in relation to discourses about sexuality (both physical and mental) in the era of the Civil War through the progressive era. It samples a variety of ideas and movements, including efforts to regulate sexuality and initiatives to advance women into the medical and "helping" professions. Specialization is given to issues of class, race and ethnicity.

AMST 1610L. Child Welfare in Twentieth-Century America.

Examines the evolution of child welfare in the United States from its origins in the late 19th century through its purported crisis in the late 20th. Specifically, will trace the history of policies and programs aimed at providing support for dependent children, and at dealing with deviant or delinquent children. Emphasis will be on understanding the social, cultural, and political contexts in which child welfare was formed and transformed during this century.

AMST 1610M. Childhood and Adolescence in American Literature and Culture.

A survey of how changing ideas of childhood and the "new" construction of the category of adolescence are mirrored in American fiction and poetry from the Puritans to the present. Among the writers considered are Anne Bradstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Henry James, and J. D. Salinger. Provides a comparative cultural perspective by studying works by Wordsworth, Dickens, Pater, and Kosinski.

AMST 1610N. Citizenship, Race, and National Belonging in the Americas.

What is the relationship between citizenship, national belonging, and ideologies of race in the Americas? In what ways do gender and class differences affect this relationship? Focusing on these questions, this course compares the racial and social experience of the U.S. Latinos with that of the populations in various countries in the hemisphere.

AMST 1610O. Civil Rights and the Legacy of the 1960s.

Recent mainstream interpretations of the 1960s tend to neglect the presence and participation of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans in the various movements for civil rights. Using an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on historical, autobiographical and contemporary texts, films, and documentaries, this course examines the Latino experience during the Civil Rights period and explores its legacy today in the lives of Latino and other racial minorities.

AMST 1610P. Class, Culture, and Politics.

Surveys the working class and radical movements that have challenged the ruling economic, political, and cultural systems. Major topics include the railroad uprising of 1877, the Knights of Labor, sexual utopianism and spiritualism, black nationalism, the Socialist and Communist parties, women's and gay liberation, and the modern ecology movement. Emphasizes cultures. Prerequisite: At least one semester of a college-level course in U.S. history or literature.

AMST 1610R. History of Sexuality in the United States.

This course introduces students to the history of sexuality in America from the colonial era to the present. This is not only a history of gay and lesbian communities. Rather it builds on those histories to create a portrait of how Americans, gay and straight, lived sexual lives in relationship to disciplines of knowledge, cultural and political institutions, and popular culture.

AMST 1610S. Immigration to the United States from the Sixteenth Century to the Present.

Explores 350 years of immigration to what is now the U.S. Organization is both chronological and topical. We will reconstruct and compare the major waves of immigration, consider causal theories of migration, examine U.S. immigration policy over time, debate the economic impact of immigration, and discuss the institutions and strategies that immigrants have designed to facilitate adaptation.

AMST 1610U. Introduction to Latino Studies.

A survey of the ways that aspects of the histories and cultures of the U.S. and Latin America have contributed to shape public policy issues and to differentiate the experiences of U.S. Latinos. Among the questions guiding class discussions: What are the implications of grouping nationally, racially, and socially heterogeneous populations under one term, such as Hispanic or Latino? To what extent do "ethnic labels" foster alliances among different ethnic or racial groups?

AMST 1610V. Introduction to Latino Studies II: Culture and Identity.

Explores the ways in which gender roles and intergenerational expectations-diversified by race, class, national identity, and citizenship status-shape the varied identities and cultural experiences of Latinos and Latinas in different decades of the post-World War II period in the U.S.

AMST 1610W. Latino Immigration in the 20th Century.

The purpose of this course is to examine the political, economic, cultural and social impact of Latina/o immigration in the 20th Century and on Latina/o identity formation. We examine the intimate and personal history of the United States in relation to Latin America, Central America, the Carribean, and Mexico that established interdependent relationships between nations and its people.

AMST 1610X. Latino Popular Music and Culture.

This course explores the various forms of popular culture associated with U.S. Latino communities. It focuses on the production, dissemination, and consumption of mass mediated cultural forms, primarily music, television, film and journalism, but it also examines other cultural expressions such as vernacular art, food, festivals, and folklore. Prerequisite: At least one semester of college-level course in U.S. history or literature.

AMST 1610Y. Latinos and Film.

Examines the way Latinos have been constructed-and misrepresented-in Hollywood film from the silent era to the present, and compares these images with contemporary Latino-made films that counteract Hollywood stereotypes with more accurate and complex images of their own histories and cultures. Readings introduce students to film criticism from a Latino perspective. Weekly screenings in and outside class.

AMST 1610Z. American Popular Culture.

Popular culture is part of everyday life, but also an important site to examine how American identities have been both shaped and reflected through film, television, music, performance, and fashion. We trace American popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present, paying particular attention to the development of different media, and looking at the production and reception of popular culture, as well as the cultural texts themselves.

AMST 1611A. Making America: Twentieth-Century U.S. Immigrant/Ethnic Literature.

Examines the literature of first and second generation immigrant/ethnic writers from 1900 to the 1970's. Attempts to place the individual works (primarily novels) in their literary and sociocultural contexts, examining them as conscious works of literature written within and against American and imported literary traditions and as creative contributions to an ongoing national discourse on immigration and ethnicity.

AMST 1611C. Pacific Rim in American History.

This course is a comparative study of Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian settlement in the United States. It begins in the 1700s when Filipino seamen first settled in what is now Louisiana and Texas and concludes with the end of World War II. Attention will be given to immigration from Asia and its relationship to the development of the capitalist world system, the role that Asian American labor played in class and racial formation in America the political economies of Asian American communities, and the various social movements and legislative efforts to exclude Asians from American society and Asian resistance to exclusion.

AMST 1611D. Reading New York (ENGL 1711D).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711D.

AMST 1611E. Popular Culture in the United States.

Focusing on popular culture since industrialization, the course will examine particular forms (broadcasting, romance novels, amusement parks, sports) we will as look at the producers of, and the audiences for, those forms. Requirements include three papers based on outside readings and a final.

AMST 1611F. Race, Gender, and Community in Latina Autobiography.

Examines how Latinas chronicle their identities in transitions vis-á-vis markers of race and gender. Through autobiography, memoir, literary criticism, and theoretical readings emphasizing the negotiations of self, place and community via social and geographical locations including family, region, and the nation. Engages in critical interpretation of the socio-cultural and political worldviews of Latina self-discovery and self-authorship.

AMST 1611G. Race, Ethnicity, Religion and Community.

This course examines the intersection of religion and community for communities of color in the United States. A survey of these communities is guided by the desire to discover the collective stories and memories that socialize social and ethnic identites, and serve as a source of personal and political transformation. Out point of entry for understanding the sacred is at "ground level" perspective.

AMST 1611H. Religion and Society in the United States.

Offers a sociological perspective on theories of the relationship between religion and societies that will help us understand and analyze current religious practices and trends, both inside and outside of religious institutions. Students will conduct several observations in religious institutions and create religious rituals of their own.

AMST 1611J. Sex, Love, Race: Miscegenation, Mixed Race and Interracial Relations.

This class will explore the conditions and consequences for crossing racial boundaries in North America. We will take a multidisciplinary approach, exploring literary, anthropological, and historical writings along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject.

AMST 1611K. The Century of the Child? Child Welfare in Twentieth-Century America.

Examines the evolution of U.S. child welfare from its origins in the late 19th century through its purported crisis in the late 20th century. Traces the history of policies and programs aimed at: providing support for dependent children; improving infant and child survival and health; protecting children from exploitation and abuse; and dealing with deviant and delinquent children.

AMST 1611M. Trauma and the Shame of the Unspeakable: The Holocaust, American Slavery, and Childhood Sexual Abuse.

The problem of representing traumatic experience has been raised by witnesses and survivors, psychoanalysts, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and artists. This course compares three historical situations--The Holocaust, American slavery, and childhood sexual abuse--by reading histories, memoirs, and fictions, and analyzing material cultural artifacts such as memorials. Questions about the relation of individual trauma to collective and cultural trauma will be pursued through readings that will include Freud, Jeffrey Alexander, Judith Herman, Dominique La Capra, Primo Levi, Jill Christman, Harriet Jacobs,Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones and Art Spiegelman.

AMST 1611O. Race and Early American Film: The Birth of an Industry.

American cinema became an industry at the turn of the twentieth-century during the period of legalized racial oppression and terror known as the Jim Crow era. Each of several important technical innovations in film production was introduced in blockbuster films that re-enforced narratives of white supremacy: the development of long-form narrative in The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D. W. Griffith: the synchronization of sound in The Jazz Singer (1927); and the introduction of color film in Gone with the Wind (1939). African-American filmmakers such as the director Oscar Micheaux responded with films that contested these representations, e.g., Within Our Gates (1920) and Body and Soul (1925). His work and that of other directors, producers, and critics gave rise to the development of Black cinema that fought for survival as Hollywood became the dominant force in the industry.

AMST 1611Q. The Asian American Case: Race, Immigration and the Law.

The central historical themes are exclusion, citizenship rights, and and equal protection. The experience of Chinese and Japanese Americans dominates the historiography but we will use that scholarship to help us think about a wider range of issues across time.

AMST 1611R. Bourgeois Blues: Class Conflict in African American and Caribbean Literature and Film.

This course investigates class differentiation and its effects in African-diaspora novels, autobiographies, and films (such as The Good Negress, Brothers and Keepers, Crick Crack Monkey, and "Sugar Cane Alley"). Alongside these literary works and films, we will read a wide range of critical/theoretical essays on class and class conflict and the intersection between class and race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

AMST 1611S. US Popular Culture.

This course focuses on the relationship between popular culture, media, and society and provides an overview of social structures, content, audiences, and effects. The core mission of this class is to connect popular culture to the larger world in which it is produced and consumed. We examine the institutional and social contexts of cultural production and consumption in the United States. We will cover a variety of cultural forms (e.g. music, film, tv, and social media) and explore culture as an arena of conflict and a vehicle for social change. Other areas of focus include the meaning of aesthetics and style in daily life, cultural gatekeeping, and the role of social media platforms in shaping the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural texts/commodities.

AMST 1611T. Blacks and Jews in American History and Culture (JUDS 1753).

Interested students must register for JUDS 1753.

AMST 1611U. History of American Technology.

Technologies reflect and transform American society and culture. This course examines the invention, introduction and use of new machines and systems, with a focus on infrastructure, manufacturing, and information and communication technologies. Special attention paid to labor, business, political and cultural contexts of technological change.

AMST 1611V. Color Me Cool: A Survey of Contemporary Graphic Novels.

Surveys a variety of comic books and graphic novels, both mainstream and independent. The emphasis, however, will be on the independent graphic novel. Students will also read history and criticism to understand better the context from which the books emerge and to grasp more firmly their visual and textual aesthetics. Must attend first three lectures to be eligible for enrollment.

AMST 1611W. Asian Americans and Popular Culture.

From the Fu Manchu to Lucy Liu, Asian Americans have long been the objects of loathing, terror and desire, in American popular culture. This course looks Asian Americans in popular literature, music, theater, film and television as subjects, producers and consumers.

AMST 1611X. Narratives of Liberation.

The theme of human liberation has appeared in literary works from around the world and across centuries. This course will examine a variety of narratives that foreground the attainment pf physical, spiritual, and political freedom for individuals and groups. Beginning with the Book of Exodus and traveling through African American slave narratives, British proto-feminist novels, Latin American testimonios, and contemporary films, we will examine how a wide range of writers and filmmakers have conceptualized the goal and the process of liberation in their works. Requirements for the course will include two papers/projects and a final exam.

AMST 1611Z. The Century of Immigration.

Examines in depth the period of immigration that stretched from the 1820s through the 1920s and witnessed the migration of over 36 million Europeans, Asians, Canadians, and Latin Americans to the United States. Explores causal theories of migration and settlement, examines the role of family, religion, work, politics, cultural production, and entertainment in immigrant/ethnic communities, and traces the development and impact of federal immigration policy.

AMST 1612A. Chicago and America.

This course explores the history of Chicago, but also uses the city as a way to think about issues in American history. Sources include novels, memoirs, popular histories, film, and music.

AMST 1612B. Celluloid America.

The American motion picture developed as a unique art form in the late 19th century and its enduring cultural and social significance is irrefutable. In this course, we will explore US history using cinema to explore the cultural values represented within and shaped by the medium. Topics include the invention of the moving image, the rise and fall of the Hollywood studio system, and the emergence and evolution of film genres and styles (i.e. westerns, film noir, musicals, etc.) as a means of economically appealing to the masses and cultivating viewership domestically and abroad.

AMST 1612C. Growing Up in America.

This course will consider American narratives of adolescence and coming of age from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine the archetypal aspects of coming to grips with maturity and the world, class and gender roles, and the invention of "adolescence" as a new psychological category. International perspectives will be provided by reading some British and Japanese works. Authors covered will include Dickens, Melville, Twain, Alcott, Kerouac, Hemingway, Baldwin, Mishima and Tan, among others. Lectures, class discussions and student reports. S/NC

AMST 1612D. Cities of Sound: Place and History in American Pop Music.

This course investigates the relationship between popular music and cities. We will look at a number of case studies from the history of music in the twentieth century. We will try to tease out the ways that certain places produce or influence certain sounds and the ways that musicians reflect on the places they come from in their music. Accordingly, we will consider both the social and cultural history of particular cities and regions--New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, New York, Washington DC, and others--and aesthetic and cultural analyses of various forms of music--including blues, jazz, punk, hip-hop, and others.

AMST 1612G. Henry James Goes to the Movies.

This course will focus on some of the novels and stories by James that have been made more than once into films or tv shows - Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl - and study the narrative and visual choices as interpretations of James's texts. Critical readings on the art of fiction and the art of film will also be introduced.

AMST 1612K. Immigrant America and Its Children.

With a focus on the experiences of the immigrant second generation, this course seeks to expose students to the recent social science literature on contemporary immigration to the United States, including discussions on its origins, adaptation patterns, and long-term effects on American society. We will closely examine patterns of assimilation and adaptation for the children of immigrants, address the challenges they confront when trying to straddle two cultures, describe their ethnic identity formation, and interrogate the effects of their increasing presence on U.S. schools and society in general. The experiences of the second generation will be examined in various institutions including the family, labor market, schools, and community, and we situate these institutions in both national and transnational spheres. The course will consist of lectures by the instructor combined with class discussion of assigned texts. This course will also provide students with an analytic framework to address questions of multiculturalism. The course will also help students develop a better understanding of the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in society.

AMST 1612L. Eating Cultures: Food and Society.

This course will look at various ways to understand the complex role of food in society. We will look at issues of food production and consumption, and how our relationship to food contributes to the political and social structures that we live with. Our approach will be historical and pay special attention to the ways in which communities of color and immigrants have shaped, and have been shaped by, the food they cultivate, harvest, consume, and market. Field trips and readings explore how food creates ways for people to form bonds of belonging while also creating bonds of control and regimes of inequality. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1612M. Children of Immigrants.

Gives an overview of the experiences of the children of contemporary immigrants in the United States. It looks at their experiences in key social institutions including schools, the family and ethnic community. The course will examine the integration of immigrant children and how factors of race, class, and gender shape their experiences. To address the integration of immigrant children, the course will look at their process of assimilation, maintenance of transnational ties, and lastly the formation of youth identity.

AMST 1612N. Political Theatre of the Americas (TAPS 1610).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1610.

AMST 1612O. 21st Century American Drama (TAPS 1650).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1650.

AMST 1612P. First Nations: the People and Cultures of Native North America to 1800 (HIST 1805).

Interested students must register for HIST 1805.

AMST 1612Q. Women / Writing / Power.

An introduction to American women's writing and to the development of feminist literary practice and theory. This course will cover a broad historical range from the colonial poets Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley to contemporary writers Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate, and Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Attention to the effects of racial, class, and cultural differences will inform this course that will focus on gender and literature.

AMST 1612R. Race, Inequality, and the American City since 1945.

This course will explore the dynamics of race and class in American cities during the post-World War II period. The readings and discussions will focus on suburbanization, the decline of central cities, conflict over the use and definition of urban space, urban governance, spatial fortification, and popular dissent. The cities examined will include Buenos Aires, Chicago, Detroit, Liverpool, Los Angeles, New York City, São Paulo, and St. Louis.

AMST 1612S. Introduction to American Indian Studies (ETHN 1890H).

Interested students must register for ETHN 1890H.

AMST 1612T. Slackers and Hipsters: Urban Fictions, 1850-Present.

Slackers and Hipsters surveys the cult of the cool and disaffected in literature and film over two centuries. Beginning with Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivner," but also sampling works as varied as Chatterjee's English August and Kunkel's Indecision, we'll examine both the aesthetic and political implications of the "slacker" in his/her ironic, apathetic, and peculiarly alienated view of the world.

AMST 1612V. Sinner, Saints, and Heretics: Religion in Early America (HIST 1511).

Interested students must register for HIST 1511.

AMST 1612W. Rethinking Women's Bodies and Rights: Transnational Reproductive Politics.

This course examines the issues and debates surrounding women's reproduction in the United States and beyond. It pays special attention to how knowledge and technology travel across national/cultural borders and how women's reproductive functions are deeply connected to international politics and events abroad. Topics include: birth control, eugenics, population control, abortion, prostitution, reproductive hazards, genetic counseling, new reproductive technologies, midwifery, breastfeeding, and menstruation. Students will analyze historical and contemporary materials concerning women's reproductive roles, as well as read scholarly studies on reproductive issues in various parts of the world.

AMST 1612X. Performances in the Asias (TAPS 1270).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1270.

AMST 1612Y. Twentieth-Century Western Theatre and Performance (TAPS 1250).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1250.

AMST 1612Z. First Nations: the People and Cultures of Native North America to 1800 (HIST 1512).

Interested students must register for HIST 1512.

AMST 1613C. First Nations: The People and Cultures of Native North America to 1800 (HIST 1512).

Interested students must register for HIST 1512.

AMST 1700B. Death and Dying in America.

No description available. Open to juniors and seniors concentrating in American Studies.

AMST 1700C. Slavery in American History, Culture and Memory.

Nearly four centuries have passed since the first enslaved Africans arrived in what is today the United States. More than 140 years have passed since American slavery was abolished. Yet slavery remains a palpable presence in the United States. In this interdisciplinary course, we will examine slavery as a problem in American history, culture, and memory, exploring the institution and its legacies in such arenas as history, literature, cinema, visual arts, and heritage tourism. Open to juniors and seniors concentrating in American Studies.

AMST 1700D. Race and Remembering.

This junior seminar engages debates in Ethnic Studies, History, Gender Studies, and the Public Humanities that grapple with the relationship between historical narratives, memory, and social relations of power. Students will examine current tensions in national memory. Each year the topic of this course will change to consider racial formation through alternating social and cultural institutions. This semester we will consider the history of racial formation through encounters with the judicial system, with policing practices, with detention, and incarceration. Students will collaborate to make these histories publicly accessible using methods in public humanities.

AMST 1700F. American Publics.

Americans worry about the quality of their civic life and fear its decline. This junior seminar examines an important concept, the public sphere, in its popular and political dimensions as well as the challenges to the boundaries of American public life. Who is a citizen and thus eligible to participate? The course pays particular attention to concerns about the impact of new media--print, broadcasting, the internet. Assignments will take students into the community to think about social, cultural, and political publics. Not open to first year students or sophomores. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1700I. Community Engagement with Health and the Environment.

This junior seminar explores how local community organizations are taking up issues of health and the environment in culturally relevant contexts. We will examine issues of environmental justice, health disparities and the basic tenets of community based participatory research. We will then partner with a local community organization and, depending on need, assist in the design, implementation, and/or evaluation of a program designed to improve the local environment and/or health status of the community. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1700K. Race in the Americas: A Hemispheric Perspective.

This junior seminar engages debates in Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, sociology and history regarding the role of race in the U.S. and Latin America. Problematizing the depiction of Latin America as a harmonious racially mixed society and the U.S. as racially divided nation, students will look beyond binary frameworks to examine how racial logics are constructed historically, situationally and relationally. Readings highlight the interconnected nature of racial logics across the region, facilitated by immigration and transnational social movements in the context of a shared European colonial past, U.S. imperialism and emergent nationhood.

AMST 1700N. Public Memory: Testimony, Memorial, Ritual.

This seminar explores theories and practices of public memory by studying three related topics and media. Questions about the relation of history and memory are pursued by reading verbal testimony. Questions about commemoration are developed by looking at material objects and public spaces. Questions about embodied memory are explored by witnessing trauma, performance, and ritual. Readings will include Freud, Nora, Derrida, Halbwachs, Laub, Savage, Connerton, Taylor and Young. Rhode Island will provide our field for understanding how public memory works in verbal, material, and embodied signs of the past and present.

AMST 1700P. Making Music American: Critical Heritage Studies.

This seminar offers a critical and comparative exploration of American music genres that operate as "heritage music" or "ethnic music" in the context of American multiculturalism. We will collectively investigate how musical practice and related discourse can construct, express, perpetuate, and sometimes challenge various cultural identities, community affiliations, and political ideologies. We will particularly attend to public performance contexts, including music festivals, club dancefloors, and live-streaming/archived online performances. Case studies focus on rural Southern "folk" genres, Chicago blues and house, Asian American taiko ensembles, and norteño/tejano dance musics (from huapango to Selena). Readings draw on historical and ethnographic scholarship grounded in critical heritage studies and critical race theory. Limited to junior-year American Studies and Ethnic Studies concentrators.

AMST 1700S. Native American Identity: Public Perception and Self-Determination.

This class examines the issues of Native American identity, primarily in the United States. The course will begin by studying historical tribal organization and classification, and the factors that have led to contemporary stereotypes and ideas of what constitutes an “Indian,” and the factors that have damaged the strength and identity of Native communities over centuries. We will discuss how misconceptions have impacted media portrayals and the American understanding of when, where, and how Native people live. The final portion of the class will discuss self-identity and self-determination through a variety of areas such as tribal enrollment, academia, and media. This course is an American Studies/Ethnic Studies Junior Seminar and is open to AMST, ETHN, and CNAIS concentrators in their junior year. Other students may register with instructor permission.

AMST 1700X. Global Macho: Race, Gender, and Action Movies.

Carefully sifting through an oft-overlooked but globally popular genre - the muscle-bound action film - this class asks: what sort of racial work does an action movie do? What is the role of women in this genre? How should we scrutinize these supposedly empty trifles of the global popular? How should we think critically about movies that feature - often without apology - a deep, dangerous obsession with masculinity, patriarchy, war, and lawlessness, with violence outside of civil society. In short, from Hollywood to Hong Kong to Rio to Paris to Mexico City, what makes the action movie genre tick?

AMST 1701A. Libraries (Un)Bound: From Desegregation to Book Bans and Beyond.

This seminar will look at the institution of U.S. libraries from the mid twentieth century to the present, with particular attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, immigrant communities, and library services for incarcerated people and people experiencing homelessness. You will discover the realm of libraries that extends beyond books by thinking through how issues of social justice can be addressed within different library institutions writ large. You will also have an opportunity to critically analyze issues of space and place in libraries and their collections, learn about the field of librarianship, and hone your library research and critical media literacy skills. Students will discover the important role that libraries play in public access to information, vital support services, and the preservation of intellectual freedom – even in the face of bias, book bans, and other barriers.

AMST 1800. Honors Seminar.

This seminar is for second-semester junior American Studies and Ethnic Studies concentrators who are interested in writing an honors thesis in their senior year. The outcome of this course will be a proposal for the honors thesis along with a bibliography and a research plan and schedule. Topics covered will be the research methods associated with different disciplines; how to make the thesis interdisciplinary; integrating public projects and new media into a thesis. Open to juniors concentrating in American Studies and Ethnic Studies. Enrollment limited to 20. S/NC

AMST 1800A. The Cultural and Social Life of the Built Environment (URBN 1870N).

Interested students must register for URBN 1870N.

AMST 1900A. The Problem of Class in America.

Class is everywhere in American life, but rarely discussed explicitly. This course will investigate why this is. How does class operate in American life? Why is it so often obscured? What are the cultural, political and historical forces that have made it such a contested category? We will approach class from a variety of disciplines, including history, cultural studies, and sociology; study the ways class interacts with race and gender; and consider the prospects of class in America in the context of the twenty-first century's widening inequality and globalized economy.

AMST 1900B. America and the Asian Pacific: A Cultural History.

From Columbus to the present, Asia has been central to the shaping of American culture. This course will examine the role of trade, migration and cultural exchange across the Pacific in the shaping of American culture and society. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900C. Narratives of Slavery.

This course analyzes circum-Atlantic accounts of racial slavery in various forms, including the slave narrative, iconography, historiography, film, and performance. In so doing, it interrogates how factors such as form and/or genre, race, gender, power, and geography influence narrative and knowledge production regrading slavery. Key themes the course addresses include racial slavery as civil and social death, ancient and modern/colonial genealogies of slavery, gendered experiences of bondage, regionalism in U.S. historiography of slavery, and the un/spoken and un/representable nature of atrocity. The course also examines contemporary narratives that underscore the significance that racial slavery brings to bear upon the present.

AMST 1900D. America as a Trans-Pacific Culture.

From Columbus to the present, Asia has been central to the shaping of American culture. This course will examine the role of trade, migration and cultural exchange across the Pacific in the shaping of American culture and society. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900F. Transnational Popular Culture.

This course looks at popular culture as a transnational phenomenon. Taking up issues of cultural imperialism, globalization, domestication, and the economics of the culture industry, the course considers the history of cultural flows, from nineteenth century topics such as Chinese opera in the U.S. and Wild West shows in Europe to twenty-first century fast food, anime, sports, Disney, and music. We will consider both the consumers and producers of popular culture in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa, as well as those in the United States. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900G. Movements, Morals, and Markets.

This seminar will provide a theoretical and empirical overview of contemporary transnational social movements. Addressing issues ranging from fair-trade and labor exploitation, to environmental protection, to indigenous rights, and LGBTQ advocacy, social movements increasing draw from morality and the global market in order to achieve their goals. This course critically investigates the ways in which humanitarian action is celebrated, contested, and commodified through art, social enterprise, and various other formal and informal institutional arrangements.

AMST 1900H. New Media as a Tool for Social and Political Change.

This course will take a critical, theoretical, and practical approach to the examination of new media as a tool for challenging inequality and working toward goals of social justice. In addition to foundational readings on power, media, social change, network theories, and others, we will also have hands on opportunities to work in audio storytelling, utilizing the resources available at Brown. The goal is for students to leave the course with an understanding of the cultural, political, and personal possibilities and limitations of social and new media in the realms of advocacy and social justice.

AMST 1900I. Latina/o Cultural Theory.

Advanced seminar designed to familiarize students with past and present debates in Latina/o Studies. Knowledge of these critical conversations will aid students in making their own contributions to the field as they write their theses and dissertations. We will read such folks as Jose Limon, Mary Pat Brady, Frances Aparicio, and Gustavo Perez Firmat, to name but a few. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900J. Race, Immigration and Citizenship.

"Who can become an American?" is a central question in American society. This seminar examines the construction of national identity, citizenship as a legal and cultural status, and the struggle for equal protection of the law. The experience of excluded Asian and Latino immigrants are key to understanding this historical and ongoing process. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900K. China in the American Imagination.

Since Columbus, China has occupied a special place in the way America has been imagined and in the ways Americans have imagined their place in the world. This seminar will explore the relationship between China and America from Columbus to the present. While politics and diplomacy play an important role, the emphasis will be on trade, immigration and culture. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900L. Cold War Culture The American Culture in the Cold War.

This seminar will expore domestic politics, social movements, family life, sexuality,gender roles and relations, intellectual currents, and popular culture in the United States during the Cold War years. Special topics include adolescence, "conformity", and the rise of television. Sources include historical monographs, memoir, film, and fiction. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900N. Ethnicity, Identity and Culture in 20th Century New York City.

Explores the processes by which 20th-century New Yorkers created a self-consiously modern, urban, and ethnic American culture. Focuses on literary and artistic representations of life in 20th-century New York as manifested in works by five ethnic groups of New Yorkers that immigrated or migrated to the city after 1800: Jews, African Americans, Italians, Chinese, and Puerto Picans. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900O. Filipino American Cultures.

Examines the situation of Filipinos in the U.S. Drawing from social history, cultural studies, literature, and visual culture, the readings focus on the Filipino experience in the U.S. through a study of self-representations in various forms such as literature and visual culture. Readings include Campomanes, Rafael, Bulosan, Linmark, and San Juan. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900P. Essaying Culture.

This course is interested in the essay as form. As a verb, essay means "to make an often tentative or experimental effort to perform." We will explore through reading and our own writing the poetic, gnomic, and often desultory moves the essay makes as it seeks to understand its cultural objects. Like the novel, the essay is an omnivorous form. It consists of fragments, poetry, personal reflection, lists, rational argument, and much more as it winds its way to understanding. We will be reading a range of essays, as well as theories of the form.

AMST 1900Q. From Perry to Pokemon: Japan in the United States, the United States in Japan.

This course traces the cultural interactions between Japan and the United States beginning with Matthew Perry is 1854 voyage. Topics include Japanese scrolls depicting Perris arrival; paintings, architecture and musical forms that traveled between the two countries; the U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II; the popularity of anime and other Japanese films in the U.S.; and the importance of American popular culture in post-war Japan. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900R. Gender, Race, and Class in the United States.

Focuses on the emergent feminist scholarship that both empirically and theoretically analyzes how the intersection of race, class, gender, sexual preference, and age shapes the lives of women, men, and transgendered people in the U.S. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900S. Green Cities: Parks and Designed Landscapes in Urban America.

Examines the cultural meaning and public use of greenspace in American towns and cities. Covers city parks and metropolitan park systems; the landscaping of riverfronts, streets, cemeteries, and company property; and the contributions of landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmstead and Warren Manning to the field of urban planning. Begins in the 17th century with the creation of Boston Common and ends by reviewing the latest greenway plans for Providence. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900T. Disability: History, Theory, and Bodily Difference.

This seminar explores the history of disability across cultural, legal, medical, and political dimensions of American life. We will consider the changing meanings of disability, the history of disability activism and communities, representations of disabilities, and the relationship between technology and the body. We will also discuss the intersections between disability and other categories of difference such as gender, race, and sexuality.

AMST 1900U. Immigrant Radicals: Asian Political Movements in the Americas 1850-1970.

Between 1854 and 1965, Asian immigrants to the United States and other countries in the Americas were barred from immigration and citizenship. Circuit of ideas and political movements evolved to resist exclusion, disenfranchisement, and discrimination. We will examine: Chinese Americans and the Chinese revolution, the Ghadar movement among Indians of the Diaspora, and the Japanese American left and Japan. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900V. Immigrants, Exiles, Refugees, and Citizens in the Americas.

Focuses on populations who leave their homelands within the Americas. Examines the meaning of categories "refugee," "exile," "citizen," and "immigrant" in the postwar period. Explores the experience and reasons of people who leave their homelands, the relations between their countries of origin and their new society, and their access to rights in both countries. Questions the extent of population movements in the Americas as redefining conceptions of citizenship, rights, nation, and national identity in the U.S. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900W. Latina Literature: The Shifting Boundaries of Identity.

Focuses on the relationship between national identity and ethnic identity in narratives by and about Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican and Central and South American women in the U.S. Texts by and about women from other ethnic and minority groups. Readings from Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Dolores Prida, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, among others. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900X. Latina/o Religions: Encounters of Contestations and Transformations.

The purpose of this seminar is to survey and review the literature in the new and emerging field of Latina/o Religions. We seek to define the Latina/o religious experience and identify its unique qualities and expressions in relation to other religious movements and expressions in the Americas. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900Y. Latino New York.

The Latino population of NYC in the present generation has generated new lines of inquiry for the study of diasporas in contemporary urban settings. This course undertakes an analysis of this experience from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives, with a focus on cultural expressions and representations and with a view toward new ethnographic and historical approaches. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1900Z. Latinos and Film.

Analyzes the way Latino ethnicities have been constructed-and misrepresented-in Hollywood films from the silent era to the present, and examines contemporary work by Latino directors, producers, screenwriters, and actors who produce films that counteract the negative stereotypes of Hollywood films with more accurate, complex, and positive images of their own histories and cultures. Weekly screenings both in and out of class and readings that introduce a new body of film criticism from a Latino perspective. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901A. Latinos in Black and White: Race, Ethnicity and Identity in the Americas.

This seminar looks critically at traditional models of "race relations" in the Americas, the historical development and expressions of "blackness," "brownness" and "whiteness" at regional, national and international levels, and their contemporary articulations and ramifications. A primary focus will be the social and political dimensions of "ethnicity" and "race" in relations between Caribbeans and African Americans in New York City. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901B. Form Matters: Contemporary Short Fiction.

Form Matters is an advanced seminar in reading contemporary short fiction, mainly centered on US writers. The class particularly focuses on socially-attuned and historically-minded neo-formalist analyses of literature. Fiction readings will be supplemented with relevant critical readings from both scholars and practicing writers. Students will be expected to engage in rigorous discussion of the material. Goals of the course include introducing you to a relevant critical vocabulary for discussing form, deepening your familiarity with contemporary US short fiction, and improving your oral and written communication skills.

AMST 1901C. Making America: The Immigrant Experience in Literature.

Examines the literature produced by immigrants and their children who came to the U.S. between 1865 and 1965. Will place literature in its sociocultural and literary contexts, considering it as a creative contribution to debates on acculturation, generational conflict, intermarriage, racism, gender politics, labor exploitation, and immigrant entrepreneurs. Will read works by authors of Chinese, Irish, Scandinavian, Japanese, Slavic, East European Jewish, Mexican, and Caribbean origin. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901D. Motherhood in Black and White.

This seminar focuses on the experience and ideology of American motherhood with respect to the different experiences of Black and white mothers from the slave era to the present.. Texts include fiction, film, history, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, e.g. "Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," "Imitation of Life," and "The Reproduction of Mothering." This seminar will be conducted online in the Fall of 2020 with both synchronous and asynchronous elements. The current syllabus is available for reference and many of the readings will remain the same, but the work will be re-organized before the semester begins and an updated syllabus posted then. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1901E. Introduction to Ethnomusicology (MUSC 1900).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1900.

AMST 1901F. Orientals: The Representation of Asians in American Popular Culture.

This is a research seminar designed to explore questions relating to the cultural construction of Asians as a racial group in the United States. The seminar will interrogate the ideas of race, ideology, Orientalism and popular culture. The seminar will then analyze various moments in the formation of dominant images of Asians in American Culture. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901G. Race and Art in America.

How do art and space function as a critical practice, a tool of resistance, and a form of self-determination in racialized 20th-century America? This course will introduce students to ways of looking at and analyzing examples of visual, performance, and mixed-media artwork by African American, Asian American, and Chicano artists who resist, challenge, deform, and subvert traditional concepts of art. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901H. Race and Poststructuralism.

Poststructuralism continues to be a major preoccupation in the discourse of the academic left, but relatively few courses consider how poststructuralist interrogations of subjectivity and history can help us to think about race in a U.S. context. This seminar begins with an overview of key poststructuralist concepts, then moves to poststructuralist texts which take up race as a primary object, and finally takes up the collision between poststructuralist thought and racial identity politics. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901I. Race and Sexuality in Contemporary U.S. Film.

This course aims at producing cultural criticism about the representation of race and sexuality in U.S. films of the 1980s-90s. By examining the circulation of images and ideas about bodies in Hollywood and "independent" production, we consider how cultural norms are constructed. Texts include films, popular film criticism (print and televisual), film theory, and industrial history. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901J. Race Immigration and the Law: The Asian American Case.

From 1870 to 1943, Chinese were defined by their "race" as ineligible for citizenship and immigration. Similar prohibitions against Japanese, Filipinos, and Indians followed in the early 20th century. This seminar will examine Asian American struggles against exclusion and how they shaped American definitions of citizenship, race, and constitutional rights. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901K. Racial Formation in North America.

No description available. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901L. Reading Latina/o History through Fiction.

Examining the imaginative act of writing, the course studies the fictional portrayal of historical subjects, facts, and events. Focuses on how non-fiction is fictionally processed in contemporary Latina and Latino novels. How do "Latino" facts--molded by struggles for civil and human rights and U.S. foreign intervention--speak? How does novelist orient readers toward an understanding of social reality? Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901M. American Roots Music (MUSC 1932).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1932.

AMST 1901N. Researching the History of Children and Childhood.

Explores how to research and interpret the ways that race, class, gender, and region have shaped the social organization, cultural meaning, and experiences of American children and childhood. Focus is on the possibilities and challenges posed by various types of evidence: visual and literary representations, memoirs, child rearing advice, toys and play, children's literature, clothing, and protective and restrictive laws. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901O. Rivers in the Industrial City.

Rivers promote industrial development and serve as important resources and cultural amenities for communities that have a substantial manufacturing base. This interdisciplinary seminar looks at the use and abuse of rivers in American industrial cities from the 18th century to the present. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901P. Musical Youth Cultures (MUSC 1925).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1925.

AMST 1901Q. Screening Men: Hollywood Masculinities, 1944-Present.

Surveys Hollywood representations of dominant masculinity with the aim of interrogating these representations. Considers how such representations have changed over time and how changes may be read in relation to contemporary social, economic, and political pressures. In addition, considers how these texts interact with theoretical issues of representation, identification, and spectatorship. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901R. Social Movements of the 1960s.

This course examines U.S. social movements from 1954 through 1974, concentrating on the 1960s. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, we examine such topics as the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of Black Nationalism, the antiwar movement, the relationship between the New Left and second-wave feminism, and the movement for gay liberation. The course also pays attention to how the 'sixties' are represented in contemporary culture. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901S. Society and Identity: A Comparative Approach to the Colonial Americas.

Compares New Spain, the British North American mainland, and the Caribbean from initial colonization in the 16th century to 18th-century wars of independence. Focuses on the complex interplay of class, gender, race, and ethnicity that defined social formations and shaped identities. Reading biographies of ordinary people as well as synthetic histories, engages the past on different levels and connects individual identity and action to broader historical processes. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901U. The Charm of Anticipated Sucess: Varieties of the American Dream in U.S. History.

The American Dream is one of the great myths of our national history-not "myth" in the sense of a falsehood, but rather a widely-held belief whose validity cannot be definitively proved or disproved (like "all men are created equal"). Using sermons, fiction, songs, and other cultural forms, this research seminar explores the complexities of the myth from the time of the Puritans to the present. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901V. The Contested City: Urban Culture in America, 1880-1940.

Focusing on the popular culture of American cities, this course examines the evolution, commercialization, uses, and struggles over vaudeville, jazz, and early film, and leisure activities such as dancing, nightclubbing, drinking, and shopping. Consideration will be given to the gendered, class-based, and racialized nature of leisure activities and spaces, reform efforts, and the dynamics of social change. Prerequisite: At least one semester of college-level course in U.S. history or literature. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901W. The Development of Black Feminism.

Beginning with the participation of black women in the abolition movement and ranging forward to current black women novelists and feminist theorists, this course will examine the intellectual development of black feminism. We will pay particular attention to black feminism as an area of critical study, and will explore the concepts of representation, ideology, discourse, race, gender, and sexuality. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901Y. The Making of U.S. Child Welfare.

Will examine the origin and design, at the beginning of this century, of the U.S. child welfare system. The separation of child from adult welfare, the definition of a special relationship between children and the state; foster care versus institutional care; the juvenile justice system; child labor; infant and maternal welfare; aid to children in families; and school-based welfare are some of the topics to be covered. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1901Z. The Old/New Immigration.

By comparing and contrasting the migration and adaptation experiences of Russian Jews and southern Italians, explores in depth the massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe that took place between 1880 and 1924. Topics include: the causes and countours of emigration, settlement patterns, adaptation and assimilation, ideologies of left and right, immigration as a gendered experience, immigrant writers and intellectuals, nativism and restriction, and the "new immigration" and national memory. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902A. The Politics of Asian American Culture.

From Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee" to Bill Clinton's John Huang, Asian Americans have been represented as aliens in American culture. The task of Asian American cultural production has been to create a space for an Asian American citizenship. This course looks at autobiography, fiction, drama, film, and cultural criticism to understand how Asian American culture makers have sought to combat imposed stereotypes, subvert structural hegemony, and undermine self-imposed orthodoxies. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902B. Water is Life/New Currents in the Study of Land, Water and Indigeneity (ETHN 1750H).

Interested students must register for ETHN 1750H.

AMST 1902C. Indigeneity, Sustainability and Resistance in Food Politics (ETHN 1750I).

Interested students must register for ETHN 1750I.

AMST 1902D. Make a Body Riot: Laughter, Resistance, and African American Literature (GNSS 1961J).

Interested students must register for GNSS 1961J.

AMST 1902E. The Second Americans: Narratives and Images of Hispanics in the U.S. 1513-1945.

Confronts the notion of Latinos as "foreign" by demonstrating historical depth and geographic breadth of the Hispanic/Latino experience in what is now U.S. territory-from colonial Florida, Califorina, and the Southwest, to early 20th-century Puerto Rican and Cuban communities in New York. Explores contrasting Hispanic and Anglo views of the presence of Hispanics via such diverse sources as historical chronicles and autobiographies, Hollywood films, romance novels, and popular music. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902F. Global America: Gender, Empire, and Internationalism Since 1890 (GNSS 1961I).

Interested students must register for GNSS 1961I.

AMST 1902H. Topics in Asian American History and Culture: Diasporas and Transnationalisms.

This seminar reviews the theoretical literatures on diaspora and transnationalism. We then place Asian migrations to the Americas (North America, Hawaii, the West Indies, Central and Latin America) in the context of migrations out of and within Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, we consider transnationalism as an analytical framework for understanding the process of Asian-American community formation. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902J. Topics in Latino Studies: Racial Ideologies, National Belonging, and Citizenship in the Americas.

What is the relationship between citizenship, national belonging, and ideologies of race in the Americas? In what ways do gender and class differences affect this relationship? Focusing on these questions, the racial and social experience of U.S. Latinos are compared with that of the populations in various countries in the hemisphere. Theoretical readings and empirical examples. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902K. Collections and Colonialism.

Using a variety of media including fiction, critical theory, cultural history, photographs, audio, and digital archives and collections, this course will explore the ways that the act of collecting has been used to produce contesting ideas of personhood. Focusing on collecting and archival histories of Black and Native America, the course looks to the often overlapping formations of collections and archives to approach intersecting representations of race, gender, class, citizenship, nation, memory, history, and solidarity. For our final project, we will collaborate on building a digital collection in Scalar, working with the Center for Digital Scholarship and Brown’s Special Collections.

AMST 1902N. Uncovering the Story of Latina/o Identity: Movement, Space and Cutlture.

This course examines the mutliple ways of knowing and understanding Latina/o cultural identity and expression in the Americas. The story of a Latina/o cultural identity is mapped out as place and sentiment in both historical and contemporary periods. We utilize theory and method from both the social sciences and the humanities to uncover and better understand the story of Latina/o identity and ourselves. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902O. Urban Borderlands.

This course analyzes changing patterns of immigration from Latin America to the U.S. by comparatively examining the emergence of various Latino communities and cultures in selected cities. It explores interethnic relations among the various Latino communities, as well as Latinos' interactions with other racial and ethnic groups. The cities to be considered are Los Angeles, New York, Miami, San Antonio, Washington DC, and Providence-the last of which will be explored via student projects in the community. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902P. Women and American Modernism, 1900-1940.

No description available. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902Q. Chicano Studies Seminar.

Explores the culture and politics of Mexican people in the United States leading up to and through the 1960s and 1970s, and the post-nationalist period that continues to the present. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, including readings and films that explore the history, sexuality, art, music, labor, and gendered identities of this diverse community. Prerequisite: Introduction to America/Ethnic Studies recommended. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902R. Memory and Forgetting in Popular Culture.

Is it always good to remember? Does forgetting always imply failure? While it is easier than ever to document and access information, the rise of ephemeral media such as Snapchat indicates a growing desire for the past to remain past, and to not become a burden on the present. This course explores the tension between remembering and forgetting as it is portrayed in film, literature, and technology, to examine what they reveal about our belief in—and anxieties towards—human memory.

AMST 1902S. Dawnland Voices: Exploring Native New England.

In this course, we’ll explore New England as many stories. In particular, we’ll engage the connections and dissonances between the multiple stories that live with the land and its people and the central role that New England plays in the storying of the United States itself. Drawing on a range of texts including academic monographs, primary documents, poetry, and film, we will explore the stories that continue to live with New England as both a physical and incorporeal location. In doing so, we will also explore the complicated relationship that Native Studies has to the field of American Studies.

AMST 1902T. Henry James and The American Scene.

A study of James's representation of the American read in the context of the cultural changes of the late nineteenth century: Daisy Miller, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl and selections from his travel writings, including The American Scene. Writings by James's contemporaries, W. E. B. Du Bois and Thorstein Veblen will will also be studied. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902U. Zombies Pirates Ghosts Witches.

Zombies, pirates, ghosts, and witches are not only characters in horror films; they are also the strange figures who either did not fit in or resulted from the many socio-racial hierarchies of the Atlantic world. Students learn about the literature and history of the Atlantic Caribbean region through its most subversive and disturbing icons. Texts include Pedro Cabiya and Sarah Lauro on zombies, Maryse Condé and Marlon James on witches, Toni Morison and Tiya Miles on ghosts, and Michel Philip on pirates. Films include several horror classics, including White Zombie (1932), Candyman (1992), and Get Out (2017).

AMST 1902V. Visions of a Post-Industrial Society.

For decades people have predicted the end of industrial society: As factory work is replaced by automation or moved overseas a new society is to emerge based on pure information and creativity. In some ways these predictions have come true, but many of the utopian visions—abundant leisure time, social equality, enlightened leadership, a clean environment—have not. Through a mix of classic fiction, film, and social thought, this class will explore the ways people have imagined the possibilities and pitfalls of a post-industrial society. Who wins and who loses in these future visions and the reality they produce? WRIT

AMST 1902W. Queering Oral History: Theory and Practice of Building Alternative Archives.

In this course, students will engage the theory and practice of oral history with an emphasis on queer and trans frameworks. Students will learn about the history and importance of oral history as an alternative method, gain an understanding of LGBTQ history in the U.S., and research LGBTQ oral history projects. In practice, students will train in oral history methods and learn how to build accessible archives for oral histories. The final project of this course involves conducting oral histories with LGBTQ Providence and Brown community members to help build queer archives at Brown and in Providence.

AMST 1902X. Social Memory and the 1960s: From Nixon to Nostalgia.

From the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War, women’s liberation to Woodstock, the 1960s were a time of political and cultural turbulence in the US. This class explores the ways in which the decade persists in American collective memory, and how its legacies have become embodied in modern day texts, images, music, memorials, and rituals. Students will use the interdisciplinary methods of memory studies to address these questions, analyzing both primary and secondary source material. Those interested in sociology, anthropology, and history will find new approaches to enduring questions about how societies remember and forget crucial events and experiences.

AMST 1902Y. The Black Female Body in American Culture.

This course on gender and representation will use the black female body as an example of the ways in which images, both verbal and visual, of women of color are utilized within American culture. Through literature, film, visual art, and popular culture, we will consider the legacy of slavery, the persistence of stereotypes, sexual violence, and black women's resistance. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1902Z. Radio: From Hams to Podcasts.

This course examines the history of radio broadcasting and asks if a consideration of radio's historic flexibility can predict the future of this interesting medium. Readings will focus on the exciting new field of radio studies, emphasizing economics, structures, and listeners. Topics include radio's ability to cross borders, create racial and gender categories, and change programming possibilities. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903A. Missing: Museums, Memorials, & Gentrification.

In this seminar, we will study different strategies for representing absence in various contexts and media. Working with objects, controversial monuments, and gentrification, we will explore curatorial strategies, public art policies, and neighborhood resistance to community transformation, displacement, and change. Focusing on how the production of history also causes erasure, we will draw on memory studies, urban culture histories, and public humanities to engage with the potential problems and possibilities of exhibiting, correcting, and honoring what is absent. We will also explore how attending to what is lost or missing invites new ways of looking.

AMST 1903B. Alien-nation: Latina/o Im/migration in Comparative Perspective.

Explores how Latina/o immigration to the United States has reshaped the meaning of "America" over the last hundred years. We will study Latina/os in comparison to other im/migrants and examine how US immigration policy has created a nation partly composed of "alien" residents, some citizens, others not, who have constructed alternative notions of belonging. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903D. Health Inequality in Historical Perspective (AFRI 1920).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1920.

AMST 1903E. City of the American Century: The Culture and Politics of Urbanism in Postwar New York City.

This seminar will investigate the life, history and culture of New York City from World War II to the fiscal crisis of the mid 1970's, with a particular interest in transformations in the built environment of the city and region. We will primarily focus on the cultural representations, intellectual visions, and political struggles that arose around these transformations, but will also consider their effects on everyday life. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors, seniors, and graduate students concentrating in American Studies.

AMST 1903F. Topics in Asian American History: Migration, Race and Citizenship.

This seminar will explore the relationship between Asian Americans and the US State in three historical moments; the era of exclusion, WWII internment, and the post-civil rights era. We will look at citizenship as a cultural signifier that organizes race, gender, sexuality and class as well as a legal status. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903G. Oral History and Community Memory.

Students in this seminar will conduct oral history interviews and archival research to create an audio and visual history of one Providence neighborhood. Collected materials will be prepared for public presentation as a walking tour and web site. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

AMST 1903H. Space and Place: Geographies of the Black Atlantic.

Is the map on an iPhone representative of the space beneath our feet? Does a 'map' have to represent geographic space or can it represent something else? For centuries people have sought to make sense of the geographies of their everyday lives as well as environments out of their purview. In this course, we will engage with a number of approaches to space and place including historical, cultural, ethnographic, literary, geographic, and artistic, focusing on African diasporas and the Black Atlantic. Students will analyze texts, artworks, and web-based projects, and at the end of the course, create their own maps. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

AMST 1903I. Museum Histories.

Museums collect and display art and artifacts not only to preserve culture heritage, but also to educate, engage, and entertain. This course examines the history of museums– of art, history, anthropology, natural history, science and technology– to understand their changing goals and their changing place in American society. It also considers the changes within museums, in the work of curation, conservation, education, and social engagement. Students will read museum history and theory, engage with museum archives and other primary sources, and produce a research paper or a digital or public project.

AMST 1903J. Anthropology and Art.

Art is a historic topic of inquiry in anthropology. From the early days of collecting and displaying ethnographic relics in cabinets of curiosities to the bustling movements of art and artists in global art markets, anthropologists have sought to understand social life through art, and art through social life. Through readings, discussions, films, digital materials, and artworks, we will learn about artists, art worlds, art practice, and how anthropologists have studied the arts. Course assignments include critical responses to course material, a final research project, and participation in Providence arts events.

AMST 1903P. Please, Please Me.

This seminar will investigate theories of pleasure and its representation in a range of fictional texts. What is it that makes a text pleasing and for whom? How do we talk about pleasure and explain it to others? I am especially interested in the representation of pleasure from the 1970s on. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903Q. Out of Place: Regional Boundaries and their Transgression in Novels, Photography, Public Humanities.

This class explores the meaning of "region" in contemporary American culture. Focusing primarily on the West, we'll examine the construction and transgression of geographical and ideological regional boundaries. Questions considered include: What does crossing boundaries tell us about hte stability and meaning of region? What role do race, gender, and nationality play in moving across regional lines? What do shifting regional identities tell us about the possibilities and problems in ways of transforming identity? Sources include fiction, essays, websites, and photography. We use skills and ideas built over the semester to consider the ways museums and other public sites construct regional boundaries. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors, with priority given to American Studies concentrators.

AMST 1903R. Big Business, the Bomb, and Smokey Bear: Cold War Origins of Today's Environmental Movement.

Beginning with the psychological, cultural, and environmental changes brought by the Atomic Bomb, this seminar traces Americans' growing environmental awareness and concern with corporate power. We will look at classics like Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, as well as films, poetry, popular texts, and histories complicating traditional notions of the origins and conduct of the contemporary environmental movement. Students will have the opportunity to explore an aspect of environmentalism or the environment in depth through a semester writing project. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903T. The Materiality of History: Material Culture Theory and Practice.

Focusing on Native American, early American, and contemporary US material culture, this course develops critical methods for analyzing historic materials, not as silent monuments to the past, but as legible research materials for scholarly work. Who studies 'things', and with what methods? From the invisible to the living to the monumental, what are the limits of "thingness"? What is the role of commodification and American consumerism? Through selected readings and site visits, we will identify 'best practices' for integrating artifacts, collectibles, and every day things with documentary research in narrating and exhibiting the past. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903V. Asian and Latino Immigration.

This seminar examines the ways in which the histories of Asian and Latino immigration parallel and intersect each other throughout US history. Capitalist development and labor migrations; wars and refugees; immigration policies and changing racial formations will be among the topics we explore. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors, seniors, and graduate students concentrating in American Studies and Ethnic Studies.

AMST 1903W. The Boy Problem: Male Adolescence as Social Pathology.

Focusing on the beginning, middle, and especially concluding decades of the 20th century, this course examines the ways in which both expert and popular discourse in the US have conflated male adolescence with social pathology and have constructed an image of the teenage boy as both symptomatic of and responsible for the nation's ills. Particular attention will be paid to issues of gender, race, and class. Primary source readings and original research will be emphasized. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903X. Style and the Man: Masculinity in Fashion and U.S. History.

This class will examine the role clothes have played in constructing notions of masculinity and manhood from the mid-19th century to the present. We will take seriously the oft-heard comment, "the clothes make the man," by studying the sartorial circumstances around the formation of men's fashion. These circumstances include class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and generation. Our study will be episodic and privilege New York and Los Angeles, though other locations will be considered comparatively. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors concentrating in American Studies.

AMST 1903Y. American Publics.

Americans worry about the quality of their civic life and fear its decline. We examine the public sphere's popular and political dimensions as well as challenges to the boundaries of American public life. Who is a citizen and thus eligible to participate? The course pays particular attention to concerns about the impact of new media--print, broadcasting, the internet. Taught simultaneously with the same course at the University of Melbourne, Australia, students will be linked digitally for discussion and collaborative writing. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1903Z. Shrine, House or Home: Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm.

This seminar will examine historic house museums within the context of American culture from the founding of Mount Vernon in 1853 to their present decline in popularity and relevance. Utilizing sources from a variety of disciplines including literature, women's and family history, and museum and preservation theory and practice, students will re-examine the prevailing historic house museum paradigm and develop interpretation plans for house museums in the Providence area. Enrollment limited to 20. If oversubscribed, priority is given to students in the Public Humanities Programs and Department of American Civilizations. No prerequisites.

AMST 1904A. Memories, Memorials, Collections and Commemorations.

To understand how American culture thinks about the past, we will explore a range of texts including museum exhibits, historical society collections, memorials, and civic celebrations. These sites and objects, the material culture of memory, help us understand the construction of national, community and personal identity. Students will also undertake practical projects in memorialization and commemoration, among them designing the program for a new memorial to the Rhode Island slave trade. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1904B. Henry James Goes to the Movies.

This course will focus on some of the novels and stories by James that have been made more than once into films or tv shows - Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl - and study the narrative and visual choices as interpretations of James's texts. Critical readings on the art of fiction and the art of film will also be included. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1904C. The Pacific Rim in American History.

Investigates the circuits of people, goods and ideas between Asia and the Americas. Although these flows have been at work for the past half millenium, this course will focus principally on three historical moments: the trading world of the 17th and 18th centuries; colonialisms and their critics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and the "American Century" in the late 20th century. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1904D. End of the West: The Closing of the U.S. Western Frontier in Images and Narrative.

In 1893, Historian Fredrick Jackson Turner declared "the closing of the American frontier," touching off an argument among historians about the meaning and significance of European expansion and settlement in the area west of the Mississippi River. Historians, filmmakers, television producers and photographers have continued the debate in their writings, images, and drama that will be the subject of this class. We will consider the various ways The West has "ended" in popular culture and academia, and consider how these narratives shape our present perceptions of the region and the people and cultures that inhabit and border it. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1904F. The American Experience: The Southeast Asian Refugees/Americans.

Explores the complexity of the American experience, the displacements and diasporas of the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Hmong, the Lao, and the Iu Mien in America through multiplicity of perspectives and interdisciplinary approach. Special emphases are on the reinvention of new lives in New World, the American-born generation, how the American-ness and the sense of "home" are constructed, defined, and contested through literary and cinematic works, self-representations, and cultural productions written and produced by these new Asian Americans themselves. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1904G. Museums, Identities, Nationhood.

Will explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting contexts, revealing how these museums have been used to create a sense of national self, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, postcolonialism and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent decades. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

AMST 1904H. The Teen Age: Youth, Society and Culture in Early Cold War America.

An interdisciplinary and multimedia exploration of the experiences, culture, and representation of youth in the United States from the end of World War II through the beginning of the Vietnam War. Enrollment limited to 20 sophomores, juniors and seniors.

AMST 1904I. Art/Place.

This course surveys the many ways in which contemporary artists respond to, remake, and intervene in places, and teaches students to articulate their own creative responses to place. We will be working intensively in Providence's Jewelry District, collaborating with the nonprofit Artists in Context to create a public artwork, and developing each person’s creative practice in response to the narrative and aesthetic prompts of this contested space. The course will culminate in a final exhibition of student projects curated by the students themselves. Enrollment limited to 14.

AMST 1904J. The Asian American Movement: Communities, Politics and Culture.

In 1969 students at S.F. State College invented a new social category; they called it Asian America. This seminar begins with an examination the Asian American Movement, its origins and aspirations, its ideological cross currents, its failures and enduring legacies. But the central question we will ask is, what relevance does the Asian American Movement have for struggles for social justice today? Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1904K. Power + Water: Material Culture and its Environmental Impact.

Students explore material culture, its impact upon the environment in the US prior to Industrial Revolution and examine the relationship of this earlier production to current issues of pollution and climate change. In the 18-19th centuries, houses, furniture, whale products were staples of American craft and ingenuity. This material culture tells the story of how gathering raw materials and converting them into usable products came at a severe cost to watersheds, forests, species, humans. These examples show that the seemingly insatiable human urge to control/transform resources into items for consumption leads to serious consequences for the earth’s climate and inhabitants.

AMST 1904L. Cultural Heritage, Curation and Creativity.

The course examines current theories and practices in cultural heritage work from various international perspectives and places them in dialogue with practices, theories and critical perspectives from the contemporary arts. It offers students the opportunity to participate in a practical and creative cultural heritage project, realizing a curated experience/event/experience within the urban environment of Providence. Questions of material and form; the relationship between language and vision; the role of description in interpretation; and what constitutes learning through visual experience will be considered. Following readings in cultural heritage theory, curatorial studies and critical theory, the course will engage students both intellectually and practically through individual and group curatorial projects. Enrollment limited to 14 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1904M. Charles Chapin and the Urban Public Health Movement.

Examines the science, politics, and programs of the 19th and early 20th century urban public health movement. Scope will be national but the focus will be on Providence, particularly during the tenure of Charles Chapin as Superintendent of Health. Will result in the mounting of an exhibit illustrating and explaining one of facet of the movement. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AMST 1904N. The Korean War in Color (ENGL 1761V).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761V.

AMST 1904O. Native American Environmental Health Movements (ETHN 1890J).

Interested students must register for ETHN 1890J.

AMST 1904P. Queer Relations: Aesthetics and Sexuality (ENGL 1900R).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1900R.

AMST 1904Q. Engendering Empire (ETHN 1890K).

Interested students must register for ETHN 1890K.

AMST 1904R. New Narratives: New Media: New Museums.

This course explores the challenges to narrative modes, institutional patterns, and models for studies in material culture that are posed by emerging digital media practices. This course will focus on the example of the collections and resources of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Readings in brain science and anthropology that focus on the cognitive and social mechanics of cultural capital formation to project development techniques in simulation and prototyping that derive from movie production, interaction design, game development and architecture. Students from a broad spectrum of arts and science backgrounds, including specifically those from museum curation and computer science, are welcome. Enrollment limited to 15.

AMST 1904S. Ethnic American Folklore: Continuity and the Creative Process.

The course investigates how folklore and the oral culture of diverse cultural groups have transformed within their texts and in their creative representations and meanings. It looks into the dynamics of cultural continuity and the creative process involved, from oral narratives, foodscape, family lore, the senses of place, and the senses of home. At the juncture of the oral, the written, the popular, and the high tech, what are the new cultural forms, new cultural products, communication milieu and venues negotiated and contested. Anthropological field research methods and training will be a major emphasis of the course. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1904T. Women and Work in the 21st Century.

Debates about women and work seem to be everywhere in American culture, dominated by the question of whether professional women can "have it all." Simultaneously, women—especially women of color—continue to be concentrated in the lowest-level, most poorly-paid jobs. And as more families depend on women's income, the contradictions between waged work and unwaged family work grow more acute. Controversies about women and their labor—waged and unwaged—have a long history in the U.S. This course will explore current debates from historical, sociological, and theoretical perspectives, with particular attention to the impact of race and class. Enrollment limited to 20 sophomores, juniors, seniors.

AMST 1904V. Decolonizing Minds: A People's History of the World.

This seminar will explore the knowledge-production and military-financial infrastructures that maintain empires, as well as the means through which people have either resisted or embraced empire. While some attention will be made to the 19th and early 20th century colonial context, the bulk of the course will focus on the Cold War liberal era to the neoliberal regime that continues today. Possible topics include: popular culture and ideology, the Cold War university, area studies, international anti-war networks, transnational labor activism, the anti-colonial radical tradition, and the Arab Spring/Occupy Movements. Weekly readings; evaluation based on participation and analytical essays. Enrollment limited to 20. No overrides will be given before the semester begins. Please come to the first class meeting if you are interested in taking the course.

AMST 1904W. Native American Environmental Health Movements (ETHN 1890J).

Interested students must register for ETHN 1890J.

AMST 1904X. Imagining And Depicting China In America.

Geographically remote and less-obviously intertwined politically and culturally, China’s distance has fostered an active imaginary, producing rich visual and textual resources. This seminar examines narrative and visual culture over the long period Americans have been fascinated with China and the Chinese, from the 18th century to the present. Visual primary sources are our principal “texts” and include paintings, cartoons, decorative arts, photography, films, fiction, news articles, and government documents. The goal of the course is to interrogate how we envision China and the Chinese today, placing that vision within a critical historical perspective.Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1905A. Crises in American Capitalism.

We are now in the midst of what is commonly called the Great Recession—the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. This course investigates these two crises in American capitalism: how they were caused, resisted, represented, and remembered. Students will be asked to interrogate the meanings of these economic crises, and to consider their various political and cultural uses. Assigned texts will include history, fiction, journalism, film, memoir, and photography. Enrollment limited to 20 sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

AMST 1905B. Media and Modern Childhood (GNSS 1960S).

Interested students must register for GNSS 1960S.

AMST 1905C. Mainstream Journalism in America (through the prism of The New York Times).

Jefferson is supposed to have said that if he were forced to choose between a free government and a free press he would choose a free press, because without it a free government would not survive. It is certainly true that newspapers, and later the electronic media, have had major impacts on American politics and society. Now these media are in a period of convulsive change; their business model is broken and no one can fix it. This course will consider the growth, evolution, influence and future of these media, particularly The New York Times. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 1905D. African American Musical Theatre (MUSC 1905D).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1905D.

AMST 1905E. American Poetry II: Modernism (ENGL 1711A).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711A.

AMST 1905G. Literature and the Problem of Poverty (ENGL 1710K).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1710K.

AMST 1905J. American Poetry I: Puritans through the Nineteenth Century (ENGL 1511O).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1511O.

AMST 1905M. Whose Heritage?: National Landmarks for Diverse Publics.

In this course students examine the commemoration of specific sites, private and public, in creating, remembering, and preserving public history. Through theoretical readings, case studies, and workshops, students explore the intersection of people—as individuals, community members, and citizens— with their built environment, historic memory, and narrative. We explore how cultural heritage gets made, who chooses the sites, and whose history gets remembered by writing a U.S. National Park Service Landmark nomination for a local Chinese American site. The course also compares American cultural heritage programs with those of other countries and provides practical experience with National Park Service processes.

AMST 1905N. War and the Mind in Modern America.

This course examines how the crucible of war has shaped modern conceptions of human nature. Moving from the Civil War to the present, we will consider questions such as changing theories of combat trauma, evolutionary and social scientific explanations for why people fight wars, and the role of memory in individual and collective understandings of violent conflicts. Students will analyze representations of war in film and literature in addition to reading historical and theoretical texts.

AMST 1905O. Reading and Righting Histories of Violence.

This seminar proposes “histories of violence” as a useful framework to interrogate the varied forms of violence that constitute Western liberal modernity. These forms include systems of state power and imperial practices; subjective violence through raced, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies; and narrative violence that prevents histories and voices from emerging through the erasure of archives and narrative silencing. Course readings consider ongoing local and transnational struggles to reckon with the violent histories of slavery, empire, colonialism, nationalism, and democracy. They offer interdisciplinary models for researching and narrating these histories. Class discussions with consider avenues for reckoning with histories of violence.

AMST 1905Q. Laboring Women: Work, Reproduction, and Leisure since Reconstruction.

This course examines US women’s history from the late 19th century to the present, with a focus on labor broadly defined. It will consider how differences among women (e.g. race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality), as well as their status as women, historically shaped their experiences of work, cultural life, activism, and reproduction.

AMST 1905R. Theory and Practice of Local History (HIST 1972E).

Interested students must register for HIST 1972E.

AMST 1905S. Enslaved! Indians and Africans in an Unfree Atlantic World (HIST 1970B).

Interested students must register for HIST 1970B.

AMST 1905T. Imagining Formosa: American Writings on Taiwan.

American accounts of Taiwan mid-nineteenth century to present are the focus of this seminar. Beginning in 1860, Euro-American merchants, diplomats, missionaries, ethnographers, and explorers began arriving in ever-increasing numbers. We will read representative texts written by these visitors during years of treaty-port imperialism, Japanese colonial rule, martial law, and later democratization, including post colonial criticism and a novel set in 1950's Taipei and a collection of short stories. The island’s complex aboriginal and Chinese ethnic population is the subject matter of much of this writing, and we will explore issues of indigeneity and ethnicity.

AMST 1905V. Digital Communities.

Community and online engagement have been falsely cast in a dichotomous light -- either a cure-all or a sure failure. Working with local and online communities will shape our understanding and questions about the complexities of groups. We'll learn context, tools, and tricks for building powerful community-based campaigns. Students examine how projects can gain new participants while maintaining their focus and think about the differences in community involvement in on-line spaces and off. In a hands-on project, this class explores how to work together in digital space, to create moving media, and to build a campaign for support and growth.

AMST 1905Z. Eyes on the Prize: Literary Fiction as Cultural Capital.

In this course we will read selected novels that have won recent national prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Newberry Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, to understand how the creation and circulation of cultural capital works in the USA. Alternative modes of evaluation, such as #Booktok and Oprah's Book Club, will be explored. Students will choose what criteria will be considered for the readings in the second half of the course. Particular attention will be paid to gender, sexuality, race and class as categories of analysis in order to explore the relations between art and prestige in contemporary culture.

AMST 1906H. Beauty Pageants in American Society.

Beauty pageants are often ridiculed, and even vilified, in American society. Yet their cultural power—from “There She Is” to Toddlers + Tiaras to pageant waves—is undeniable. What accounts for the enduring power of beauty pageants? This course draws on inter-disciplinary scholarship across the social sciences and humanities to examine how and why pageantry and American femininity have become linked in the public consciousness. By the end of this course you will be able to use beauty pageants as a lens to carefully examine gender, race, age, and appearance, and apply that critical thinking to other pop culture phenomena.

AMST 1906I. Decolonizing Museums: Collecting Indingenous Culture in Taiwan and North America.

This course addresses "global indignity" in comparing ethnographic collections in Taiwan and North America. How do Anthropology museums maintain and interpret objects collected under English, US, or Japanese colonialism. In hands-on and virtual examination of museum collections, students follow ethnographic artifacts from useful circulation to glass cabinets—and ultimately to art galleries. We explore collecting and representation strategies of “ethnic” objects in relation to colonialism, decolonization, ethnic politics, and nationalism. What are strategies of the post-colonial museum and indigenous-led design?

AMST 1906J. Race, Gentrification, and the Policing of Urban Space (PLCY 1701W).

Interested students must register for PLCY 1701W.

AMST 1906K. Crimes of Gender and Sex: Producing and Imprisoning Criminals in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

Growing interest in mass incarceration has brought new attention to longstanding critiques of the criminal justice system. This course looks beyond failings such as “tough on crime” sentencing and racist policing to examine criminal justice as a system that defines and produces criminality. Specifically, we will examine criminalization as a social, political, and cultural process that not only makes certain bodies “criminal,” but also reinforces dominant beliefs about gender, sexuality, and sex. We will explore theories of criminality, methods of policing and imprisonment, rehabilitation initiatives, and prison activism through an intersectional lens.

AMST 1906M. Making Knowledge in the Progressive Era: Institutions, Spaces, and Ideas.

Who makes knowledge? How is it shaped by intellectual, political, and material ambitions and constraints? These current concerns also preoccupied U.S. society at the turn of the 20th century. During the Progressive Era – a time of massive technological change, social upheavals, and racial tensions – educators, researchers, and artists charted new ways of producing and disseminating knowledge. Students will analyze American knowledge cultures by reading fictions, memoirs, and philosophical/scholarly writings by Henry Adams, Jane Addams, Willa Cather, John Dewey, and W.E.B. Du Bois and by exploring other cultural artifacts and media, including visual representations, maps, architectural plans and archives.

AMST 1906N. Whiteness, Power, and Privilege: The Invention and Persistence of the White Race.

Terms like whiteness and white privilege have entered the American mainstream in the wake of racial tensions and the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter. This course seeks to situate historically, socially, psychologically, politically, economically, and corporeally what is meant by whiteness and how it affects our daily lives in this country and at a global level. Through engagement with classic texts in critical whiteness studies and select case-studies, students will discuss the invention, development, and power of whiteness. From the advent of race-based slavery to the 2016 Presidential Election, this course explores the meaning and power of whiteness.

AMST 1906P. Food in American Society and Culture.

How do we define American food and how does food define Americans? What determines what we eat, how we eat it, and what we believe we should eat? How is food used to construct and declare ethnic, racial, regional, class, and gender identities? How have food and nutrition been employed as signifiers of social justice and injustice and as sites of political struggle? What issues inform current discussions of the economics of local, national, and global food production and consumption? What is meant by eating responsibly? This course will examine these and other related question currently animating food studies.

AMST 1906Q. The History of Children and Childhood in America.

We will examine the evolution of childhood--as both a socioculturally constructed concept and a lived experience--from the colonial period to the present. In doing so, we will explore the impact of race, gender, class, and region on those constructions and experiences and consider the interpretive possibilities and challenges offered by various types of evidence: visual and literary representations, memoirs, child rearing advice, toys and play, children’s literature, clothing, and protective and restrictive laws.

AMST 1906R. Law and Transformative Social Change.

What potential does the law hold to bring about transformative social change in today’s society? Relatedly, what strategies and approaches have social movement activists utilized to engage lawyers and the broader legal system? We will answer these questions through an examination of models of activist and public interest lawyering from the Civil Rights, Environment Justice, Immigrant Rights and same sex marriage movements. Readings will draw from sociological, anthropological, legal and historical texts and legal cases with a focus on exploring multiple aspects of a legal decision.

AMST 1906S. Narratives of Blackness in Latinx and Latin America (ENGL 1761B).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761B.

AMST 1906T. Captive Voices: Atlantic Slavery in the Digital Age (HIST 1970G).

Interested students must register for HIST 1970G.

AMST 1906U. Culture as History: Making the 20th Century United States.

This interdisciplinary course explores selected currents in U.S. cultural history from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Thematic explorations trace the historical development of American cultural forms and practices, showing how transformations in communications, media, and consumption shaped Americans’ experience of capitalism and market expansion, ideas of self and society, social conflict around questions of race, class, gender, nationalism and empire, as well as immigration, migration, and social movements of both the left and right. Our broad goal will be to understand how culture came to shape how historical change unfolded in this period.

AMST 1906V. Virtual Bodies: Play, Power, Performance.

This seminar investigates digital media practices at the intersection of virtual and embodied experience, from video games and virtual communities to viral dance videos and motion-sensing surveillance systems. How do digitally mediated play, performance, and participatory culture incorporate and/or undermine technologies of power and control? How have new interfaces and media platforms invoked and reshaped ideas about liveness, creativity, authenticity, community, and privacy? What happens when embodied techniques and repertoires are taught and learned using digital media? Readings draw on media ethnography, performance studies, interface studies, and theories of intersectional embodied identity. Class members will undertake a series of practice exercises in which they learn new skills from online sources and collectively reflect on this process. Registration permission granted based on questionnaire distributed at first class meeting.

AMST 1906X. Black Queer Life.

This course explores how Black writers and artists represent and theorize a diverse array of Black genders and sexualities. We will begin with a series of conversations on the origins of Black queer theory, and then use these conversations to anchor us in our readings of Black queer life in literary and popular culture. Reading across a range of genres, including film, music, poetry, comics, and short fiction, we will collectively consider the ways sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, class, ability, and nationality to demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to Black people. We will learn from theorists, writers, and artists including Audre Lorde, Cathy Cohen, E. Patrick Johnson, Nicole Dennis Benn, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Danez Smith, Janelle Monae, Samuel Delany, among many others.

AMST 1906Y. Bodies at Work: Disability and Capitalism (STS 1700R).

Interested students must register for STS 1700R.

AMST 1906Z. Senior Seminar in Science, Technology and Society (STS 1900).

Interested students must register for STS 1900.

AMST 1907A. Whiteness and Otherness in Opera.

This course engages with how race is portrayed in opera, through the music, libretto, programming, and casting. It is designed to give students an overview of theories of race and power as it relates to music, specifically opera, and how certain ideologies are perpetuated through cultural products. Students will be encouraged to think critically, and apply the concepts learned to a variety of types of music through class activities and projects.

AMST 1907B. Indigenous Peoples and Places: How Lines Are Drawn.

What is indigenous space? What is a traditional cultural place? What constitutes “Indian Country” today? What is the relationship between land base and sovereignty? How has space been contested? How have Natives and settler-colonists conceived land and territory over time? This course is designed to introduce students to geographies of Native America including, culture areas, the mapping of languages and polities, the history of cartography and will encourage students to think critically about colonization/decolonization.

AMST 1907C. James Baldwin (ENGL 1711S).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711S.

AMST 1907D. Anthropology of Place.

Interested students must register for ANTH 1910B.

AMST 1920A. Contemporary Narratives of US Slavery.

The antebellum African American slave narrative inaugurated Black self-representation in print. Characterized by scholars as neo-slave narratives and, later, post-neo slave narratives, contemporary fictions of US slavery deploy the formal features and thematic concerns of the slave narrative to reveal Black freedom dreams of later periods. Examining recent literary, filmic, and televisual representations of US slavery, this course foregrounds racial slavery in the establishment of longstanding socioeconomic and political asymmetries across race, gender, and class in the US. And it analyzes the ways in which imaginative depictions of racial slavery seek to address and ameliorate such asymmetries. Our class will pay particular attention to how contemporary Black writers and filmmakers thematize labor, love, gender, power, pleasure, community, and resistance among the enslaved and their descendants.

AMST 1950. Pursuit of Happiness: Environmental Justice and Indigenous Rights.

Co-instructors Ron Potvin and Lorén Spears will lead exploration of indigenous cultural survival in the midst of ecological exploitation by the colonizers of Rhode Island and North America. They will address these issues with tours to native heritage sites; meetings with native experts and advocates; historical scholarship; and fiction, poetry, and song. Students will communicate their understanding of course content through writing, creative expression, and multimedia. The class will contribute content to a travelling exhibition organized by the Humanities Action Lab for its 2019 Initiative on Migration, Climate Justice, and Environmental Justice.

AMST 1970. Independent Reading and Research.

Required of all honors candidates in the senior year. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course. S/NC

AMST 1971. Digital Media and Virtual Performance (MUSC 1971).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1971.

AMST 2010. Introduction to American Studies.

Introduction to American Studies required of all first-year graduate students in American Studies. Graduate students from other departments may enroll with the permission of the instructor.

AMST 2020E. Introduction to Interdisciplinary American Studies.

This graduate-level course offers an introduction to the discipline of American Studies through a close reading of four important texts representing different methodologies and theories within the discipline. We will also read a series of seminal articles focused on transnationalism, highlighting the significance of border-crossings to the American experience throughout the semester. The goal of the course is to familiarize students with pedagogical approaches within American Studies, through active seminar discussions, fieldtrips within the community, and work with material and visual media as well as secondary texts.

AMST 2220A. Digital Scholarship.

This course examines how the social sciences and humanities changed as a result of the information revolution. We will look at changes in museums, publishing, knowledge production, and pedagogy. Students learn digital tools and use them to create new media projects experimenting with public scholarship, digital humanities research, archival tools, and/or classroom possibilities. Digital novices welcome. Enrollment limited to 20.

AMST 2220B. Culture, Politics and the Metropolitan Built Environment.

This interdisciplinary readings seminar will provide graduate students with an introduction to recent scholarly work on 20th century and contemporary cities and suburbs. Readings are drawn from cultural, political, social, and intellectual history, American Studies, political science, sociology, and ethnography. They will investigate the interconnections between urban and suburban development and the role of ideology, class, gender, race, and globalization in shaping planning, architecture, culture, policy, politics, and social movements. This class is open to students in American Studies, History, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, and other disciplines who find themselves interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of cities and suburbs.

AMST 2220D. Museums in Their Communities.

This seminar examines in detail aspects the internal workings of museums (of anthropology, art, history, science, etc.) and their place in their communities. Accessions, collections management, conservations, education, exhibition, marketing, research, and museum management are among the topics discussed; the focus varies from year to year. Open to graduate students only.

AMST 2220E. American Orientalism and Asian American Literary Criticism (ENGL 2760Y).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2760Y.

AMST 2220F. The Transnational Practice of U.S. Popular Culture.

This graduate seminar examines popular culture within a transnational framework, exploring both the founding texts in the field and the latest works by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and communications scholars. Topics include the economics of the culture industry, globalization/cultural imperialism/domestication, audience research, and the history of cultural flows, from circuses to Bollywood. Students can take the class as either a reading or project course. Assignments include a short theoretical paper considering definitions (popular culture v. mass media, for example) and either a research paper/project or an annotated bibliography.

AMST 2220G. Old Media New Artists: Innovation and Contingency in African American Culture.

What are the defining characteristics of newness in twentieth-century African American culture? How have black creative artists repurposed their respective disciplines in accordance with and against the shifting proclivities of African American social politics? Through an interdisciplinary focus that considers music, literature, visual arts, and interactive media, this seminar proposes several alternative epistemological frameworks for recognizing the emerging artistry of our time. Enrollment is limited to 20 graduate students.

AMST 2220I. Skin Deep: Reading Race, Reading Form.

There is a movement away from symptomatic/paranoid readings of literature. In 2009, Stephen Best/Sharon Marcus pitched this in their call for surface readings, which deals with what is manifest/present in texts, rather than the latent/concealed. I hope to get beyond politically-instrumental readings of literature/to thinking in a sustained fashion about language/form/aesthetics of race. The seminar will divide between reading histories/theories of race (obsession with physical variation as race and technologies of seeing that we use to read race)/working through a range of post-nationalist works of literature/sharpening our understanding of reading as a mean-making event. Limited to Grad Students.

AMST 2220J. Introduction to Critical Race Theory.

This graduate seminar will explore the foundations and central tenets of Critical Race Theory, from its origins in Critical Legal Studies, to current applications, debates, and evolutions, with particular attention to CRT’s intersections with the field of American Studies. We will also bring in CRT “offshoots” such as TribalCrit, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and DisCrit. CRT posits that racism is endemic to society, but that we must also remain committed to social justice and praxis. How do we navigate these tensions, use CRT to provide a toolkit for navigating scholarship, and work toward social change in the realms of race and racism?

AMST 2220K. The Body (HIST 2981J).

Interested students must register for HIST 2981J.

AMST 2220R. Popular Music Studies.

This graduate seminar offers a critical exploration of interdisciplinary scholarship on popular music and related cultural formations. Class readings emphasize ethnographic approaches grounded in American Studies, media studies, and ethnomusicology, alongside relevant bodies of critical theory. We will consider production, circulation, and reception practices, as well as the erosion of the barriers separating these domains. Case studies foreground popular music scenes in the Americas and the United Kingdom—especially Afro-diasporic and Latinx genres and practices—but readings, discussions and student projects will range beyond these areas. Major topics include musical subcultures; transnational circulation; club/dance music; listening practices; and genre studies focusing on hip-hop, reggaetón, and K-pop. Registration permission granted based on questionnaire distributed at first class meeting.

AMST 2220S. Diaspora, Displacement, Transnationalism (HIST 2971P).

Interested students must register for HIST 2971P.

AMST 2220Y. Aesthetics of Relation: Minoritarian Gestures in the Visual Realm.

Focusing on recent scholarship, this course explores the use of aesthetics among minoritarian subjects to elaborate a politics of relation. Exploring origins in women of color, black radical, and queer of color scholarly traditions, alongside methodologies from cultural studies and visual culture studies, we will read diagnoses of and responses to power as well as imaginings of alternate social formations. In addition to recent scholarship, we will also consider recent exhibitions and artist talks.

AMST 2220Z. Currents in Popular Music: Race & Sound.

Race and sound have a material relationship marked by imagination, fantasy, and deceit. Race is both social construct and lived reality; it changes across time, space, and modes of expression. Music, (or here, sound), can both express creative insurgency and reproduce cultural hegemony. In this seminar, we will read for the duality of racing sound – declaring particular racial identities at particular times by ascribing those identities to sonic markers – and sounding race; making racial identity audible through listening and performance practices.
We will also engage contemporary discourses of popular music and sound studies by reading popular music books published in the last 5 years. By focusing on the ways that these texts are constructed and examining continuities and disjunctions across monographs, we’ll work to understand the current landscape of popular music studies and enter into that discourse ourselves.

AMST 2221A. Accessioning, Archiving, and Antiracism: Critical and Creative Approaches.

This course challenges artists, practitioners, and scholars to push the hermeneutic limits of archives. The course presents a series of critical essays, case studies, and workshops to support students as they develop theoretical expertise, creative thinking patterns, and practicable skills. Students will develop finding aids that support enhanced accessibility, and analyze systematic research practices that build toward equity. Ultimately they will develop acquisition plans in alignment with the Brown Libraries new acquisition plan.
Beginning with an overview of what constitutes an archive, this syllabus attempts to guide learners through the acquisitioning process. It foregrounds the ways that anti-racist activists and artists work in and against archives, exploring how collecting professionals and amateurs alike can use the acquisition process to challenge dominant white supremacist narratives and hierarchies of knowledge in the service of more equitable and just institutional development.

AMST 2221B. Immigration and the Borders of US Empire.

Since the founding of the United States, we have debated and struggled over the boundaries of American nationhood, who may claim the rights and protections provided by the state, and where the lines of inclusion/exclusion are drawn. This course will focus on two interrelated themes. The first is the implementation of immigration and nationality controls designed to manage cross-border traffic and restrict membership in the national community. The second is to explore how the projection of US power beyond its territorial borders (e.g. US empire) has fueled cross-border movement between metropole and colonial/postcolonial zones. We will highlight the ways in which the US’s encroachment of borders outside its territorial domain raises important questions about the meaning and legitimacy of national sovereignty and the fashioning of immigrant “illegality.”

AMST 2221C. Afro-Asian America: Intraminority Relations in Historical Perspective.

In this graduate course, we explore the subject of Asian-Black relations in the United States, domestically and internationally, toward a deepened understanding of how intraminority relations inform U.S. race relations and racial formations. Topics include shared and overlapping struggles against colonialism, interracial solidarity and the Third World Left, the theory of racial triangulation, social and sexual intimacy across race, and the so-called “Black-Korean conflict” of the 1980s and 1990s. Readings will chart how the study of Asian-Black relations have changed over time and illuminate why the subject remains salient while drawing from a range of discipline-based and interdisciplinary approaches. History and historical approaches will be especially foregrounded, though the class also includes attention to approaches from interdisciplinary and other discipline-based fields.

AMST 2221D. Tracked: Critical Surveillance Studies.

This graduate seminar investigates historical and contemporary technologies and practices of surveillance, drawing on the established field of Surveillance Studies as well as relevant literature in performance studies, media ethnography, software/platform studies, sociology of labor, and history of science. We will address confluences of moving bodies, disciplining technologies, and state power: for example, motion-sensing systems operating at scales ranging from individual fitness trackers to drone monitoring of refugee movements. Key topics include sousveillance, dataveillance/data bodies, racialized surveillance, algorithmic bias, surveillance art, and surveillance capitalism.

AMST 2221E. Sensing Sovereignty: Theorizing Indigenous & Minoritarian Aesthetics.

This graduate seminar explores the rich textures of Indigenous aesthetics by drawing on the fields of Native feminisms, performance studies, queer of color critique, and Indigenous theory. Students will consider Indigenous peoples’ engagement with aesthetics as integral to the persistence of Indigenous paradigms. We will ask: How are aesthetics a critical site of both colonization and decolonial refusal? How can we collectively explore the relational capacities and overtones imbued within Indigenous and minoritarian aesthetics? How do activists, artists, writers, etc. employ aesthetics as the conduit to building anticolonial solidarities across diverse contexts? We will explore the sensory paradigms framing aesthetics asking how these register within the body and the environment to build, sustain, and live in otherwise worlds. Simultaneously, students will explore the way Indigenous and minoritarian uses of media challenge settler colonial and carceral regimes of white supremacist power.

AMST 2221F. Native American Structures of Feeling: Affect, Subjectivity, and Indigeneity in America.

This graduate seminar stages a meeting between the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies and the capacious network of affect theory to attend to the experiences of Native Americans living amidst ongoing U.S. occupation of their lives and lands. Taking our cue from Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, we will question the ways in which the “grammar of Indigenous Studies misapprehends the tumult of everyday life” through the field’s emphasis on sovereignty and political recognition. We will trace a colonial history that has made categories such as “the human” and “the subject” unavailable to Native people, and consider the affective conditions created for individuals living within a state made possible only through their elimination. What lives do Native people forge despite the confines that settler colonialism carves for them? How might we better understand these lives through Native literature?

AMST 2221G. Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise (HMAN 2401X)..

Interested students must register for HMAN 2401X.

AMST 2450. Exchange Scholar Program.

AMST 2500. Museum Interpretation of the American Experience.

A seminar examining methods of museum interpretation, the ways that museums convey information to the public with exhibits, tours, demonstrations, films, video tapes, slide shows, interactive computer programs, publications, and other techniques. We will visit museums that have an historical or anthropological focus and read theoretical and critical writings on the public interpretation of American material culture.

AMST 2500A. History Curatorship.

This seminar on curatorial practice considers collecting as well as exhibitions and other forms of interpretation. We will visit museums, read historical, theoretical, and critical writings on collecting and presenting culture, and work on museum projects.

AMST 2510. Industrial Archaeology.

No description available. S/NC

AMST 2520. American Studies: Professional Issues in American Studies.

This course explores the mechanics of a doctorate degree in American Studies. We will explore the constitution of our field through the elaboration of field exam lists and narratives, query its pedagogical application in the design of undergraduate syllabi, and begin to outline and enact our participation in the profession both within and beyond the academy. At the end of this class, students will have constructed a portfolio that will assist their progress towards a degree and provide the tools with which to chart pathways once a degree is in hand. S/NC

AMST 2525. American Studies MA Capstone.

This course is required for all Masters students in American Studies who are in their final semester. Enrolled students will work with American Studies faculty to complete an interdisciplinary research paper or project of their choice.

AMST 2540. Methods in Public Humanities.

This course surveys public humanities work, including cultural heritage preservation and interpretation, museum collecting and exhibition, informal education, and cultural development. It also provides an overview of the contexts of that work in nonprofit organizations, including governance, management, and development.

AMST 2550A. Asian American Political Movements to 1970.

This research seminar will examine political movements in Asian immigrant communities in the United States and the Caribbean before the emergence of "Asian America" in the late 1960s.

AMST 2550B. The Japanese in the Americas.

A research seminar on the comparative historical experience of Japanese in Hawaii, mainland U.S., Brazil, and Peru. Open to undergraduates with permission of instructor.

AMST 2550C. Advanced Seminar on Asian American History.

Advanced seminar on Asian-American history, diaspora studies and globalization.

AMST 2580. Managing and Evaluating Arts and Culture Institutions.

Cultural and arts organizations are re-assessing why they exist, who they serve and how they should be structured and supported to do their best work. This course explores how current and emerging field leaders, practicing artists and educators; trustees and donors, philanthropists and public officials answer these questions. Students will investigate how a particular institution is adapting (or not) to new conditions. Students will formulate responses to real world dilemmas from the perspective of Executive Directors, program officers, practicing artists, educators, and community members.

AMST 2590. Creativity, Community and Controversy in Cultural Policy.

The art of making good policy lies in making tough choices between competing options to maximize public good. Governments perceive the arts/arts-education as amenities and slash their budgets. However, creative placemaking initiatives, the expansion of the creative economy, the rise of design thinking suggest new ways for policy makers to constructively resolve apparent dilemmas to advance arts policy goals. The course explores public policies that stimulate the arts; how arts advocates make their case to public officials; the benefits of the arts to the communities; and how policy makers in many sectors in the US and internationally leverage/exploit, arts-based solutions.

AMST 2600. Intro to Digital Humanities.

The humanities value nuance, while computers process precisely formatted information and structured data. How do we use computers to do humanities work? What are the benefits and the limitations? Students in the course will examine these questions and learn how to use and experiment with a variety of digital methodologies for humanistic research (e.g. text mining, working with structured data, creating data visualizations). The course will also engage students in analyzing the potential intrinsic bias of source texts in datasets and the algorithms that researchers regularly use for text analysis projects, such as topic modeling. Undergraduates by permission of instructor.

AMST 2631. Public Humanities on Lockdown:Considerations on the role + design of humanities programs in prisons.

This course examines the role of education programs in prisons and jails, as well as how other humanities organizations have interacted with the prison-industrial complex. Students will learn about the history of incarceration in the United States, the current state of mass incarceration, and the prison abolition movement. They will also examine different approaches, challenges and ethical considerations in building humanities programs for incarcerated populations. Case studies of prison education and humanities programs and program design and evaluation will be examined throughout the course.

AMST 2640. Mechanics of Cultural Policy in America.

This seminar presents and analyzes contemporary institutional initiatives and policies relating to culture, including public art, tourism, historic preservation, and museums. It demonstrates how political, social, cultural, advocacy, and media organizations from the local to international level shape policies designed to protect and present cultural sites and activities in society. Enrollment limited to 10 graduate students.

AMST 2650. Introduction to Public Humanities.

This class, a foundational course for the MA in Public Humanities with preference given to American Studies graduate students, will address the theoretical bases of the public humanities, including topics of history and memory, museums and memorials, the roles of expertise and experience, community cultural development, and material culture. Enrollment limited to 20 graduate students.

AMST 2651. The Responsive Museum.

This course considers the many kinds of experiences available to people in art museums. Although art museums have tended to embrace the values of art history, visitors use them in surprising, personally meaningful, powerful ways. Among the topics we will activate: building community, stimulating creativity, evoking memory and associations, learning about the self and others, healing, and crossing cultural boundaries. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.

AMST 2652. Community Documentary and Storytelling.

This class focuses on ways that documentary methodologies and storytelling help individuals articulate and negotiate issues of race, ethnicity, gender and social class in local and regional communities. Through readings, discussions, and presentations by guest speakers, students will examine written, digital, visual, video/film, and oral presentations and performances as ways to express community stories. We will also consider how such projects can facilitate civic engagement. The class will involve participation in a community documentary project. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.

AMST 2653. Public Art: History, Theory, and Practice.

The course offers an opportunity for RISD and Brown students to work together to understand the growing interdisciplinary field of public art. We will explore the potential of working in the public realm as artists and/or arts administrators. Topics include: pivotal events and artworks that formed the history of public art from the early 20th century to the present; approaches to site-specificity; ideas of community and audience; current debates around defining the public and public space; temporary vs. permanent work; controversies in public art; memorials, monuments, and anti-monuments; case studies; public art administration models, among others.

AMST 2654. Designing Heritages: From Archaeological Sensibilities to Relational Heritages.

Do you believe in the past? This course takes as its starting assumption that pasts are not temporally distant from today. They are contemporary experiences whose structure and mediation impact how we live in our shared world. This course will explore the intellectual history of archaeological thought and the development of heritage theory. While simultaneously exploring practical design skills, it will provide context to contemporary synergies between art, archaeology and heritage studies through interdisciplinary studies of architecture, art history, cultural criticism, heritage studies and archaeological theory. Enrollment limited to 18 seniors and graduate students.

AMST 2655. Against Invisibility: Asian America/s, Collective Memory and the Public Humanities.

Asians have been living in North America since the 1600’s but four centuries later Asian Americans are still virtually invisible in the narratives that define the nation. What spaces are available to resist invisibility? The seminar will focus on ways in which Asian Americans have used vernacular photography to archive collective memory, resist state surveillances, assert subjectivity, and narrate alternate histories. We will learn to read photographs in their shifting contexts produced in the internment or refugee camp, collected in a family album or used to prove immigration status) and think about the politics of photography in Asian American narratives.

AMST 2656. Cultural Policy Planning.

Cultural policy is the aggregate of governmental activities in the arts, humanities, and heritage. This seminar explores its history and public/private context and offers practical insights about how to influence cultural policy design, especially methods to achieve public consensus through planning. Students discuss contemporary issues, examine policy planning principles, and learn practical methods through case study to develop policy recommendations. Enrollment limited to 20 seniors and graduate students.

AMST 2657. Museum Interpretation Practices.

Examines current interpretive practices and offers students the opportunity to participate in creating gallery interpretation for the museum context. Questions of material and form; models of attention and perception, the relationship between language and vision; the role of description in interpretation; and what constitutes learning through visual experience will be considered. Throughout the semester students will develop an interpretive practice through a series of workshops, exercises, site visits and critical discussions. Enrollment limited to 14: seven seniors and graduate students, along with seven RISD students.

AMST 2658. Releasing the Imagination in Public Humanities Practice.

Designed to stimulate and nourish creative approaches to work in museums and other venues of public humanities practice. Students will be invited into a series of creative adventures drawing on essential skills of close looking, deep listening, persuasive writing, and creative production. Essays from Maxine Greene's "Landscapes of Learning" and "Releasing the Imagination," as well as an array of personal essays, exhibition catalogues, fiction, and research from the fields of education, sociology, and psychology. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students; undergraduates may be admitted with instructor permission.

AMST 2659. "Paradigm Dramas" Revisited: American Studies in Historical Perspective.

The course offers an in-depth exploration of the radical roots and continual transformations of the academic discipline of American Studies within particular historical contexts, beginning in the early 20th century into the present. We will read seminal texts responsible for the formation of defining moments in the discipline's history, including the "myth & symbol school," "American exceptionalism," multiculturalism, post-nationalism and transnational American Studies. Students will produce reviews of current texts and reflect on future possibilities for a mature and globalized American Studies. Enrollment limited to 20 graduate students.

AMST 2660. Projects in Public Humanities.

Devoted to one or more advanced projects in Public Humanities not covered in detail by the regular courses. Projects in public humanities provide practical, hands-on project and group project management experience that is essential for careers in museums, historic preservation, and cultural agencies. Students will work with faculty advisor to project completion. Written permission and topic description required. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course. This course is repeatable for credit. Prerequisite: AMCV 2650 or demonstrated ability of equivalent experience. Instructor permission required.

AMST 2670. Summer Practicum in Public Humanities.

Practicums in public humanities provide practical, hands-on training that is essential for careers in museums, historic preservation, and cultural agencies. Students will work with faculty to find appropriate placements and negotiate a semester's or summer work, in general a specific project. Available only to students in the Public Humanities M.A. program.

AMST 2680. Semester Practicum in Public Humanities.

Practicums in public humanities provide practical, hands-on training that is essential for careers in museums, historic preservation, and cultural agencies. Students will work with faculty to find appropriate placements and negotiate a semester's or summer work, in general a specific project. Available only to students in the Public Humanities M.A. program.

AMST 2686. Creating a 21st Century Art and Design Museum: A Seminar and Laboratory.

This graduate course could be an essential component of preparing yourself to advance your museum career. It combines a research seminar with travel to meet current museum leaders and a laboratory to shape the program of an emerging museum in a nearby community. By applying your previous experience you can help form the future of museums in this laboratory. This course examines the relevance of the museum concept, its history and current pressure/opportunities for museums to become even more appropriate to promoting scientific and cultural knowledge, understanding the human condition, our environment, and to become places of inspiration for all.

AMST 2687. History & Heritage Organizations: Collaboration & Critique.

In this course each student will engage closely with one cultural organization in the state of Rhode Island which has both a public mission and maintains collections related to history and heritage. Each student will write a profile of his/her chosen organization (history, collections, operations, etc.) through interviews and research; s/he will then collaborate with one or more other students to create an online exhibition using combined resources from their respective organizations; finally, s/he will critique the ways in which the organization fulfills or does not fulfill its stated mission in terms of current American Studies and public history frameworks.

AMST 2688. Digital Archives and Digital Publics.

This course considers the (perhaps surprisingly) long history of digital archives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, surveying various efforts of academic institutions, community organizers, activists, amateurs, and anarchists, examining digitized and “born-digital” materials, reflecting on relationships between ideas of cultural value and forms of materiality, technology, access, and dissemination. Particular attention will be paid to imagined audiences and uses of digital archives: scholarly, political, speculative, creative, memetic, and otherwise. This course provides students with opportunities to learn from archivists (and to visit local special collections on/off-campus) and to develop projects informed by best practices in digital public humanities.

AMST 2689. Show Me the Money: Philanthropy and Civil Society.

This course will engage students in the history, policy, practice of philanthropy as a significant dimension of American society/public humanities. A core theme: the relationship between philanthropy and the idea of civil society as the arena in which individuals and organizations contribute to the common good and address civic challenges. The course will: explore the impact and influence of philanthropy over time, examine the dynamics of difference, power, equity; will conclude with an investigation of changing values, trends in philanthropy, including critiques of inequality+practices of impact investing; focus on examples of relevance to public humanities and highlight the RI context.

AMST 2690. Management of Cultural Institutions.

This course explores public humanities institutions as an organizational system interacting with broader community systems. Students gain an understanding of the managerial, governance and financial structures of public humanities organizations and how those structures relate to mission, programming and audience. The course is designed to help those who work on the program side of public humanities and cultural non-profits(as educators, librarians, curators, interpreters, exhibit designers, public programming coordinators, and/or grant makers) engage more strategically with planning, organizational behavior, revenue generation, finance, marketing, and governance.

AMST 2691. Poetry in Service to Schools and the Community.

Poetry in service to the community honors a connection between poetry and wisdom, assumes that poetry is a wisdom medium (vehicle, vessel, conveyance) toward more enlightened thinking and practice. In this way, it is also an ideal medium for extending our study and practice beyond Brown, conducting workshops in schools, community centers, youth detention facilities and elsewhere. The class emphasizes community building, in teaching pairs and classes and workshops throughout Providence, in Renga and workshop groups. Poetry is the connective tissue; building relationships is at the heart of the practice. Students will write and teach. Enrollment limited to 16.

AMST 2692. Digital Public Humanities.

What is “digital humanities” and how does it impact and intersect with the field of public humanities? Digital humanities work involves new approaches to reading, writing, research, publication, and curation: digital tools help us examine digital and non-digital material in innovative ways, and digital modes of communication help us reach new and wider ranges of audiences. This course provides students with the opportunity to create digital projects and utilize digital tools to further their academic and professional interests.

AMST 2693. Community Arts with Young People.

Blurring the boundaries between artist and audience, practitioners of community arts have engaged underrepresented audiences who have traditionally relegated to more passive forms of participation, including young people with little access to arts education. This class provides students the opportunity to research and/or to conduct their own community arts projects with young people in Providence. Students will develop a deeper and more critical understanding of theorizing and implementing community arts projects with youth; will examine how to create pedagogic conditions with youth through the arts and humanities, as well as ways to systematically observe, document, and analyze these pedagogies. Enrollment limited to 15.

AMST 2694. UnSettling Public Humanities.

This course will decenter experiences and cultural expectations attendant to whiteness, cis-maleness, able-bodiedness, heterosexuality, and middle/upper-classness in the public humanities,and thereby explore the contemporary problems and possibilities of intersectional approaches in the field. What do contemporary paradigms of “diversity,” “public engagement,” and “cultural organizing” have to teach us about effective and ethical public humanities approaches? Do different, multiply marginalized communities of affinity practice entirely different public humanities? How are cultural interventions changing to accommodate the demands of an increasingly segmented public sphere?

AMST 2695. Museum as Idea.

What should museums be in the 21st ce? Are museums of today relevant to cultural historical, scientific, artistic, political and educational purposes? How can they provide more meaningful encounters with objects to inspire curiosity and to honor their creators? How can museums relate to their diverse communities today? Must they own objects to be museums? Growing from the historical basis for museum theory, We'll suggest alternative directions, create platforms for new perspectives. We'll rely on readings, discussion, and meetings with museum leaders, and on independent creative research. All will be challenged to invent their own concept of "museum". Enrollment limited to 12.

AMST 2696. The Promise of Informal Learning.

The course will take as its focus "Facilitated informal learning" - learning that happens outside of formal learning environments but is facilitated by an educator. It will explore facilitated informal learning within cultural institutions - museums, historic houses, zoos, libraries, science centers, children's museums. The course will explore the pedagogical methods, underlying philosophies and learning theories, audience, debates, and goals of facilitated informal learning today.

AMST 2697. Museum Interpretation Practices.

This course examines current interpretive practices and offers students the opportunity to participate in creating gallery interpretation for the museum context. Questions of material and form; models of attention and perception, the relationship between language and vision; the role of description in interpretation; and what constitutes learning through visual experience will be considered. Throughout the semester students will develop their interpretive practice through a series of workshops, exercises, site visits, and critical discussions. Enrollment limited to 15.

AMST 2698. Critical Perspectives in Informal Learning.

This course explores informal learning in multiple settings including art museums, historic houses, children’s museums, and science centers. Students will consider definitions of, and goals for informal learning. Together we will investigate questions regarding the possibilities and challenges of informal learning and examine philosophical and practical questions such as: what are our goals – programmatic and pedagogic – as educators? How do we meet the needs of diverse audiences? How do we develop inclusive audience practices? This course will give students a firm grounding in the history and philosophy of informal learning as well as explore contemporary issues in the field.

AMST 2699. Digital Storytelling.

This course surveys the current state of digital storytelling, examining topics ranging from digital curation to data journalism to social media activism (and beyond). We will consider the narrative conventions, multimodal dimensions, and mechanics of a wide range of digital stories, carefully examining both the tools available to creators and the theoretical perspectives that motivate their authors. Students will determine best practices for digital storytelling projects through their engagement with course readings, their participation in in-class workshop sessions where we experiment with particular tools and publishing platforms, and their implementation of a digital storytelling project. Enrollment limited to 15.

AMST 2760Z. African American Literature After 1965: Nationalism and Dissent (ENGL 2760Z).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2760Z.

AMST 2920. Independent Reading and Research.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Search Banner by instructor name to find the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course. You will need instructor permission to register and the course may be repeated with different instructors. Open to American Studies graduate students only. S/NC

AMST 2921. Independent Reading and Research.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Search Banner by instructor name to find the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course. You will need instructor permission to register and the course may be repeated with different instructors. Open to American Studies graduate students only. S/NC

AMST 2922. Independent Reading and Research.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Search Banner by instructor name to find the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course. You will need instructor permission to register and the course may be repeated with different instructors. Open to American Studies graduate students only. S/NC

AMST 2923. Independent Reading and Research.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Search Banner by instructor name to find the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course. You will need instructor permission to register and the course may be repeated with different instructors. Open to American Studies graduate students only. S/NC

AMST 2950. Independent Reading and Research in Public Humanities.

For MA in Public Humanities Students who wish to do independent reading and research.

AMST 2970C. Rethinking the Civil Rights Movement (HIST 2970C).

Interested students must register for HIST 2970C.

AMST 2990. Thesis Preparation.

For graduate students who have met the residency requirement and are continuing research on a full time basis.

ETHN 0066L. Beyond World Music: Singing and Language (ANTH 0066L).

Interested students must register for ANTH 0066L.

ETHN 0070. An Introduction to Africana Studies (AFRI 0090).

Interested students must register for AFRI 0090.

ETHN 0090A. The Border/La Frontera.

We will examine the historical formation, contemporary reality and popular representation of the U.S.-Mexico border from a bilingual (English-Spanish), multicultural (U.S., Mexican, and Latino), and transnational perspective within the framework of globalization. We will explore the construction of border communities, lives and identities on both sides of the international divide, and pay particular attention to the movement of peoples in both directions. We will read materials, watch films, and conduct class discussions in English and Spanish. Comfort and reasonable proficiency in Spanish is required, but native command is not necessary. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

ETHN 0090B. Critical Mixed Race Studies in the Twenty-First Century.

This course will guide students through an understanding of the historical, contemporary, and ideological rationale behind the constructions of mixed race, and how mixed race theory plays out in history, art, and contemporary media. This course aims to expand the conversations of mixed race beyond the stereotypes of tragic mulattos and happy hapas, instead interrogating what mixed race looks like in the twenty-first century and what historical precedents can explain current phenomena.

ETHN 0090C. Latinx Art.

This in-person, discussion-based seminar serves as an introduction to contemporary US Latinx Art. How do we understand the category “Latinx Art” and its history? How have the expressive iterations of different communities reflected on community dynamics and politics? How do contemporary curatorial projects provide platforms to envision Latinx futures? Departing from the cultural expressions linked to US Latinx civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this class will dwell on diverse formal and thematic approaches and foci in contemporary US Latinx Art to reflect more broadly on the ideological impact of expressive culture. We will do so by studying the expressive culture of artists in the United States of Latin American descent as well as the interdisciplinary critical scholarship of art history and visual culture scholars. Attendance to relevant local exhibitions and artist talks will be encouraged.

ETHN 0090D. Native American Literature: An Introduction.

This course will serve as an introduction to Native American literature. We will center Native American voices and stories to resist and reject the tradition of U.S. origin stories that perpetuate Native absence in order to produce American national fantasies of democracy, civilization, and progress. Native American novels, short stories, and poetry will be our scenes to reflect on, critique, and contest the ongoing project of settler colonialism in the United States. Our goal is to attend to individual and tribal experiences of life under settler colonialism, and consider the political, social, and psychological conditions that this structure produces. By the end of the course, students will have gained an understanding of Native American history and federal Indian policy, the Native American literary canon, and key debates in the field of Native American Studies.

ETHN 0091. An Introduction to Africana Studies (AFRI 0090).

Interested students must register for AFRI 0090.

ETHN 0100. Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 0100).

Interested students must register for ANTH 0100.

ETHN 0100V. Inventing Asian American Literature (ENGL 0100V).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0100V.

ETHN 0130. American Heritage: Democracy, Inequality, and Public Policy (SOC 0130).

Interested students must register for SOC 0130.

ETHN 0190A. Islands of Empire: Sounds and Silences.

A mural painted on a cement wall in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico greets you with, “Welcome to the oldest colony.” In five words, this small portion of the mural speaks to a legacy of empire and colonialism. This course brings Puerto Rico in dialogue with other past/present U.S. colonies and neocolonies such as Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guam, Philippines, and Hawai’i and their diasporas. Listening to spoken word, murals, music, oral histories, podcasts, and other mediums of sound and silence, we examine themes of race, sovereignty, colonialism, and empire across new geographic re-imaginings.

ETHN 0190B. Bad Capital: Race, Technology, and Asian/America.

How do representations of Asians and Asian Americans reinforce systems of Orientalism, capitalism, and colonialism in the U.S. and beyond? Through film, literature, and theory, this course aims to examine representations of Asian/American labor, capital, and consumption against the historical backdrop of the evolving U.S. political economy. Tracing historical representations of post-Emancipation Asian “coolie” laborers to contemporary anxieties surrounding Chinese surveillance, Indian tech outsourcing, and Japanese manufacturing, this course aims to unpack cultural representations of Asian/Americans at the intersections of Orientalism, capitalism, and technology. This course is designated under the DIAP and WRIT curricular programs.

ETHN 0190C. American (Mass)culinities: Sexuality, Race and Aesthetics (AMST 0190C).

Interested students must register for AMST 0190C.

ETHN 0190D. Centering Central America.

This course explores the histories, cultures, and political contexts of Central America and the experiences of Central Americans across the Americas. Drawing from cultural productions alongside historical analyses and ethnographic case studies, this course assumes a hemispheric approach to decenter the United States from our conversations of (im)migration and transnationalism and, in turn, center Central America. Each country will have its own week, followed by a conversation on (im)migration and Central Americans in the contemporary moment. Our key question here is: what are the defining moments in Central America’s history that have shaped the region and Central American lives? WRIT

ETHN 0190E. It's the End of the World As We Know It: Zombie and Apocalypse Narratives in Pop Culture (AMST0190E).

Interested students must register for AMST 0190E.

ETHN 0190F. Beyond the Tourist Trap: The Past, Present, and Future of Asian American Urban Spaces (AMST 0190F).

Interested students must register for AMST 0190F.

ETHN 0190G. The Fringe is the Fabric: Anti-Immigrant Movements in the United States (AMST 0190G).

Interested students must register for AMST 0190G.

ETHN 0190H. Indigenous Resurgence: Roots, Reclamations, and Relations.

This interdisciplinary survey course in Native American and Indigenous Studies will prepare students to identify, contextualize, and complicate contemporary Indigenous movements for justice. Three organizing sections of readings and writing assignments: roots, reclamations, and relations, make up the thematic trajectory of the course. Students will think through Indigenous projects to recover lost knowledges and ways of being (roots), reclaim self-determination from settler institutions (reclamations), and reorient social movements in solidarity with other struggles for justice (relations).

ETHN 0190X. Gendered Mobility: Migrant Women Workers in a Globalized Economy (AMST 0190X).

Interested students must register for AMST 0190X.

ETHN 0191P. Beyond Chinatown: The Past, Present, and Future of Asian American Spaces (AMST 0191P).

Interested students must register for AMST 0191P.

ETHN 0201G. Killing them Softly: Satire and Stereotype in African-American Literature (ENGL 0201G).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0201G.

ETHN 0210. Blacks in Latin American History and Society (AFRI 0210).

Interested students must register for AFRI 0210.

ETHN 0271. Introduction to Latinx History (HIST 0256).

Interested students must register for HIST 0256.

ETHN 0290D. Women, Sex and Gender in Islam (RELS 0290D).

Interested students must register for RELS 0290D.

ETHN 0300. Ethnic Writing.

This course will explore the idea of "ethnic writing" in both theory and practice. Students will examine how writers draw upon race and ethnicity (not always their own) to produce creative works and will then put these ideas in practice in their own writing, including but not limited to fiction, poetry, memoir, and inter-genre work. Interested students should attend the first session prepared for an in-class exercise that will determine attendance. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

ETHN 0301. Culture and Health (ANTH 0300).

Interested students must register for ANTH 0300.

ETHN 0310. Theory and Practice of Engaged Scholarship (SOC 0310).

Interested students must register for SOC 0310.

ETHN 0510F. Che Guevara, The Man and the Myths (COLT 0510F).

Interested students must register for COLT 0510F.

ETHN 0577B. The US-Mexico Border and Borderlands (HIST 0577B).

Interested students must register for HIST 0577B.

ETHN 0600. Introduction to Native and Indigenous Literatures (ENGL 0511G).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0511G.

ETHN 0601A. Introduction to Asian American History.

This course provides an introduction to the histories of people of Asian descent in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. We will focus on the experiences of people with ancestries in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, considering commonalities and differences by nationality, class, gender, religion, place, and other factors. Topics include orientalism in U.S. culture, immigration and exclusion, Asian American civil rights struggles, and the “model minority.” We eschew any claim that an “authentic” or “typical” Asian American experience exists, instead working from the idea that Asian Americans and their lives are multifaceted, complex, and dynamic. Course materials will include primary and secondary sources and incorporate interdisciplinary scholarship and approaches while being anchored in history.

ETHN 0610. Black Student Protest from Jim Crow to the Present (AFRI 0610).

Interested students must register for AFRI 0610.

ETHN 0700E. Postcolonial Literature (ENGL 0700E).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0700E.

ETHN 0710B. Ethics of Black Power (AFRI 0710B).

Interested students must register for AFRI 0710B.

ETHN 0710F. Being There: Bearing Witness in Modern Times (ENGL 0710F).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0710F.

ETHN 0710J. Introduction to Asian American Literature (ENGL 0710J).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0710J.

ETHN 0750B. Hispanics in the United States (HISP 0750B).

Interested students must register for HISP 0750B.

ETHN 0790B. Native Americans and the Media.

This course explores the ways in which Indigenous Americans have been constructed in the White American imagination and through self-representation from Frontier phase of American history, through contemporary images in American popular culture and media. Through films created about, and later by, Native people we will explore the evolution of the image of Native American in America culture.

ETHN 0790C. Theory Into Practice: Service Learning at a Dual Language Charter School.

Students will explore Dual Language (Two-Way Immersion; Bilingual) education through a variety of activities, using the service-learning model. Students will contribute at least 2 hours per week at the International Charter School (K-5), and another two hours in seminar at Brown University in conversation about readings, service, and politics pertaining to Two-Way Immersion education.

ETHN 0790D. Race and Remembering.

This course will explore struggles for power over narrating history and engages current tensions in public history and national memory. Together students will consider ongoing struggles to reckon with the violent histories of slavery, empire, colonialism, nationalism, and democracy in the US. Students will engage questions regarding remembering, forgetting, memorializing, and reckoning with histories of racial formation and violence. What are the methodological and narrative pitfalls of representing these histories? What are the possibilities for reckoning with violent histories? This course will concentrated on the Americas, but will also incorporate global understanding of legacies of narrative and memory.

ETHN 0810. Belonging and Displacement: Cross-Cultural Identities (POBS 0810).

Interested students must register for POBS 0810.

ETHN 0820G. Race and Political Representation (POLS 0820G).

Interested students must register for POLS 0820G.

ETHN 0880. Hip Hop Music and Cultures.

Interested students must register for AFRI 0880 S01 (CRN 27044).

ETHN 0900. Introduction to Deaf Studies (SIGN 0900).

Interested students must register for SIGN 0900.

ETHN 0901I. Body Count: Technologies of Life and Death (MCM 0901I).

Interested students must register for MCM 0901I.

ETHN 0901L. African American Media Visibility: Image, Culture, Crisis (MCM 0901L).

Interested students must register for MCM 0901L.

ETHN 0980. The Research Process: Qualitative and Ethnographic Methods.

Paying attention to methodology and research design can enhance the capacity of research in any field and contribute to knowledge production. The purpose of this seminar is to introduce students to a variety of social science research methods with an emphasis on ethnographic, mixed-methods research (research-design, data-collection, and data analysis). Social science research is a craft, and like any other craft, it takes practice to do it well. This seminar emphasizes a "hands-on," "applied," and/or practical approach to learning. The course is suited to students who have an on-going research project they plan to pursue throughout the semester. Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 0990. Black Lavender: Black Gay/Lesbian Plays/Dramatic Constructions in the American Theatre (AFRI 0990).

Interested students must register for AFRI 0990.

ETHN 1000. Introduction to American/Ethnic Studies.

Considers the U.S. as a society whose unifying identity is rooted in ethnic and racial diversity. Explores the historical and contemporary experiences of racial and ethnic groups in this country and analyzes different forms of representation of those experiences, as well as representations of the racial and ethnic stratification in the U.S. imagination.

ETHN 1020. Race and Language in the United States.

This course will examine the role of language in the social construction of race, racism and racial identity. We will address the different language issues facing African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and speakers of "accented" English. We will explore current issues such as the Oakland Ebonics case, English- Only legislation, bilingualism, and hate speech vs. free speech.

ETHN 1020C. The Afro-Luso-Brazilian Triangle (AFRI 1020C).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1020C.

ETHN 1050. Race in the Americas.

This class will explore issues of race, racial identity construction, and racism throughout Central and Latin America (including the Caribbean). This is a class in comparative race relations that covers peoples of African, Asian, Native, and European descent. Topics covered include: miscegenation, diaspora, space, socioeconomic inequality, and nation building. Previous coursework in Ethnic Studies or similar suggested.

ETHN 1051. History of African-American Education (EDUC 1050).

Interested students must register for EDUC 1050.

ETHN 1060E. West African Writers and Political Kingdom (AFRI 1060E).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1060E.

ETHN 1060I. Africana Philosophy of Religion (AFRI 1060I).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1060I.

ETHN 1070. Ethnic Studies Practicum: Strategy, Tactics and Tools for Social Change.

This is an academic and reflective practicum on the politics and processes of social justice organizing. Students will learn about the historical and political evolution of organizing, the connection between organizing and ideology/vision, concrete tools and tactics used in the strategies of social justice organizing, and elements of running non-profit organizations. This course will require, equally, academic vigor, personal leadership and involvement, and introspective analysis. Students will be required to intern at a local organization in Providence, and reflect on their involvement utilizing the theories and discussions gained through the classroom. This course will also explore connections between local, national, and international movement-building. In keeping with this course's commitment to real-life organizing examples and experience, course instructors and guest speakers are themselves experienced organizers and Executive Directors of social change organizations. This will be a small class with preference given to students with some experience in community, student/youth, and/or or labor organizing. Permission of instructors required: contact sara@daretowin.org or koheiishihara@gmail.com.

ETHN 1071. China Modern: An Introduction to the Literature of Twentieth-Century China (EAST 1070).

Interested students must register for EAST 1070.

ETHN 1090. Black Freedom Struggle Since 1945 (AFRI 1090).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1090.

ETHN 1100. Korean Culture and Film (EAST 1100).

Interested students must register for EAST 1100.

ETHN 1110. Voices Beneath the Veil (AFRI 1110).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1110.

ETHN 1111. African Issues in Anthropological Perspective (ANTH 1110).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1110.

ETHN 1123. Native North Americans in the Twenty-first Century (ANTH 1123).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1123.

ETHN 1133. Ethnonationalism- The Asian Arena (ANTH 1133).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1133.

ETHN 1170. African American Women's History (AFRI 1170).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1170.

ETHN 1200B. Contemporary Indigenous Education in North America.

In the past, formalized schooling in Indigenous communities was a tool of colonization and cultural genocide, forcing Native peoples to assimilate to western norms, values, and knowledge. However, contemporary Indigenous communities have managed to reclaim and reshape education for Native youth, utilizing innovative methods and technologies, as well as drawing upon generations of traditional and indigenous knowledges to create environments that promote academic achievement alongside culture. In this course we will focus on the ways Native communities are asserting their educational sovereignty, through culturally-relevant/responsive curriculums, language immersion schools, indigenous charter schools, traditional ecological and scientific knowledges, and more.

ETHN 1200C. Introduction to Asian American Studies.

This course provides an introduction to major issues and formative historical moments within the field of Asian American Studies. Course readings are highly interdisciplinary drawing from scholarship in history, literature, sociology and political science. This course spans multiple historical moments beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing through the present. Topics covered include Asian immigrant and refugee experiences, the movement for Asian American Studies, the construction of an Asian American pan-ethnic identity, community political mobilization and efforts to combat Islamaphobia and anti-Asian violence.

ETHN 1200D. Latinx Literature.

This course will introduce students to a broad array of Latinx literature. While there is a long tradition of Latinx literature in the United States, we will focus primarily on a period from 1985 to the present. Aimed to familiarize students with debates in the field, the readings will also include critical essays. Enrollment limited to 15.

ETHN 1200F. The Mexican Revolution (HIST 1333).

Interested students must register for HIST 1333.

ETHN 1200G. Introduction to Latina/o/x Cultural Studies.

This course serves as an introduction to the many discourses that structure and challengewhat it means to be Latina/o/x in the United States. Through historically situated critical analysis of Latina/o/x cultural production, including theoretical essays, literature, and film, we will meditate on the major issues that shape the Latina/o/x experience. We will study how Latinidad—the sense of being Latina/o/x—is constructed as an identity and how that identity varies across origin, place, and time. Major themes we will explore include include the legacies of U.S. colonialism; cultural nationalism, citizenship, immigration and exile; labor and class; race and ethnicity; and gender and sexuality.

ETHN 1200H. Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (SOC 1270).

Interested students must register for SOC 1270.

ETHN 1200I. History and Resistance in Representations of Native Peoples.

Throughout history, Native peoples have been portrayed through a stock set of stereotypes such as savage warriors, Indian princesses, or mystical shamans. These images surround us in advertising, news media, Hollywood, sports mascots, and Halloween costumes. This course will examine the foundations of these representations and their connections to colonization, with a focus on contemporary and ongoing examples, from Johnny Depp’s Tonto, Urban Outfitters’ “Navajo” products, to JK Rowlings’ “History of Magic in North America,” with a focus on the ways Native peoples are taking back and reshaping Native representations through activism, social media, art, design, film, and more.

ETHN 1200J. Asian Americans and the Struggle for Social Justice.

In 1868, in the largest strike that America had ever seen, ten thousand Chinese workers struck Central Pacific Railroad. One hundred and fifty years later, Asian Americans, now stereotyped as the “model minority,” are rendered invisible in current struggles for social justice. Yet as railroad workers, laundrymen, farmworkers, draft resistors, sewing women and nurses, Asian Americans have left us a rich legacy of legal, social and political activism. Particular attention will be paid to solidarities across racial, gender, and national boundaries.

ETHN 1200K. Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies.

This class examines and introduces the politics, cultures, histories, representations, and studies of the Native peoples of North America, with a primary focus on the United States, and helps students to develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills regarding Native American and Indigenous Studies. Although broad in cultural and geographic scope, the course does not attempt to summarize the diverse cultures of the hundreds of Native American tribes across the continent or Indigenous peoples globally. Instead, it focuses on several key issues in the lives of, and scholarship about, American Indian/Native American/First Nations/Indigenous peoples in the US (and beyond).

ETHN 1200L. Introduction to Latinx History.

The Latinx population in the United States continues to be mischaracterized in popular culture, political debates, and in the media. How can one discuss a group as diverse as Mexican Americans, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, and, most recently, Americans from Central America? Students will explore key moments of racial formation and state policies, social phenomena, and social revolutions that influence the daily life of Latinx communities in the US and in US territories. Students will analyze cultural texts and social policies and will develop a facility with key concepts in the field.

ETHN 1200M. Latinx in Graphic Detail.

This course centers graphic narratives in an exploration of Latinx becoming. With analytic attention to the interplay of narrative and illustration, assigned texts will provoke thematic conversations on gender and sexuality, migration and exile, racial hierarchies and national belonging, as well as feminist and queer utopian ideation. Formally, we will study comics, biography, memoirs, bildungsroman narratives, political projects, and consider the invocation of other artforms including punk music, site specific installation, performance, sculpture, and photography.

ETHN 1200N. Introduction to Asian American History.

This course provides an introduction to the histories of people of Asian descent in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. We will focus on the experiences of people with ancestries in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, considering commonalities and differences by nationality, class, gender, religion, place, and other factors. Topics include orientalism in U.S. culture, immigration and exclusion, Asian American civil rights struggles, and the “model minority.” We eschew any claim that an “authentic” or “typical” Asian American experience exists, instead working from the idea that Asian Americans and their lives are multifaceted, complex, and dynamic. Course materials will include primary and secondary sources and incorporate interdisciplinary scholarship and approaches while being anchored in history.

ETHN 1200X. Black Speculative Fiction:World-Making + Alternative Universes,Science Fiction + Fantasy(AFRI 1100X).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1100X.

ETHN 1200Y. The Art and Imagination of Josephine Baker (AFRI 1200X).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1200X.

ETHN 1201C. Imagined Networks, Glocal Connections (MCM 1201C).

Interested students must register for MCM 1201C.

ETHN 1201D. Blacks and Jews in American History and Culture (JUDS 1753).

Interested students must register for JUDS 1753.

ETHN 1201E. US Popular Culture (AMST 1611S).

Interested students must register for AMST 1611S.

ETHN 1210. Afro-Brazilians and the Brazilian Polity (AFRI 1210).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1210.

ETHN 1250. Twentieth-Century Western Theatre and Performance (TAPS 1250).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1250.

ETHN 1251. Violence and the Media (ANTH 1251).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1251.

ETHN 1255. Anthropology of Disasters (ANTH 1255).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1255.

ETHN 1260. The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (AFRI 1260).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1260.

ETHN 1270. Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (SOC 1270).

Interested students must register for SOC 1270.

ETHN 1271. Performances in the Asias (TAPS 1270).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1270.

ETHN 1310. African American Politics (POLS 1310).

Interested students must register for POLS 1310.

ETHN 1311. International Health: Anthropological Perspectives (ANTH 1310).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1310.

ETHN 1320. Anthropology and International Development: Ethnographic Perspectives on Poverty/Progress (ANTH1320).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1320.

ETHN 1360. Africana Studies: Knowledge, Texts and Methodology (AFRI 1360).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1360.

ETHN 1411. Nations within States (ANTH 1411).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1411.

ETHN 1421. Ethnic American Folklore: Continuity and the Creative Process (ANTH 1421).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1421.

ETHN 1430. The Psychology of Race, Class, and Gender (EDUC 1430).

Interested students must register for EDUC 1430.

ETHN 1440. Theorizing the Black Diaspora (AFRI 1440).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1440.

ETHN 1500. Mellon Mays Research Seminar.

This seminar is a required course for Mellon Mays Fellows with Junior standing. Topics will include research methods; health and wellness in the pursuit of scholarship; barriers to success; and cohort peer review. The outcome of this course will be a completed research plan, literature review and thesis proposal. Open to juniors who have already been accepted into the MMUF program. Instructor permission. Grade option S/NC.

ETHN 1600C. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Education: Education and the Portuguese-Speaking World (POBS 1600C).

Interested students must register for POBS 1600C.

ETHN 1611M. Trauma and the Shame of the Unspeakable: The Holocaust, Slavery, Childhood Sexual Abuse (AMST 1611M).

Interested students must register for AMST 1611M.

ETHN 1611W. Asian Americans and Popular Culture (AMST 1611W).

Interested students must register for AMST 1611W.

ETHN 1611Z. The Century of Immigration (AMST 1611Z).

Interested students must register for AMST 1611Z.

ETHN 1623. Archaeology of Death (ANTH 1623).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1623.

ETHN 1624. Indians, Colonists, and Africans in New England (ANTH 1624).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1624.

ETHN 1625. Questions of Remembrance: Archaeological Perspectives on Slavery in the New World (ANTH 1625).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1625.

ETHN 1630. Performativity and the Body: Staging Gender, Staging Race (TAPS 1630).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1630.

ETHN 1650B. Asian Americans and the Racial State.

This seminar is animated by the resurgence of anti-Asian hatred in American society. First, we look at the long history of racial violence against Asians in America. Second, we ask how Asians have come to be racialized as the permanent alien in American society and the implications of that formation. Second, we ask how Asians in America have organized their resistances to this racialization. This is a collaborative project based course that combines discussions of readings, lectures and videos with workshops that will focus on building a publicly facing project.

ETHN 1650C. Fictions of Queer Race.

What fictions do we tell ourselves about sexuality and race? Through literature and film, this course introduces students to queer of color critique, a mode of queer theory emphasizing diverse experiences, geographies, and epistemologies that also foregrounds the intersection of sexual and racial constructs. The course highlights important questions about the representational politics and social dynamics of the intersection of sexuality, gender, race, and nationality. What is “queer” art? How can we queer ethnic literature? What is a queer diaspora? How should we articulate coalition building?

ETHN 1650D. Research and Transnational Communities: Qualitative Fieldwork Methods (AMST 1500A).

Interested students must register for AMST 1500A.

ETHN 1650F. Mapping Violence.

Mapping Violence is a research project that aims to expose interconnected histories of violence, the legacies of colonization, slavery, and genocide that intersect in Texas in the early twentieth century. Although often segregated in academic studies, these histories coalesced geographically and temporally. Students in this course will learn interdisciplinary methods combining ethnic studies, history, public humanities and the digital humanities to rethink the limits of archival research, historical narrative, and methods for presenting findings to public audiences. This research intensive seminar will allow students to develop historical research skills and to contribute original research to the Mapping Violence project.

ETHN 1670. Latino/a Theatre and Performance (TAPS 1670).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1670.

ETHN 1700. The Asian American Experience in Higher Education (EDUC 1700).

Interested students must register for EDUC 1700.

ETHN 1710I. Harlem Renaissance: The Politics of Culture (ENGL 1710I).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1710I.

ETHN 1710J. African Literature in Globalization Time (ENGL 1710J).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1710J.

ETHN 1710M. Nationalizing Narratives: Race, Nationalism, and the 20th-C. American Novel (ENGL 1710M).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1710M.

ETHN 1750A. Immigrant Social Movements: Bridging Theory and Practice.

What is the impact of legal status on the potential for undocumented individuals' participation in a social movement? Relatedly, how is the heterogeneity of movement participants represented in campaigns and political protest? In this course we will examine the undocumented immigrant movement in the United States today through readings, films and guest lectures from local immigrant rights activists. As part of the course students will be partnered with local community based organizations where they will complete a semester-long internship.

ETHN 1750B. Treaty Rights and Food Fights: Eating Local in Indian Country.

In many Native American communities the push to "eat local" is often based on reviving a traditional food culture as well as a way of promoting better health. This class explores the disparate health conditions faced by Native communities, and the efforts by many groups to address these health problems through increasing community access to traditional foods, whether by gardening projects or a revival of hunting and fishing traditions. We will examine the ways in which Native food movements have converged and diverged from general American local food movements, and the struggles they often face in reviving treaty-guaranteed food ways.

ETHN 1750D. Transpacific Asian American Studies.

This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that is also open to American Studies and other graduate students for graduate credit. It is designed to help us think about the Pacific as a historical space where the Asian American formation is constructed, as goods, people and ideas circulate across the Pacific. We will explore ways which these historical circuits and exchanges have shaped questions of identity and belonging, taking China and the Americas as our principal points of connection. We will read across a number of fields, including: Asian Studies, American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

ETHN 1750E. Transpacific Popular Culture.

In this seminar we will look at the relationship between American wars of empire, urban uprising, martial arts, and hip hop to illuminate the deep circuits of race, migration, labor and popular culture across the Pacific.

ETHN 1750G. Introduction to Ethnomusicology (MUSC 1900).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1900.

ETHN 1750H. Water is Life/New currents in the Study of Land, Water, and Indigeneity.

In this course, we’ll think conceptually about water. We’ll look to work in Native and Indigenous Studies, Pacific Studies, and American Studies to see how reframing popular understandings of water and space can radically alter our engagement with questions of geography, imperialism, colonialism, and globalization. For instance, how is our understanding of settler colonialism limited through a land-focused approach? How might our vision of the global world change when we center island nations? Using literary, theoretical, and historical texts we’ll use a focus on water to upend common approaches to space and see what emerges. Registration permission granted based on questionnaire distributed at first class meeting.

ETHN 1750I. Indigeneity, Sustainability and Resistance in Food Politics.

This course explores Western and Indigenous understandings of food security/sovereignty, with particular attention to the politics of food and sustainability. In this course, we will study food security from its origins, policy making, to current debates about alternative Indigenous food systems, drawing on many examples and using New Zealand, Peru, and the U.S.A as case studies. The course intends to ground discussion about the contemporary context of food security, including debates over the existing food regimes (neoliberal and capitalism), agrarian/food sovereignty movements, and implications of the right to food from both human and cultural right perspectives.

ETHN 1750J. American Roots Music (MUSC 1932).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1932.

ETHN 1750K. U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (INTL 1803S).

Interested students must register for INTL 1803S.

ETHN 1750L. Latina Feminisms.

This course will serve as a focused and rigorous exploration of Latina feminist cultural production. Our analysis driven seminar discussions will include critical consideration of novels, short stories, film, and performance and visual art largely by an about Latina women. Their work will address topics that include: gendered expectations, non-normative sexuality, race hierarchies, labor, reproductive justice, and gendered violence. Together we will query how cultural objects come to function as salient social and political texts in order to ascertain the contributions and challenges that Latina feminists bring to dominant discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism, among others.

ETHN 1750M. Extravagant Texts: Reading the World Through Asian American Literature.

In this course we study a body of writings that self-consciously move beyond the topics and genres with which Asian American literature has traditionally been associated—that are, in Maxine Hong’s Kingston’s formulation, “extravagant.” We explore works that adopt a transnational or diasporic perspective and that are written in such genres as magical realism, speculative fiction, experimental poetry, and plays. In addition to more conventional concerns like racism or immigration, these works also address such issues as empire, war, environmentalism mixed-race identity, adoption, and sexuality.

ETHN 1750N. Musical Youth Cultures (MUSC 1925).

Interested students must register for MUSC 1925.

ETHN 1750P. Art for an Undivided Earth / Transnational Approaches to Indigenous Art and Activism(ENGL 1711J).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711J.

ETHN 1750Q. The African Atlantic Diaspora: Race, Memory, Identity, and Belonging.

This course will examine conceptual frameworks on notions of ‘Blackness’ across the African Atlantic Diaspora. We will examine the ways in which blackness is viewed individually and collectively by groups. In the beginning of the course students will read academic texts, view documentaries and engage in discussions that focus on concepts of race, memory, identity formation and belonging. The course consists of a travel component to Ghana in West Africa. In Ghana students will explore parts of the history that has shaped the present day diasporan community through a series of faculty led workshops, tours and meetings with local organizations.

ETHN 1750R. Latina/o Cultural Theory (AMST 1900I).

Interested students must register for AMST 1900I.

ETHN 1750S. Extravagant Texts: Reading the World Through Asian American Literature.

In this course we study a body of writings that self-consciously move beyond the topics and genres with which Asian American literature has traditionally been associated—that are, in Maxine Hong’s Kingston’s formulation, “extravagant.” We explore works that adopt a transnational or diasporic perspective and that are written in such genres as magical realism, speculative fiction, and poetry. In addition to more conventional concerns like racism or immigration, these works also address such issues as empire, war, mixed-race identity, environmentalism, adoption, and sexuality.

ETHN 1750T. U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (INTL 1803S).

Interested students must register for INTL 1803S.

ETHN 1750U. The U.S.-Mexico Border and Borderlands: Experiential Learning on the Ground and in the Field.

In an intensive three week study, in the classroom and most of all, on the ground and in the field, we will attempt to achieve a real and realistic understanding of what exactly is the U.S.-Mexico border and the regions along the border on both sides, the borderlands, stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Focus on Mexicans and Mexican descendants on the border, but also on original native peoples and immigrants from elsewhere (Chinese, Haitians, Iraqis). Preference to upperclass students with no prior encounter with the border. Knowledge of Spanish is desirable but not required. Students in this intensive wintersession course will have pre-course assignments in Dec. and must arrive on campus no later than 1/2 at noon, as the course will begin with dinner on 1/2 and class will begin at 9am on 1/3. Students will leave from Pvd to San Diego on 1/6, and depart late on the 16th. Class will be held in Pvd from noon 1/17 to 5pm on 1/18.

ETHN 1750V. Ethnic Studies & Education (EDUC 1520).

Interested students must register for EDUC 1520.

ETHN 1750W. The Korean War in Color (ENGL 1761V).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761V.

ETHN 1750X. Native American Language Loss, Revitalization, and Resiliency.

This class examines the issues of Native languages, primarily in the United States. The course will study the variety of languages in North America, the factors that have negatively affected the strength and use of native languages in many tribes, the impact of such loss on communities, and the ways in which those communities have worked hard to maintain, revitalize, or reclaim their languages.

ETHN 1750Z. Whites, White Jews and Us: Radical Black, Arab & Jewish Thinkers (COLT 1610W).

Interested students must register for COLT 1610W.

ETHN 1751A. Indigenous Laws, Environmental Racism, and LandBack.

This class is an introductory course about the laws that affect Indigenous Peoples (federal, state, tribal, traditional, and international). It will center around historic and current cases involving the extension of jurisdiction into Indigenous lands, property, and ways of life, and further discuss the normalization of environmental racism and environmental injustice against Indigenous Peoples. The class will be in regular communication with Indigenous Peoples around the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand about Indigenous Movements to protect sacred lands, obtain #LandBack, and assert cultural, individual, and civil rights. DIAP

ETHN 1751B. Feeling Minor: Race, Affect, and Asian America.

How have writers and theorists conceptualized the affective structures of race that have shaped Asian Americans? How do literary explorations of such concerns negotiate the prevailing black-white binary and influential theorizations of blackness and brownness in charting the contours of Asian American psychic life. What modalities of psychoanalysis and affect theory offer the most generative resources for these inquiries. We address these and other related questions by looking at writings by Sara Ahmed, Anne Cheng, Franz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Cathy Park Hong, Chang-rae Lee, Ling Ma, José Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, and Ocean Vuong among others.

ETHN 1751C. Sexy Good Medicine: Sex, Gender, and Indigeneity in (the) America(s).

In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the academic field of Indigenous Gender and Sexuality Studies. While in Western societies gender and sexuality have traditionally been employed as tools of population control—becoming associated with ideas like sin, shame, and the private—in this course we will approach them as good medicine. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, we will explore the healing power of gender and sexual diversity. All throughout the course, we will also learn about the fight of Indigenous peoples to reclaim sovereignty over their own bodies. In this sense, we will approach Indigenous gender and sexuality as active tools for decolonization. While the course’s primary geographic focus is Anglo-North America—with a specific emphasis in the United States—it aims to be hemispheric (and global) in its approach.

ETHN 1751D. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Hispanophone Caribbean Literature (HISP 1331M).

Interested students must register for HISP 1331M.

ETHN 1751E. Health Inequality in Historical Perspective (AFRI 1920).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1920.

ETHN 1751F. Race in U.S. Cities and Suburbs.

This undergraduate seminar explores U.S. urban and suburban histories during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, through the concerns of race and ethnicity. We seek to understand how dilemmas over and struggles for belonging and equality in the United States have played out in and over urban and suburban spaces. We will pay particular attention to the histories of segregation, housing discrimination, urban unrest, suburban integration, the rise of “ethnoburbs,” and gentrification. Readings represent foundational texts and new directions in scholarship and provide in-depth examinations of particular urban and suburban communities. Topics include the simultaneous erasure and appropriation of Indigenous peoples in the development of Pacific Northwest cities; the Asian American “model minority” and integration of all-white suburbs; minority grassroots activism and resistance against redevelopment; racism and neoliberal urban governance in the 21st century. RPP

ETHN 1751G. James Baldwin (ENGL 1711S).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711S.

ETHN 1751H. Anthropology of Place (ANTH 1910B).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1910B.

ETHN 1760P. "Extravagant" Texts: Experiments in Asian American Writing (ENGL 1760P).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1760P.

ETHN 1761F. Toni Morrison (ENGL 1761F).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761F.

ETHN 1761V. The Korean War in Color (ENGL 1761V).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761V.

ETHN 1761W. Black Freedom Struggle Since 1945 (AFRI 1090).

Interested students must register for AFRI 1090.

ETHN 1800. Honors Seminar (AMST 1800).

Interested students must register for AMST 1800.

ETHN 1805. First Nations: the People and Cultures of Native North America to 1800 (HIST 1805).

Interested students must register for HIST 1805.

ETHN 1806. First Nations: The People and Cultures of Native North America to 1800 (HIST 1512)..

Interested students must register for HIST 1512.

ETHN 1810. Language and Power (ANTH 1810).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1810.

ETHN 1810G. Fiction and History (COLT 1810G).

Interested students must register for COLT 1810G.

ETHN 1811D. Reading Revolution, Representations of Cuba, 1959-The Present (COLT 1811D).

Interested students must register for COLT 1811D.

ETHN 1812V. War, Anti-War, Postwar: Culture and Contestation in the Americas (COLT 1812V).

Interested students must register for COLT 1812V.

ETHN 1870A. Ethnic Los Angeles.

This course will focus on the historical and contemporary struggles of people of color in Los Angeles, California, throughout the twentieth century. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, examining films, literature, and history pertaining to the city. There are no prerequisites. Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1870B. Latino/a Communities Seminar.

This seminar's first goal is to introduce students to the social and economic issues that affect contemporary Latino communities. The second goal is to train the students in empirical fieldwork research methods in Ethnic Studies. The seminar searches for ways to link the academy and communities through empirical research that addresses the needs and demands of Latino/a urban communities.

ETHN 1870C. Native North Americans in the Media: Representations and Self Representations in Film.

How have Native North American peoples been represented and self-represented in film from the early 1900s to today? Filmmaking is employed to explore the construction and stereotyping of Indigenous peoples of North America in American popular culture, as well as the recent (re)construction of Native identities by American Indian peoples. Specific topics including identity, race, gender, violence, religion and spirituality, cultural appropriation, and Native humor frame the analysis and comparison of American popular and Native representations of Native Americans. The course centers on the screening and discussion of selected movies, complemented by academic and non-academic literature in the form of books, articles, reviews, and other media materials. Completion of introductory courses on Native American peoples and cultures is strongly recommended.

ETHN 1870D. Chicana/o Fiction.

This course is a survey of Chicana/o fiction from the 1950s to the present. We will be reading novels as well as stories, with the occasional inclusion of poetry. Our literary texts will be supplemented with secondary sources--history, literary criticism, cultural studies, and the like. The course will also ask students to consider the relationship between Chicana/o literature and other writing in the Americas.

ETHN 1870E. Queer Latina/o Literature and Theory.

Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1870F. Eating Cultures.

Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1870G. Reading Race: Advanced Seminar in Critical Race Theory.

Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1890A. Seminar on Latino Politics in the United States.

Advanced seminar on the politics of Latino communities in the United States.Considers the history of Latino politics; participation, partisanship and office-holding; immigration and citizenship; social movements; public policy; gender and race; and pan-ethnic identity. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Includes optional community research project. Some familiarity with Latino studies, U.S. politics, Latin American politics, or ethnic studies would be helpful.

ETHN 1890B. Native American and European Contact in Early North America, ca. 1600-1750.

This course will consider contact between Native Americans and Europeans in the early Americas with particular attention to interactions in the greater New England area. Readings stress the diversity of Native lifeways and how contact changed both Natives and Europeans. An equally important theme is to examine the ways in which the history of Native peoples has often been ignored, changed, appropriated, and distorted, as well as reclaimed and re-evaluated over time. Therefore, while the focus is on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the class will also consider how the histories of that time have been told and retold in later eras, including our own. We will also pay attention to the way in which different historians undertake the study of the past. This seminar has no prerequisites, but please be advised that the workload is substantial. If the class is oversubscribed, preference will be given to Ethnic Studies concentrators.

ETHN 1890C. Business, Culture, and Globalization: An Ethnographic Perspective.

The exchange of goods, resources, or commodities is commonly understood as business transactions. Business transactions have always been global, but in the new information age, it seems that many can take part in this exchange system. What is termed as "globalization" has become increasingly popular, yet efforts to clearly define what the term actually means continue to change. This course aims at complicating, rather than simplifying, the term and to understand how business transactions unfold in a "global" economy.

ETHN 1890D. Indigenous Music of the Americas.

Introduces students to music of indigenous communities in North, Central, and South America, with particular attention to the relation between performance, cultural identity, and social change. We will focus especially on indigenous societies in the Andes, Brazil, and the United States and Canada. The course is designed to explore common links between indigenous history, worldview, and performance throughout the hemisphere, while simultaneously illuminating how distinct experiences of colonization and recovery have fostered unique musical practices.

ETHN 1890E. Johnny, Are You Queer: Narratives of Race and Sexuality.

This course is intended as a wide-ranging romp through the fields of queer theory and narratives of race and sexuality. It will move from the 1980s through the present looking at representations of queerness and race in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, music, etc. We will investigate the convergences and divergences in the discourses of race and sexuality.

ETHN 1890F. Bad Boys and Bad Girls in Asian American Literature and Culture.

From the angry Asian men of the "Aiiieeeee!" anthologies to Margaret Cho's raucous comedy acts, bad boys and bad girls in Asian American literature and culture have been interpreted as helping to shatter the model minority stereotype. This course examines bad subjects, especially in their relations to popular culture, gender, and sexuality. We will investigate what puts the "bad" in bad boys and bad girls, how ideas of "bad" change, and what the bad subject does for readers and writers. Readings and viewings to include Frank Chin, John Okada, Gish Jen, Margaret Cho, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Better Luck Tomorrow. Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1890G. Native Americans in the Media: Representation and Self-Representation on Film.

How have Native North American peoples been represented and self-represented in film? Specific topics include identity, race, gender, violence, religion and spirituality, cultural appropriation, and Native humor frame the analysis and comparison of American popular and Native representations of Native Americans. The course centers on screening and discussing selected movies, complemented by academic and non-academic literature such as books, articles, and reviews. Completion of introductory courses on Native American cultures is recommended, but not necessary. All students are welcome. Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1890J. Native American Environmental Health Movements.

American Indian reservations are home to countless sources of environmental contamination, which impact residents' health and ability to maintain cultural practices. In response to this assault, and the numerous scientific studies that often follow, Native communities are taking charge of the research process, and partnering with scientists to explore health affects and remediation possibilities. Through case studies, we will examine how Native communities are pushing to "indigenize" the research process. This class is broadly interdisciplinary, and will be useful for students interested in contemporary issues in Native American communities, and students intending to conduct scientific research in minority communities. Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1890K. Engendering Empire.

This class studies the ways in which empire is a gendered construct. We will also keep in mind that gender never exists in isolation, but on the contrary is always on the crossroads with race, class, and ethnicity. How have brown and black women's bodies borne the mark of empire? This class will closely examine the relationship between empire and gender, specifically this class will discuss this relationship as it has developed in the Americas.

ETHN 1890L. (De)Colonizing Women: Writing the Third Space.

As women of color, we are in the intersections of race, gender, and class. A feminist movement that does not incorporate analyses of race and class cannot meet our needs. A civil rights movement that does not address gender cannot meet our needs; therefore, we create our own space -- a third space. This course reads the literature, poetry, film and theory of third space feminism in the United States. Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1890N. Thawing the "Frozen Indian"; American Indian Museum Representation.

This course examines the role of museums as sites where issues of identity, memory, place, and power intersect. We will review the histories, theories and paradigms that have influenced collecting processes and exhibitions, focusing on representations of Native American Indian peoples. We will explore the ways in which Native people have spoken out against conventional museum practice and have sought to reshape it as a means of decolonizing their history, as well as utilizing museums to their benefit to both preserve and promote Native art and culture. How can non-Native scholars and museum professionals contribute to this effort? Enrollment limited to 15.

ETHN 1890P. Introduction to Native American Literature.

This survey course introduces several prominent genres of Native American literary production, including oral traditions, nonfiction essay, novel, short story, and stand-up comedy/performance. Selections are drawn primarily from Native American/Aboriginal writers and performers in the United States and Canada from the nineteenth century to present, including indigenous women from Pacific Islander communities. In addition to genre considerations, particular attention will be given to the social, cultural, and political contexts in which these works were produced.

ETHN 1890Q. The Hispanic Caribbean and its Diasporas.

The purpose of this course is to examine the history and cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean. An enduring feature of the region as a whole is its cultural diversity and vitality. Perhaps to a degree unsurpassed among world regions, the Caribbean is a set of immigrant societies, shaped by successive waves of European, Africa and Asian settlers. Through art, music, and literature Caribbean people have not just borrowed from but added to Western civilization and the pan-African heritage. Increasingly, Hispanic Caribbean people are making their voices heard as immigrants in the U.S. and the former colonial metropoles of Europe.

ETHN 1890S. Youth, Art, Engagement and Social Justice.

This course is designed for students concerned with the challenges, theoretical models, and best practices of academic research and advocacy relationships. The goals of this course are to navigate the challenges of bridging the gap between the academy, community-based organizations, and social justice research and to accrue experience forging these partnerships. This course has a practice component where students develop a project with a non-profit organization and a portion of each course session is devoted to discussion about progress and challenges of each students project.

ETHN 1890T. Writing Latinx Lives: The Memoir.

Writing Latinx Lives examines the boom over the last couple decades in Latinx memoirs. The course is interested in the rigorous analysis of life writing. What gets written? Who is writing it? What social, political, cultural trends are the writers in dialogue with? And so forth. We will read these memoirs along with critical analyses of the genre. I don't want us, that is, to simply get lost in the stories these memoirs tell, but rather I want us to understand how those stories work and why they matter.

ETHN 1890W. Wise Latinas: Women, Gender, and Biography in Latinx History (HIST 1979E).

Interested students must register for HIST 1979E.

ETHN 1891A. Introduction to Native and Indigenous Studies.

This course explores international Indigenous perspectives, experiences and historical impacts of Indigenous peoples around the world in a contemporary global environment. We will examine the complex intercultural dynamics of colonial and post-colonial societies, placing the experience of Native peoples of North America in the larger context of other Indigenous peoples living in settler colonial societies, for example, Maori of Aotearoa – NewZealand and Quechua people of Peru. We will examine Indigenous peoples’ connections with territories, resources, and efforts to protect their knowledge systems and sovereignty. Also, through a comparative approach, we will study Indigenous and Western research paradigms.

ETHN 1892. Race, Class and Gender in Latino Communities.

Examines the roles of racial, class, and gender identities, in the emergence and consolidation of Latino political power in the United States. We look at Latino racial attitudes and racial hierarchies, as "inherited" from Latin American social systems, and as developed here in the U.S. We explore class politics as they shape Latino social movements, economic conditions, and communities, and we analyze the impact of Latino immigration and union membership on organized labor. We consider gender roles and patriarchy in Latino families, and the roles of intersectionality and feminism in Latino politics. Enrollment limited to 40.

ETHN 1900A. Alien Nation: US Immigration in Comparative Perspectives.

Latina/o immigration to the United States has reshaped the meaning of "America" over the last hundred years. We will study Latina/os in comparison to other immigrants and examine how US immigration policy has created a nation partly composed of "alien" residents--some citizens, others not--who have constructed alternative notions of belonging.

ETHN 1900B. Community, Language and Literacy: A Practicum.

This course examines adult language and literacy learning and approaches to teaching in community settings. It is designed to support students’ work teaching language and literacy to immigrant adults. Working with the Swearer Center and its community partners students will explore theories informing educational practice, and will gain skills and practice in providing language and literacy instruction to adult learners in the community. This practicum specifically addresses issues of language acquisition, acculturation, and broader contexts framing adult education. Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1900C. Contemporary Latino/a Education in the United States.

Latino/as are now the second largest group of students in United States schools and, in aggregate, among the most troubled as measured by drop-out rates and grade-level retentions. Yet Latino/a students also perform well in some settings. This course reviews contemporary Latino/a education, focusing on the multiple educational contexts Latino/as encounter, including how non-Latino/a educators regard Latino/a students.

ETHN 1900D. Latino Communities Seminar.

Enrollment limited to: 20.

ETHN 1900E. Senior Seminar in Ethnic Studies.

No description available.

ETHN 1900F. Theory, Creativity, Activism.

This class will bring together much of the literature and discussions conducted throughout your education as an Ethnic Studies major and prepare you for the application of Ethnic Studies in your post-graduate life. I have chosen to emphasize three themes that have been dominant in your Ethnic Studies curriculum: Theory, Creativity, and Activism. We will begin by critically exploring the democratic principles and imperial practices that underlie the "American system" and the political formation of The Third World. Our discussions and readings will include an examination of the contributions and limitations of multiculturalism, postmodernism, anti-colonialism and feminism, and the relevance of (ethnic) "experience" in interpreting and addressing the problems we face as a planetary civil society. The majority of the class will be dedicated to the praxis of Ethnic Studies as a creative and political force within our world today. We will read fiction and non-fiction and view films that articulate the complexities of life in North America and beyond.

ETHN 1900G. Race and Immigration in the Americas.

Enrollment limited to: 20.

ETHN 1900H. What is Ethnic Studies?.

No description available. Enrollment limited to 20 seniors and graduate students.

ETHN 1900I. To Be Determined.

Enrollment limited to 20.

ETHN 1901. American Empire Since 1890 (HIST 1900).

Interested students must register for HIST 1900.

ETHN 1903G. Oral History and Community Memory (AMST 1903G).

Interested students must register for AMST 1903G.

ETHN 1903P. Please, Please Me (AMST 1903P).

Interested students must register for AMST 1903P.

ETHN 1903V. Asian and Latino Immigration (AMST 1903V).

Interested students must register for AMST 1903V.

ETHN 1903X. Style and the Man: Masculinity in Fashion and U.S. History (AMST 1903X).

Interested students must register for AMST 1903X.

ETHN 1904J. The Asian American Movement: Communities, Politics and Culture (AMST 1904J).

Interested students must register for AMST 1904J.

ETHN 1910. Independent Study.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

ETHN 1910D. Faces of Culture (ANTH 1910D).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1910D.

ETHN 1920. Senior Thesis.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

ETHN 1940. Ethnographic Research Methods (ANTH 1940).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1940.

ETHN 1950G. Contemporary Chinese Culture and Media (EAST 1950G).

Interested students must register for EAST 1950G.

ETHN 1960D. Feminist Theory/Feminist Activism (GNSS 1960D).

Interested students must register for GNSS 1960D.

ETHN 1981C. Minority News: Radical Reporting and Reading (HMAN 1970L).

Interested students must register for HMAN 1970L.

ETHN 2070. Music and Identity (MUSC 2070).

Interested students must register for MUSC 2070.

ETHN 2220. Urban Politics (POLS 2220).

Interested students must register for POLS 2220.

ETHN 2340. Human Development and Urban Education (EDUC 2340).

Interested students must register for EDUC 2340.

ETHN 2970C. Rethinking the Civil Rights Movement (HIST 2970C).

Interested students must register for HIST 2970C.

NAIS 0100. Learning our Native Languages.

The purpose of this course is to support learning Indigenous languages. Course content is differentiated to each student according to their needs, with guiding questions: How will you learn your language? What aspects of your language (reading, writing, listening, speaking, cultural context) will you focus on, and why? What resources will be most helpful and what challenges of learning your language exist? How will they benefit your academic study and professional trajectory?
The scholarly context of this course emerges from a need to address the legacies of destruction to Indigenous peoples. Given the history of cultural and linguistic genocide, Native voices and ways of knowing will be centered, using community resources, oral histories, and Native scholars as a support network for study. Study is also guided by principles such as relationships to heritage languages, Indigenous epistemologies, land relations, music, and gender.

NAIS 1000A. Learning our Native Languages: Addressing Legacies of Destruction.

The purpose of this course is to support learning Indigenous languages. Course content is differentiated to each student according to their needs, with guiding questions: How will you learn your language? What aspects of your language (reading, writing, listening, speaking, cultural context) will you focus on, and why? What resources will be most helpful and what challenges of learning your language exist? How will they benefit your academic study and professional trajectory? The scholarly context of this course emerges from a need to address the legacies of destruction to Indigenous peoples. Given the history of cultural and linguistic genocide, Native voices and ways of knowing will be centered, using community resources, oral histories, and Native scholars as a support network for study, guided by principles such as relationships to heritage languages, Indigenous epistemologies, land relations, music, and gender.

NAIS 1100. Federal Indian Law: Native Nations, Resistance, and Indigenous Rights.

This class is an introductory course to Federal Indian Law and the history of Nations Nations and their advocacy for Indigenous Rights. It will provide a multi-century overview of cases brought by Native Nations and Indigenous people in federal courts, including the history that led to these cases. It will center around specific time periods and topics of Indigenous resistance and federal policies that shape the landscape of federal laws and legal precedent that affect Nations Nations and their Indigenous people today. The class will hear from a variety of speakers in federal Indian law involved in Supreme Court cases over the past 40 years.

NAIS 1201. Native American Languages.

This course surveys Native American and Indigenous languages in the western hemisphere and the communities that speak them, focusing on a representative sample for closer study. The role of language in maintaining cultural identity is examined, and prospects for the future of Native American languages are assessed.

NAIS 1202. Language, Race, and Indigeneity.

This course will survey historical and contemporary theories of language, race and nation throughout the expansion of western civilization from the ancient Mediterranean to the present. Students will examine how science, religion, and law have contributed to contemporary understandings of race and indigeneity. Special attention will be given to the establishment and reproduction of overarching categories such as “Indian” and “Indigenous”. Students will also compare national and racial contexts, including their own, to better understand the processes of social movements where language serves as a fundamental category for group work.

NAIS 1203. Community-centered Language Documentation.

Have you ever run to a dictionary to “prove” something is a word and found yourself surprised it’s not there? Or maybe you’ve seen the incredible work of the Wampanoak tribe on reawakening and teaching their language? In this class we will talk about the multi-disciplinary field of language documentation and the why, how, and who of how language documentation material is made and shared. You will be encouraged to connect what you learn back to your own concentrations and experiences and to critically engage with the impacts of how this information is shared on perceptions of knowledge and power.

NAIS 1204. Indigenous Women and the Power of Rematriation.

This class is a survey course on Indigenous women and the power of rematriation. It will provide an intergenerational view of Indigenous women and the influences they have in their communities, within Indigenous movements, and among each other in a variety of contexts, including leadership, seed sovereignty, repatriation, sacred places protection, Indigenous knowledge movements, community work, language, and teaching the next generation. Each class is specifically designed to centralize the interconnectedness and relationships of Indigenous women among their Indigenous nations and communities, and the intergenerational nature of their life works. The class will hear from a variety of speakers who will offer important insight into rematriation and their struggles against colonialism, the commodification of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands, and the diminishment of Indigenous rights, that have lead to the movements they established.

NAIS 1205. Indigenous Human Rights.

This course focuses upon Indigenous human rights and will investigate the frameworks established by Indigenous nations and Indigenous peoples, countries (nation-states), and the United Nations through which Indigenous peoples may advocate. Students will learn about individual and collective human rights, Indigenous intellectual property rights, and formulating statements/interventions centered around the sovereignty of Native nations and issues facing Indigenous communities. Throughout the course, students will hear from speakers who have advocated around the world for the human rights of Indigenous peoples. Students will also have the opportunity to learn about the structure of the United Nations, the UN process of advocacy, and how to research and create documentation at the UN. This course will invite local tribal communities in for intergenerational learning opportunities and community-based learning.

NAIS 1206. Research Design & Methodologies.

This course introduces students to theory and concepts in research design and methodology with special attention to participatory action research and Indigenous research methods. Students will be prepared to articulate a theoretical justification for the use of participatory action research and Indigenous research methods. By the end of the semester students will apply participatory action research and/or Indigenous research methods in their own projects.

NAIS XLIST. Courses of Interest to Concentrators in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

PHUM 1080. The Entrepreneurial Process (ENGN 1010).

Interested students must register for ENGN 1010.

PHUM 1140. Writing for Activists.

Interested students must register for ENGL 1140E.

PHUM 1220. Decolonizing Classical Antiquity: Wht Nationalism, Colonialism, Ancient Material Heritage (MGRK1220).

Interested students must register for MGRK 1220.

PHUM 1240. Urban Life: Anthropology in and of the City (ANTH 1236).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1236.

PHUM 1250. The Visual in Anthropology: Documentary Films and Society (ANTH 1253).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1253.

PHUM 1307. Politics and Spectacle in the Arts of Ancient Rome (HIAA 1307).

Interested students must register for HIAA 1307.

PHUM 1340. Principles and Methods of Geographic Information Systems (SOC 1340).

Interested students must register for SOC 1340.

PHUM 1510. Classical Art from Ruins to RISD: Ancient Objects/Modern Issues (ARCH 1500).

Interested students must register for ARCH 1500.

PHUM 1620. Archaeology of Settler Colonialism (ANTH 1622).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1622.

PHUM 1653. Material Culture Practicum (ANTH 1621).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1621.

PHUM 1805. Making the Invisible Visible: Global Urban Typologies in the 20th and 21st Century.

This seminar presents tools for urban analysis and introduces the students to the process of knowledge distribution via book publishing today. Urban typologies as a tool to analyze, clarify, compare and provide solutions have become more important than ever. The urbanization process of the industrial era has set into motion a dramatic change of human life on planet earth. On the edge of the 20th to the 21st century, agglomerations have evolved into mega cities, whose number of inhabitants equals that of states elsewhere. By 2050, major cities in sub-Saharan Africa will have doubled the number of their citizens. Which analytical and prognostic tools will help to provide a sustainable and prosperous future for them? The course will introduce students to the process of researching, analyzing, selecting, writing about global urban environments, and reviewing academic books.

PHUM 1815. Social Entrepreneurship (IAPA 1803E).

Interested students must register for IAPA1803E.

PHUM 1870. Downtown Development (URBN 1870D).

Interested students must register for URBN 1870D.

PHUM 1880. Exhibition as Medium (HIAA 1888).

Interested students must register for HIAA 1888.

PHUM 1901. Anthropology in/of the Museum (ANTH 1901).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1901.

PHUM 1903. Shrine, House or Home: Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm.

This seminar will examine historic house museums within the context of American culture from the founding of Mount Vernon in 1853 to their present decline in popularity and relevance. Utilizing sources from a variety of disciplines including literature, women's and family history, and museum and preservation theory and practice, students will re-examine the prevailing historic house museum paradigm and develop interpretation plans for house museums in the Providence area.

PHUM 1904. Power + Water: Material Culture and its Environmental Impact.

Students explore material culture, its impact upon the environment in the US prior to Industrial Revolution and examine the relationship of this earlier production to current issues of pollution and climate change. In the 18-19th centuries, houses, furniture, whale products were staples of American craft and ingenuity. This material culture tells the story of how gathering raw materials and converting them into usable products came at a severe cost to watersheds, forests, species, humans. These examples show that the seemingly insatiable human urge to control/transform resources into items for consumption leads to serious consequences for the earth’s climate and inhabitants.

PHUM 1912. Collections & Colonialism (AMST 1902K).

Interested students must register for AMST 1902K.

PHUM 1923. Anthropology of Place (ANTH 1910B).

Interested students must register for ANTH 1910B.

PHUM 1931. The Archaeology of College Hill (ARCH 1900).

Interested students must register for ARCH 1900.

PHUM 2004. Critical Approaches to Preservation and Cultural Heritage.

This course examines the modern fields of preservation and cultural heritage from a historical and critical point of view to better understand their formation, evolution, current condition and the issues integral to their future. We explore such thorny topics as the “invention” of tradition and the relationship between heritage programs and nationalism, the evolution of the global cultural heritage industry, the story of preservation institutions in the United States and abroad, the rise of cultural heritage crimes in conflict zones, public history and memorials at “sites of conscience,” and the emergence of digital preservation and “experimental preservation.”

PHUM 2010. Introduction to Public Humanities.

This class, a foundational course for the MA in Public Humanities with preference given to graduate students enrolled in MA in Public Humanities, will address the theoretical bases of the public humanities, including topics of history and memory, museums and memorials, the roles of expertise and experience, community cultural development, and material culture. Enrollment limited to 20 graduate students.

PHUM 2011. Curatorial Practice and Change.

This course engages in theoretical and practical aspects of engaging in public histories and curating exhibitions. We will explore various methodologies for creating exhibitions and engage in institutional critique. We will also look at community practice, and museum and historical projects in public contexts. Through readings, discussion, assignments, museum trips, public history tours, and guest lectures, we will critically analyze the role of curators and curatorial practice.

PHUM 2013. Management of Cultural Institutions.

This course explores public humanities institutions as an organizational system interacting with broader community systems. Students gain an understanding of the managerial, governance and financial structures of public humanities organizations and how those structures relate to mission, programming and audience. The course is designed to help those who work on the program side of public humanities and cultural non-profits(as educators, librarians, curators, interpreters, exhibit designers, public programming coordinators, and/or grant makers) engage more strategically with planning, organizational behavior, revenue generation, finance, marketing, and governance.

PHUM 2014. Museum Interpretation Practices.

This course examines current interpretive practices and offers students the opportunity to participate in creating gallery interpretation for the museum context. Questions of material and form; models of attention and perception, the relationship between language and vision; the role of description in interpretation; and what constitutes learning through visual experience will be considered. Throughout the semester students will develop their interpretive practice through a series of workshops, exercises, site visits, and critical discussions. Enrollment limited to 15.

PHUM 2015. Public Art: History, Theory, and Practice.

The course offers an opportunity for RISD and Brown students to work together to understand the growing interdisciplinary field of public art. We will explore the potential of working in the public realm as artists and/or arts administrators. Topics include: pivotal events and artworks that formed the history of public art from the early 20th century to the present; approaches to site-specificity; ideas of community and audience; current debates around defining the public and public space; temporary vs. permanent work; controversies in public art; memorials, monuments, and anti-monuments; case studies; public art administration models, among others. It is both a seminar and a studio; students work individually and together on research, presentations, proposals and public projects. Enrollment limited to 12 seniors and graduate students. Instructor permission required.

PHUM 2016. Creative & Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Commons.

This seminar surveys entrepreneurship within the art-industrial complex, emphasizing the roles of artists as innovators, the commons as laboratory, and cultural institutions as incubators. An inquiry-based course, our collective research works from the premise that entrepreneurship is the creation of social, cultural and financial value, which are inextricably linked under the umbrellas of capitalism and philanthropy. Students will investigate the infrastructures, policies, practices upon which the arts/culture ecosystem is built; engage in fieldwork that surveys the diverse entry points to the field; translate what they’ve learned into an actionable, individualized toolkit, empowering them to opt into (or out of) the art market economy with strategy and confidence. With a focus on personal and professional development, this course equips students with skills, tools and vocabularies vital to actualizing the impact they want to have through their creative practice, projects or ventures.

PHUM 2020. Methods in Public Humanities.

This course surveys public humanities work, including cultural heritage preservation and interpretation, museum collecting and exhibition, informal education, and cultural development. It also provides an overview of the contexts of that work in nonprofit organizations, including governance, management, and development.

PHUM 2021. Public Amnesias and Their Discontents:Theories and Practices of Remembering.

This course considers the consequences of forgetting as one of the challenges and provocations to the work of public humanities. By extending the histories of memory into discourses of “amnesia,” we will identify origins, effects, and the possibility of a return for material that has become forgotten or, more significant for us, made forgettable. This class is not about memory loss as an individual neurological condition, but as cultural and civic phenomena: specifically, how material objects in the public sphere become lost from view.

PHUM 2022. Public in Persons: Along Humanities’ Ethical Edges.

This course will offer a challenge and a potential to Public Humanities practices and theorizing: to place the irreducibility of individual human experiences as one of its most compelling and profound principles. This consideration differs from forms of “ethics” as they shaped traditional Western philosophy, where the focus was on the ways to lead “a good life” for a very specific, and small, part of the population. But recent ethical responses globally to racisms, genocides, and dispossessions now are frequency spoken in terms of responsibility, radical difference, vulnerability, and hospitality. This course will introduce students to how such ideas might inform “ethical praxis” in Public Humanities, offering case studies and guest presentations alongside writings addressing these four areas of interaction.

PHUM 2025. Semester Practicum in Public Humanities.

Practicums in public humanities provide practical, hands-on training that is essential for careers in museums, historic preservation, and cultural agencies. Students will work with faculty to find appropriate placements and negotiate a semester's or summer work, in general a specific project. Available only to students in the Public Humanities M.A. program.

PHUM 2060. Projects in Public Humanities.

Devoted to one or more advanced projects in Public Humanities not covered in detail by the regular courses. Projects in public humanities provide practical, hands-on project and group project management experience that is essential for careers in museums, historic preservation, and cultural agencies. Students will work with faculty advisor to project completion. Written permission and topic description required. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course. This course is repeatable for credit. Prerequisite: AMST2650 or PHUM2010 or demonstrated ability of equivalent experience. Instructor permission required.

PHUM 2065. Independent Reading and Research in Public Humanities.

For MA in Public Humanities Students who wish to do independent reading and research.

PHUM 2102. Accessioning, Archiving, and Antiracism: Critical and Creative Approaches (AMST 2221A).

Interested students must register for AMST 2221A.

PHUM 2225. Material Matters (ANTH 2515)..

Interested students must register for ANTH 2515.

PHUM 2405. Monuments, Counter-Monuments, and the Representation of the Slave Past (AFRI 2005).

Interested students must register for AFRI 2005.

PHUM 2451. Performing Latin America (HISP2351A).

Interested students must register for HISP 2351A.

PHUM 2696. The Promise of Informal Learning (AMST 2696)..

Interested students must register for AMST 2696.