This course introduces students to methods of American Studies, Asian American Studies and Latino Studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in and about America's past and present. It presents students various scholarly approaches to historical and mythic manifestations of America from local, national, and global perspectives and considers the historical and cognitive processes associated with the delineation of America. The course examines a wide range of material and media from the point of view of multiple fields of study.

This seminar will interweave the history of New York City with the history of dance across the twentieth century. It will use the work of dancers, choreographers, and critics to illuminate social, political, and cultural trends in New York's urban life. Topics include dance in working-class leisure, dance as cultural activism during the Popular Front and Black Arts eras, immigration and assimilation in NYC, and the impact of urban renewal on communities and the performing arts.

This course challenges the racial parameters of disability studies and disability history by asking how persistent conditions of antiblack violence, including mass incarceration, state divestment, medical neglect, and environmental racism, destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an "able body." Surveying scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, African American history, and the history of science and medicine, we will study the construction of disability as a racialized category. Students will also recover disability theories that are already intrinsic to the Black radical tradition, postcolonial studies, and Black feminisms.

As articulated by Thelma Golden, postblack refers to the work of African American artists who emerged in the 1990s with ambitious, irreverent, and sassy work. Postblack suggests the emergence of a generation of artists removed from the long tradition of Black affirmation of the Harlem Renaissance, Black empowerment of the Black Arts movement, and identity politics of the 1980s and early 90s. This seminar involves critical and theoretical readings on multiculturalism, race, identity, and contemporary art, and will provide an opportunity for a deep engagement with the work of African American artists of the past decade.

This course examines the diversity of the American Jewish experiences in South America, North America, and the Caribbean. Moving from the early colonial era to the present, we will examine Jewish life using historical, literary, religious, and cultural evidence. This course offers an introduction to the methods of digital humanities and will culminate in each student creating an online digital exhibit using ArtSteps. Special attention will be paid to the experiences of women as well as multiracial Jews and Jews of color.

In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from WEST SIDE STORY (1957) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. How have Sondheim's musicals conversed with American history and American society since the mid-20th century? How do Sondheim's musicals represent America and Americans, and how have various productions shaped and re-shaped those representations? We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.

This class will grapple with literary, visual and media texts that represent and theorize violence on a transnational field. We will consider the representation of pain as an industry and as a cultural phenomenon. Drawing from critical race theories, queer and psychoanalytic theories, and transnational feminist work, this course analyzes pain/violence narratives from a wide range of genres--film, essay, memoir, and policy--to explore how pain and violence is narrated and depicted and how such narrations become part of a collective consciousness that keeps systematic forms of oppression intact.

A survey of Native American Literature. In place of US origins stories, we consider the dispossession of land and waters and the impact on the environment. We reflect on the United States' attempts to eliminate Indigenous people and correspondent modes of survival and resistance. 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. In this class, we aim for a more holistic understanding of the past and present in America, such that we can imagine alternative futures.

The 1970s are one of the most fascinating periods in recent American history, marking a turn from the countercultural turmoil of the 1960s to the rising conservatism of the 1980s. Often overlooked, these years nonetheless encompass tremendous social, political, and cultural change. In this seminar, we'll examine the 1970s through 10 intriguing objects--some famous, some obscure---that shaped and reflected the decade's art, politics, economics, technology, and culture. We'll use each object as an occasion for looking deeper at the issues it encapsulates or represents, how those issues reverberate across the decade, and their legacy for today.

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework. We hope that you are ready to explore these exciting and urgent issues with us.

Princeton University is on the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape people, who endure to this day. Historical and contemporary awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure is critically important to overcoming their effects. Moreover, Princeton was home to the first gathering in 1970 that coalesced the field known as Native American Studies. As such, this seminar engages the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. We will address questions of settler colonialism, Indigenous knowledge, resistance, education, research, stereotypes and cultural appropriation, identity, nation (re)building, and critiques of NAIS.

This course uses historical and anthropological methods to examine the health of Native communities. By investigating the history, social structures, and colonial forces that have shaped and continue to shape contemporary Indigenous nations, we investigate both the causes of contemporary challenges and the ways that Native peoples have ensured the vibrancy, wellness, and survival of their peoples. We will treat health as a holistic category and critically examine the myriad factors that can hinder or enable the wellbeing of Native nations.

In traditional workshops content and context come second to craft. Here we will explore writing political fiction, the politics of fiction and writing as political engagement. We'll read widely, from the most realistic depictions of the American political process and the varieties of immigrant experience to the work of afrofuturists and feminists. The personal is the political and our frame will range from the global to the domestic. We will write stories that inhabit experiences other than our own. This course will allow students to make interdisciplinary connections between courses on history, politics and identity and creative writing.

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

This course convenes experiences of watching and thinking about contemporary Asian American film. The syllabus is built around narrative films made by and about ethnicized Asians that have crossed the threshold of commercial viability or popular visibility in America. The central critical theme: how can the structure, flow, and mood of film, diminished in cultural capital but still vital as a form of imaginative storytelling, inspire incisive modes of seeing, feeling, and thinking what it means to be Asian in the world today? Core methods of film analysis and surveys of Asian American history inform the meditations on that central theme.

Authors and theorists of contemporary fiction have turned to various modes of fictionality, speculation, and the counterfactual to address and encounter gaps in the historical record, even if not to fully recover experiences lost to time. "Historical Fiction / Fictional History" will introduce students to literary and critical methods by toggling between "historical" and "fictional" texts, and ask them to experiment creatively with their own narrative voices.

This class explores the underside of civility: the indifference of good manners, the controlling attention of caregivers, the loving coercion of family, the quiet horrors of neighbors, friends, and allies. We will explore characters in fiction and film whose militant niceness exercises killing privilege or allows for the expansion of their narcissism...people with "good intentions" who nonetheless wreak havoc on the people and the environment around them. We will consider "niceness" as social performance, as cultural capital, as middle-class value, as sexual mores, as self-belief, and as affective management.

An introduction to the forms and meanings of American television, with an emphasis on watching, thinking, and writing critically about the medium. We will examine a range of structures, styles, and strategies specific to television, including episodic storytelling, the advent of streaming and "peak TV," and the role of television in establishing and sometimes disrupting norms of identity, politics, and aesthetics. The main approach throughout will be close analysis of specific genres, series, and episodes informed by the histories, contexts, and practices that make American television such a significant part of American culture.

Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison: each lay claim to being America's premier twentieth-century novelist. And each did so through a distinctive focus on place and identity. Even more than that shared preoccupation, however, their radical narrative innovations explain why they continue to be read. This course explores the common subjects and varied literary strategies that have transformed possibilities for American fiction.

In received tradition there are no women authors writing in English before the very late 17th century, with a very few notable exceptions in the Middle Ages. This course charts the recovery and revaluation of early modern poetry, drama and prose by women. We'll learn how significant it is and enjoyable, as we encounter works that range in subject from the harrowing death of grown-up daughters, highly original philosophy, bold political verse and critiques of slavery. We'll consider all within frameworks provided by contemporary gender and race theory and history.

This course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?

The term "just transition" has proliferated among climate policy makers, activists, and others from local to international scales to unite actors with labor, social justice, and renewable energy priorities. This course traces the historical origins and contested uses of just transition frameworks, exploring debates and common ground among labor, policy, environmental justice, ecosocialist, and decolonial perspectives. Emphasis is on the U.S. context with points of connection to global systems and movements.

This seminar offers an intensive introduction to working with cultural documents emerging within and from LGBTQ+ communities in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Students will work individually and collaboratively as they engage a broad array of cultural texts and primary documents from the later 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Students will rehearse how to interpret, analyze, and contextualize such documents of the recent queer past as they also explore how to apply these skills within historical, literary/cultural, and dramaturgical analysis.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist, queer, and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.

This course is designed to introduce students to the historical processes and issues that have shaped the lives if Indigenous Americans over the past five centuries. We will explore the ways that the diverse peoples who lived in the Americas constructed different kinds of societies and how their goals and political decisions shaped the lives of all those who would come to inhabit the North American continent. The course requires students to read and analyze historical documents and contemporary literature, and includes a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the American Revolution and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will read a number of famous thinkers and actors in their own words: Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. Students will leave this class with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the ideas and the thinkers who have shaped the nation's politics and culture.

This course will examine the U.S. West's place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, and legacies throughout American history. The American West has been a shifting region, where diverse individuals, languages, cultures, environments, and competing nations came together. We will examine the West's contested rule, economic production, and mythmaking under Native American Empires, Spain, France, England, individual filibusters, Mexico, Canada, and United States.

This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

This course examines Hurricane Maria's impact on Puerto Rico and the push for a resilient, equitable future. We will explore the disaster's effects on infrastructure, economy, and communities, and the role of colonialism and environmental injustice in setting the stage. Through research projects, students will have the opportunity to investigate specific aspects of Puerto Rico's post-Maria recovery and to propose innovative solutions that prioritize equity, sustainability, and community empowerment.

This course explores the history, culture, and language of the Deaf in the United States. The first part of the course focuses on the history of Deaf people in the United States. The second part discusses various aspects of Deaf culture: language, literature, art, politics, etc. The third part critically examines different issues facing Deaf people here in the United States and around the world. These issues include audism, linguicism, ableism, intersectionality, disability justice, bioethics, and education. No American Sign Language knowledge required.

African Americans in the United States have encountered myriad barriers to their quest for inclusion. Drawing on a mix of history and social science, we will come to understand why certain segments of America oppose the full inclusion of African Americans. We will also discuss the political strategies undertaken by the Black community to combat social, political, and economic injustices. The first half of the course will focus on historical antecedents such as the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. The second half of the course will focus on the nature of contemporary racial attitudes in the 21st century.

In this course we examine a variety of new religious movements that tested the boundaries of acceptable religion at various moments in American history. We pay particular attention to government and media constructions of the religious mainstream and margin, to the politics of labels such as "cult" and "sect," to race, gender, and sexuality within new religions, and to the role of American law in constructing categories and shaping religious expressions. We also consider what draws people to new religions and examine the distinctive beliefs, practices, and social organizations of groups labeled by outsiders as "cults."

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to continue developing the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.

In this course, we will study the works of feminist-identified scholars and performers to examine how they use different mediums to excavate, stage, and theorize lives that place, front and center, the relationship between (P)olitics, embodied knowledge, and creative expression. Examining works in theater, students will learn about different forms of feminist practice and how those forms may support and conflict with each other. Students will also learn how to incorporate and articulate theories and mediums into their own creative practices.

From Cross Colours to boom boxes, the 1990s was loud and colorful. But alongside the fun, black people in the U.S. dealt with heightened criminalization and poverty codified through the War on Drugs, welfare reform, HIV/AIDS, and police brutality. We will study the various cultural productions of black performers and consumers as they navigated the social and political landscapes of the 1990s. We will examine works growing out of music, televisual media, fashion, and public policy, using theories from performance and cultural studies to understand the specificities of blackness, gender, class, and sexuality.

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through a study of New York in conversation with other cities. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.

Connect contemporary American art and visual culture with environmental justice movements. Examines photographers, performers, filmmakers, writers, and other artists, with a focus on Indigenous and other BIPOC artists and media makers. Examines how artists engage with environmental justice movements around climate change and energy transitions, food and water security, land use and land back, biodiversity loss, and allied issues. What roles do the arts play in such movements?

This class seeks to critically analyze the intersections of race, violence, and medicine in the United States. Through an interdisciplinary lens, students will examine historical and contemporary case studies to understand how violence has been medicalized, and how race plays a significant role in these processes. Discussions will also encompass slavery, structural violence, police violence, public health approaches to violence, and the role of healthcare professionals in addressing racial disparities in the experience and treatment of violence in African American, Latinx, Asian American and Indigenous contexts.

Why did three American genres become classics in the same twenty-year period, 1936-1956? Part of the answer lies in global disruptions that unsettled codes of behavior. Part lies in film innovations that altered cinema itself. But more than this intersection of social and formal transformations, the decisive answer lies in a handful of directors who reconfigured gendered relations in three generic forms. The surprising correspondences that emerge among these classic films, if also the obvious divergences even within single genres, that will focus our discussion.

This course surveys Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in sociology, anthropology, American studies, ethnomusicology, and education. This course develops an account of racializations beyond the black/white binary while situating Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences of exclusion and differential inclusion in the larger context of US wars and empires Asia and the Pacific Islands; settler colonialism; racial capitalism; displacement & migration; and popular culture and mass media.

This course examines the connections between climate change and longstanding processes of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. We will examine the history and evolution of the climate justice movement, including its connection with the environmental justice and civil rights movement in the United States and ongoing calls for climate reparations particularly among African-descended populations. We explore the ways wider scale systems of power and domination produce unjust environmental and climatic conditions and the disproportionate ways these systems impact BIPOC communities across the globe.

Princeton University is on the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape people, who endure to this day. Historical and contemporary awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure is critically important to overcoming their effects. Moreover, Princeton was home to the first gathering in 1970 that coalesced the field known as Native American Studies. As such, this seminar engages the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. We will address questions of settler colonialism, Indigenous knowledge, resistance, education, research, stereotypes and cultural appropriation, identity, nation (re)building, and critiques of NAIS.

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to develop the first stage of the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.

Foundational ENV course. Introduces students to key concepts and approaches in environmental studies from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. Focus is on the evolving history of environmental movements, including wilderness-centered conservation and deep ecology, urban-centered environmentalism, Indigenous sovereignty and land back, and climate justice. Emphasizes US environmental movements since the 1960s, with points of comparisons to other time periods and national contexts.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist, queer, and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.

Considers key issues in American Food Studies today, from what it means to speak of "American food" to how artists intervene in our habituated practices, with a focus on what creativity means with regard to food, and on food sovereignty as self-determination and agency. Students will deepen their historical understanding of US culture, broaden their grasp of the forces that shape American foodways, and take creative and practical action through food. While grounded in key historical readings, this course points steadily to the present- to understand where we are- and to the future.

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality across the 20th century, with emphasis on both regulation and resistance. Topics include early homosexual subcultures; the commercialization of sex; reproduction and its limitation; sex, gender, and war; cold war sexual containment; the feminist movement; conservative backlash; AIDS politics; same-sex marriage; Hillary; and many others.

What happens to narrative when writers aspire to write the world? How has globalization transformed not only the way novels are produced but also the internal form of the works themselves? We'll read novels that overtly strive for a fuller picture of some social or conceptual whole (e.g., migration, climate change, labor, the Internet), especially where they thematize the impossibility of such a project. Students will learn advanced methods for reading literature's relation to society by examining how writers play with scale, link parts to wholes, and provincialize worlds while rendering the seemingly provincial or mundane worldly.

The Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, was the defining (and polarizing) initiative of the Obama era, with provisions to expand health insurance coverage, control health care costs, and improve the health care delivery system. This course will focus on the history of health reform, as well as implementation challenges since the law's enactment. We will examine the federal regulatory process, the many legal challenges to the law, the role that states have played in implementation, and Congressional repeal efforts. We will also investigate the role of federalism in health care policy and the future of health care reform.

Pleasure Power and Profit explores the intimate ways that sexualities and race are entwined in contemporary culture, historically, and in our own lives. Why are questions about sexuality and race some of the most controversial, compelling, yet often taboo issues of our time? Exploring films, popular culture, novels, social media, and theory, we engage themes like: race, gender and empire; fetishism, Barbie, vampires and zombies; sex work and pornography; marriage and monogamy; queer sexualities; and strategies for social empowerment such as: Black Lives Matter, the new campus feminism, and global movements against sexual and gender violence.

This course examines ebbs and flows in U.S. drug policy, and how issues of race and identity inform the creation, implementation, impact, and dismantling of substance control policy. From "Chinese opium" in the 19th c. to "Hillbilly heroin" (as OxyContin was once labeled) and from "crack" cocaine to menthol cigarettes and marijuana, we examine the forces shaping drug policies, how policies are transformed, why they change, and what drug laws reveal about society. We also examine how social, political, and economic circumstances shape drug policies, and how the US built a vast system governing people and the substances they can and cannot use.

Photography was invented simultaneously in England and France, but so complete was the US intervention in photographic history that by the late 1980s, it was possible to claim that 'even though Americans did not invent photography they should have.' Photography is as much a technological as a discursive invention, and the subject of American photographs have been continuously reinvented throughout the medium's history. This course frequently convenes around Princeton's holdings at Firestone Library.

Can reality television offer a new theory of reality? This course examines a prominent aspect of US popular culture--structured reality television programs--to explore questions of reality central to the Western intellectual tradition. Each week, we pair philosophical or theoretical texts with episodes of reality television, and see how these programs can elaborate, contravene, or reframe our conceptions of reality. Some questions include: What is reality, anyway, and why do we care about it? How do we know we're looking at reality? How is reality made, and can reality television do anything else than reflect its structures?

To what degree has religion shaped the environmental justice movement? This course in environmental humanities and social sciences examines the impact of religious ideas, persons, practices, and institutions on the values and strategies of environmental, food, and climate justice activists. It also grapples with the significance of this impact for environmental thought and policy. Students engage with primary sources, media, scholarship, and community organizations to study cases in the US South, New Jersey, the tropics, and the planet as a whole, culminating in a collaborative project with a community partner.

This course explores how the religious is depicted and engaged, even implicitly, in feature films. Movies selected are considered significant with respect to director, script, music, cinematography, impact in film history, influence in wider culture, etc., aside from any religious dimensions but then also because of how, why, and in what ways something is conveyed about religion - critically or affirmatively (or both). The first portion of the course will examine the presentation of specific religions. The second portion will explore religious concepts such as love, evil, fate, justice, heroes, [extraordinary] power, freedom, etc.

Dance is an underrecognized political force, used to project national identity and advance soft power on the global stage. It can help us understand state initiatives for control and mobilization for protest. This course investigates dance as both a state and a resistant practice using dance studies theory. Case studies include American and Soviet ballet during the Cold War, Mexican dance forms, US modern dance, and more. Activities include readings, discussions, performance exercises, and viewing performances. Guest artists conduct studio sessions in dance logics. No prior dance or performance experience is necessary.

This course focuses on the structural and institutional foundations of racial discrimination in the United States. It emphasizes the contributions of sociologists. The course gives a historical overview followed by an investigation of key legislative actions and economic factors inhibiting racial equality. Subsequent topics include migration and immigration; urban development; and residential segregation. The end of the course reviews resistance movements and policies aimed at addressing systemic racism, including restorative justice and reparations.

This seminar in history and documentary film explores personal narrative and how individual experience contributes to profound social change. We study 1960s youth through oral history, archival research, ethnography and journalism. Trenton NJ is the case study. Themes include: civil rights and Black power; immigration and migration; student uprisings and policing; education; gender and sexuality; churches and city institutions; sports; work, class and neighborhood; politics, law and government. Using documentary narrative, the course asks how a new generation of storytellers will shape public conversations and policy.

Seminar sociologically explores elements of the American Jewish experience: identity, ethnicity, Jewish diversity, denominationalism, adaptation, acculturation vs. contra-acculturation, including intermarriage. We investigate Jewish population and attitudes, ritual and rites of passage, popular culture, Jewish education, antisemitism and philosemitism, messianism, and the role of Israel. Students will analyze one of these topics in depth in the real life of Jews. A field trip to Brooklyn is included.

This class examines the transpacific entanglements between the United States, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. The central aims of the course is to 1) unpack how narratives of American exceptionalism and rescue have historically been used to justify US military and capitalist interventions in Asia and the Pacific Islands and 2) connect the ways in which this contributes to the continued dispossessions, displacements, movements, and racializations of Asian and Pacific Islander peoples.