Spring 2024
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.
Previous Semesters
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Spring 2023
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AMS 304 / LAS 312 / ENV 324
This course studies how the environment has related to the construction of race and racism. By focusing on case studies around the globe, we will learn about the racial politics of waste, food consumption, energy, and climate change in diverse social and cultural contexts. Since the course moves chronologically through different historical periods, students will learn how dominant ideas about race and the environment have evolved over time. They will also examine how capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism have recreated environmental racism as a structure and a technology of power.
Instructors: Juan M. Rubio
AMS 317 / MTD 321 / THR 322 / ENG 249
In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) 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.
Instructors: Stacy E. Wolf
AMS 334 / ENG 234
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.
Instructors: Lee C. Mitchell
AMS 398 / DAN 312 / GSS 346
The fat body operates at the conjuncture of political economy, beauty standards, and health. This seminar asks, How does this "f-word" discipline and regulate bodies in /as public? What is the "ideal" American public body and who gets to occupy that position? How are complex personhood, expressivity, health, and citizenship contested cultural and political economic projects? We will examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness using dance, performance, memoirs, and media texts as case studies. Intersectional dimensions of the fat body are central to the course. No previous performance experience necessary.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
AMS 403 / SOC 403
The aim of this course is to provide you with the tools to think about elites within democratic societies. The course is divided into four modular units: (1) The Decline of Aristocracy, (2) Creating an American Elite, (3) Elites and Power, and (4) A New Elite. For each of these units we will spend one week reading a theoretical approach to understanding the theme, one week on an empirical case to put this theory in context, and one week reading a novel that works with the themes of the theory and research we have read.
Instructors: Shamus R. Khan
AMS 404 / CWR 404 / ENG 454
In-depth look into current US issues, with emphasis on democracy and the question 'What is America?'-socially, culturally, politically. Seminar immerses students into nonfiction literature, particularly as it illuminates the idea of "America" and the state of "Americans". Together we explore seminal non-fiction writing about America, the better to hone students' ability to think and write critically about the public sphere, and to write intelligently about their lives. Seminar examines how major writers, and students, best integrate research, socio-political analysis, literary skill, to craft publicly valuable, self-revelatory writing.
Instructors: Richard Benjamin
AMS 415 / ENV 415 / HUM 415 / ENG 435
Creation stories from Turtle Island foreground an integral connection between land and story. "Sky Woman Falling" contains key ecological and environmental knowledge. This course explores the relationship between land and story, emphasizing seeds as sources of sovereignty and repositories of knowledge across generations. We focus on Native New Jersey while understanding the history of this land in the context of global indigeneity and settler colonialism. Course literature engages seeds, land, and the environment from a perspective that crosses the disciplines of American studies, literature, history, ecology, and environmental studies.
Instructors: Tessa L. DesmondSarah Rivett
AMS 442 / HIS 470 / JDS 442
For over two centuries, Lower East Side tenements have housed immigrant and migrant families. Since 1988, the Tenement Museum has researched and told the stories of Jewish, German, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Black and Chinese families, connecting individual family stories to larger historical questions. This course offers the unique opportunity to dive deeply into the research and methodology. What sources can we use to tell the story of "ordinary people," and how do those sources change over time? How do contemporary questions of American identity connect to the stories that we tell?
Instructors: Annie Polland
AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how Black activists have partnered to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
Instructors: Reena N. Goldthree
AAS 380 / AMS 382
This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.
Instructors: Naomi Murakawa
ANT 223 / AMS 223 / AAS 224 / URB 224
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.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De JesúsLaurence Ralph
ANT 245 / ENV 245 / AMS 245
How do we grapple with the lasting, unintended impacts of science, engineering and medicine in "the nation's service and the service of humanity"? What lessons can we learn from the past to conduct morally sound research and generate culturally inclusive knowledge? We explore perspectives from indigenous studies to approach the intersection of Princeton's history, nuclear science, settler colonialism and environmental racism to collectively imagine a more holistic and inclusive approach to studying science, technology and the environment. Students will conduct original research that draws from and contributes to the Nuclear Princeton project.
Instructors: Ryo Morimoto
ASA 320 / GSS 377 / AMS 220 / SAS 318
Asian Americans have experienced a long history of contestation regarding gender and sexuality. To examine this saga, we will begin with Black and Asian feminist critiques of normative gender and sexuality. We will then turn to sociocultural history, analyzing legal cases policing intimacy, and the construction of the gendered and sexualized Asian woman in late 19th C. San Francisco. We will then examine histories of normative forms of sexuality, politics and social worlds of queer and trans communities, gendered labor, representation and the post-911 era.
Instructors: Rishi Ramesh Guné
ENG 259 / AMS 259
This course offers a survey of the varieties of animation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as their critical reception. Animation is a ubiquitous form, present across media and in advertising. Many viewers take its components and effects for granted. But the archive of animation fundamentally complicates any easy assumptions about "realism" in the twentieth century; animation, moreover, challenges assumptions about bodies and their functions, exaggerating their features and functions, promoting alternatives to more mundane notions of life and liveliness, and relatedly, to ideas of time, contingency, and experience.
Instructors: Monica HuertaRuss Leo
ENG 358 / LAS 385 / AMS 396 / AAS 343
Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean Literature: colonialism, indigeneity, iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt. These past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean in ways that necessitate attention to gender, race, and environment.
Instructors: Annabelle E. HaynesChristina León
ENG 404 / NES 404 / AMS 402
How does political upheaval - especially in the form of revolution - shape memoir? This course focuses on the work of writers, particularly those of Middle Eastern origin who live in the Americas (Mexico, the United States, and Cuba) to explore this question. It pairs their memoirs with other examples of their writing (letters, eulogies, and essays) and artistic production to study issues of post-coloniality, gender, race, and nationalism.
Instructors: Sarah Gualtieri
ENG 411 / AMS 411 / AAS 413
This course will focus on two "representative men" of the nineteenth century. It will propose that Emerson and Douglass are two of America's greatest defenders, precisely because they are its greatest mourners. While they point to America's unfulfilled promise of universal representation, they seek to realize it in their own acts of writing. This course attends to these writers' relations to the period's broader discourses surrounding race, ecology, empire, and nation-building. Alongside Emerson and Douglass, we will read short texts by naturalists, politicians, and activists such as J.B. Lamarck, James Madison, and Ida B. Wells.
Instructors: Eduardo L. CadavaDenise Xu
ENV 238 / AMS 238
Introduces students to cross-disciplinary concepts that shape how complex environmental challenges are defined, studied, and addressed. These concepts include biodiversity, climate change, ecosystem, environmental racism, pollution, sustainability, and wilderness. Examines a wide range of case studies - from the U.S. National Park Service and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and Extinction Rebellion.
Instructors: Allison Carruth
HIS 271 / AMS 271
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.
Instructors: Elizabeth Ellis
HIS 384 / GSS 384 / AMS 424
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.
Instructors: Margot Canaday
HIS 393 / AAS 393 / SPI 389 / AMS 423
From "Chinese opium" to Oxycontin, and from cocaine and "crack" to BiDil, drug controversies reflect enduring debates about the role of medicine, the law, the policing of ethnic identity, and racial difference. This course explores the history of controversial substances (prescription medicines, over-the-counter products, black market substances, psychoactive drugs), and how, from cigarettes to alcohol and opium, they become vehicles for heated debates over immigration, identity, cultural and biological difference, criminal character, the line between legality and illegality, and the boundaries of the normal and the pathological.
Instructors: Keith A. Wailoo
LAS 308 / THR 370 / AMS 298 / LAO 308
This class will look at the works of Latin American and Latinx women playwrights who have created works that are either adaptations of mythical Greek heroines or reinterpretations of the historical Latin American and Caribbean record. These works challenge our visions of history: they use the power of the canon to make us think about the weight of tradition, and use that weight to shatter our preconceptions of gender, race, and identity. The course will include dialogues/workshops with contemporary artists and scholars, and will include performance, creative writing, and digital work as part of our class assignments and/or final project.
Instructors: Lilianne Lugo Herrera
POL 319 / AMS 219 / AAS 386
The 14th Amendment is the centerpiece of constitutional debates about equality. This class explores the development and ongoing debates over the 14th Amendment, including the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. We also give attention to some additional statutes, notably Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The readings will largely be rooted in decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, with a focus on race, sex, sexuality, religion, and disability. What constitutes discrimination and 'anti-discrimination'? What ought to be the goal for understanding equality, diversity, and acceptance?
Instructors: Paul Frymer
POL 344 / AAS 344 / AMS 244
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.
Instructors: LaFleur Stephens-Dougan
REL 397 / AMS 297
Have you ever wanted to change the world? So have lots of other people. In this course, we'll explore how American Christians have participated in social movements since the early 20th century, and we'll see how religion fits into their mobilization strategies. We'll focus on four case studies: the Catholic Worker movement; Black church women during the Civil Rights movement; the early Christian Right; and advocacy around HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ+ rights. This course centers ethnographic research methods in the study of religion, and students will learn skills such as data coding, participant observation, and qualitative interviewing.
Instructors: Lauren R. Kerby
SOC 373 / AMS 428
This seminar focuses on the structural and institutional foundations of racial discrimination in the United States. It emphasizes the contributions of sociologists, some of whom will participate as invited guests. 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.
Instructors: Patricia Fernández-Kelly
SPI 327 / AMS 327 / POL 428
As the United States has increasingly looked to its federal government to provide policies and protect rights that benefit its population, how have the branches of government risen to the occasion? Where have they struggled? What obstacles have they faced? What complexities have arisen over time? This course is an investigation of the institutional, political, and legal development of the unique "American state" in the contemporary era.
Instructors: Sarah L. Staszak
SPI 387 / SOC 387 / AMS 487
For the last 60 years, the United States has been engaged in a near-constant effort to reform American schools. In this course, we will make sense of competing explanations of educational performance and evaluate the possibilities for and barriers to improving American public schools and for reducing educational disparities by family socioeconomic status, race, and gender. In doing so, we will grapple with the challenges that researchers and practitioners face in evaluating educational policies.
Instructors: Jennifer L. Jennings
SPI 393 / GHP 406 / AMS 410
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.
Instructors: Heather H. Howard
URB 356 / AMS 256 / LAS 395
This course considers theories and practices of reinterpreting landscape through the lenses of indigeneity, transnational feminism, and decoloniality. We will explore alternative ways of knowing and relating to places--thinking across space and time, built structures and material absences, borders and networks of relation--with a focus on the Americas. Discussions will engage spatial perspectives in geography, anthropology, and decolonial thought along with creative writing and multimedia work. Students will apply critical spatial practices by designing a digital project using textual, sonic, and visual modes to remap a selected site.
Instructors: Mary Pena
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Fall 2022
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America Then and Now
AMS 101
This course introduces students to methods of American 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.
Instructors: William A. Gleason, Monica Huerta, Shamus R. Khan
Native American Literature
AMS 322 / ENG 242
An exploration of the written and oral literary traditions of Native American and Indigenous authors. This course offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. The course will include a service-learning trip to the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm and an opportunity to learn some Lenape, the ancestral language of New Jersey.
Instructors: Sarah Rivett
Creative Ecologies: American Environmental Narrative and Art, 1980-2020
AMS 354 / ART 355 / ENV 373
This seminar explores how writers and artists--alongside scientists and activists--have shaped American environmental thought from 1980 to today. The seminar asks: How do different media convey the causes and potential solutions to environmental challenges, ranging from biodiversity loss and food insecurity to pollution and climate change? What new art forms are needed to envision sustainable and just futures? Course materials include popular science writing, graphic narrative, speculative fiction, animation art, documentary film, and data visualization along with research from anthropology, ecology, history, literary studies, and philosophy.
Instructors: Allison Carruth
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: American Empire, the Anthropocene, & Afrofuturism in Octavia E. Butler
AMS 404 / AAS 405
This seminar takes up the works of science fiction pioneer Octavia E. Butler to explore the future of the American empire via a study of Afrofuturism and the Anthropocene. We will explore Afrofuturism's history and current status, especially in relation to the Anthropocene in the novels, short stories, and critical writings by and related to Butler's canon. We will pay close attention to how Butler's oeuvre charts the arc of American history from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq war and the significance of Butler's prophetic work that had dire warnings regarding climate change, white nationalism, and the waning of the American empire.
Instructors: Susana Morris
Diversity in Black America
AAS 323 / AMS 321
As the demographics of Blacks in America change, we are compelled to rethink the dominant stories of who African Americans are, and from whence they come. In this seminar, we will explore the deep cultural, genealogical, national origin, regional, and class-based diversity of people of African descent in the United States. Materials for the course will include scholarly writings as well as memoirs and fiction. In addition to reading assignments, students will be expected to complete an ethnographic or oral history project based upon research conducted within a Black community in the U.S., and a music or visual art based presentation of work.
Instructors: Imani Perry
Postblack - Contemporary African American Art
AAS 372 / ART 374 / AMS 372
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.
Instructors: Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
Asian Americana: Theorizing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality Across Difference
ASA 361 / AMS 461 / GSS 330
From the height of the Asian American movement began at San Francisco State in 1968, the question of where Asian diasporic communities fit within the American racial matrix has been of pivotal interest for scholars, students, activists and artists across genres. This class seeks to explore Asian Americans' social location in the US. Using a relational intersectional feminist approach, this class will examine Asian Americans positionality in relation to Indigenous, Black and Latinx communities throughout the country. Students will engage and hone Asian American Studies interdisciplinary methods (historical, literary and filmic analysis).
Instructors: Rishi Ramesh Guné
Special Topics in Creative Writing: Writing Political Fiction
CWR 345 / AMS 345 / GSS 383
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.
Instructors: A.M. Homes
Wounded Beauty
ENG 216 / AMS 216 / GSS 214
This course studies the entanglement between ideas of personhood and the history of ideas about beauty. How does beauty make and unmake persons -socially, legally and culturally- at the intersection of race, gender and aesthetics? Let us move beyond the good versus bad binary that dominates discussions of beauty to focus instead on how beauty in literature and culture have contributed to the conceptualization of modern, western personhood and its inverse (the inhuman, the inanimate, the object). We will trace beauty and its disruptions in the arenas of literature, visual culture, global capitalism, politics, law, science and technology.
Instructors: Anne Cheng
Conspiracy in America
ENG 261 / AMS 357
How do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.
Instructors: Zahid R. Chaudhary
Feminist Futures: Contemporary S. F. by Women
GSS 303 / AMS 313 / ENG 283
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.
Instructors: Alfred Bendixen
U.S. Legal History
HIS 379 / SPI 362 / AMS 420
This class views legal history broadly as the relationship between formal law, popular legal culture, state governance, and social change in the U.S., from the colonial period to the present. We will examine changing conceptions of rights, equality, justice, the public interest. We also will consider questions about the operation of law in U.S. history: How is law made? What do people expect from law? Who controls law? How did that change over time? These questions open up a rich, layered past in which the law was a source of authority that mediated social and political conflicts, even as those conflicts ultimately changed the law.
Instructors: Laura F. Edwards
Unrest and Renewal in Urban America
HIS 388 / URB 388 / AMS 380 / AAS 388
This course surveys the history of cities in the United States from colonial settlement to the present. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of "melting pots" and cutting-edge innovation, as well as urban crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; downtown and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment.
Instructors: Alison E. Isenberg
Borderlands, Border Lives
HIS 484 / LAS 484 / LAO 484 / AMS 484
The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.
Instructors: Rosina A. Lozano
Introduction to Latino/a/x Studies
LAO 201 / AMS 211 / LAS 201
This introductory course examines what it means to be Latino/a in the United States and how Latino/a culture has been defined in historical and contemporary contexts. In this course students will learn how legacies of colonialism and modernity affect Latino/as and how they negotiate empire, identity, language, culture, and notions of home. Students will learn how certain Latino/a cultures and communities were formed in the United States, as well as how gender, class, race, and sexuality inform these ideas of identity in a given space and place.
Instructors: Keishla Rivera-Lopez
Latinx Autobiography
LAO 218 / ENG 258 / AMS 218
This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse - but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
American Deaf Culture
LIN 215 / AMS 214 / GHP 315
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 rights, bioethics, and education. No American Sign Language knowledge required.
Instructors: Noah A. Buchholz
Secession, the Civil War, and the Constitution
POL 488 / HUM 488 / AMS 488
This seminar explores constitutional and legal issues posed by the attempted secession of eleven states of the Federal Union in 1860-1865 and the civil war this attempt triggered. Issues to be examined include the nature of secession movements (both in terms of the constitutional controversy posed in 1860-1861 and modern secession movements), the development of the "war powers" doctrine of the presidency, the suspension by the writ of habeas corpus, the use of military tribunals, and abuses of civil rights on both sides of the Civil War.
Instructors: Allen Carl Guelzo
Casting: History, Theory, Practice
THR 339 / AMS 439 / GSS 349
This course surveys the history, theory and practice of casting within U.S. entertainment industries over the last 150 years to evince the creative, industrial and social features of the always-evolving casting apparatus. As we explicate the interpretive dilemma of deciding which actor is "right" (or "wrong") for a role, we will also confront how casting structures determine who does (and does not) have access to artistic opportunity; how exclusionary and exploitative casting practices persist; and how the artistic, social and ethical implications of the casting apparatus have inspired efforts to transform it.
Instructors: Brian E. Herrera
In Living Color: Performing the Black '90s
THR 392 / AAS 347 / AMS 350 / GSS 392
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.
Instructors: Rhaisa Williams
Urban Studies Research Seminar
URB 300 / ARC 300 / HUM 300 / AMS 300
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.
Instructors: Aaron P. Shkuda
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Spring 2022
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Race, Gender, and the Urban Environment
AMS 312 / GSS 462 / URB 316 / ENV 314
This course considers how environmental racism shapes urban inequality. We will discuss how racial and gender bias have conditioned proposals for the future of cities and the planet. We will also address how people who have experienced racial and gender marginalization have formed relationships with land, water, and non-human life in response to crisis. We will address environmentalist work in geography, critical race studies, city planning, queer and trans theory, and disability studies along with novels, journalism, and film to analyze how ideas of race and gender and questions of urban and planetary futures have informed one another.
Instructors: Davy Knittle
Black and Indigenous Feminist Survival and Experimentation in the Americas
AMS 351 / GSS 443 / AAS 352
This course is designed to explore how centering Black and Native/Indigenous feminist epistemologies (ways of knowing), theories, methods, themes, cultural production, and decolonial and abolitionist struggle reorient the field of American Studies. If we orient American Studies around and through Black and Native/Indigenous gendered, sexualized, feminist and queer modes of survival and ingenuity; what themes, debates, and questions rise to the surface and become salient?
Instructors: Tiffany J. King
Creative Ecologies: American Environmental Narrative and Art, 1980-2020
AMS 354 / ART 355 / ENV 373
This seminar explores how writers and artists--alongside scientists and activists--have shaped American environmental thought from 1980 to today. The seminar asks: How do different media convey the causes and potential solutions to environmental challenges, ranging from biodiversity loss and food insecurity to pollution and climate change? What new art forms are needed to envision sustainable and just futures? Course materials include popular science writing, graphic narrative, speculative fiction, animation art, documentary film, and data visualization along with research from anthropology, ecology, history, literary studies, and philosophy.
Instructors: Allison Carruth
Isn't It Romantic? The Broadway Musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim
AMS 365 / ENG 365 / GSS 365 / MTD 365
Song. Dance. Man. Woman. These are the basic components of the Broadway musical theatre. How have musical theatre artists, composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and designers worked with these building blocks to create this quintessentially American form of art and entertainment? This course will explore conventional and resistant performances of gender and sexuality in the Broadway musical since the 1940s. Why are musicals structured by love and romance?
Instructors: Stacy E. Wolf
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Elites in Democratic America
AMS 403 / SOC 403
The aim of this course is to provide you with the tools to think about elites within democratic societies. The course is divided into four modular units: (1) The Decline of Aristocracy, (2) Creating an American Elite, (3) Elites and Power, and (4) A New Elite. For each of these units we will spend one week reading a theoretical approach to understanding the theme, one week on an empirical case to put this theory in context, and one week reading a novel that works with the themes of the theory and research we have read.
Instructors: Shamus R. Khan
American Agrarians: Ideas of Land, Labor, and Food
AMS 419 / ENV 419
For agrarians, farms and fields are prized over boardrooms and shopping malls. Agrarianism values hard work, self-sufficiency, simplicity and connection with nature. For some today, it is a compelling antidote to globalization and consumerism. This course examines American agrarianism past and present and its central role in our national imaginary, tracing the complex and contradictory contours of a social and political philosophy that seeks freedom and yet gave way to enslaving, excluding, and ignoring many based on race, immigration status, and gender. A focus will be on new agrarianism and movements for food, land, and social justice.
Instructors: Tessa L. Desmond
Law and Public Policy in African American History
AAS 380 / AMS 382
This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.
Instructors: Naomi Murakawa
Pluriversal Arctic
ANT 322 / ENV 342 / HUM 323 / AMS 422
Students will be introduced to anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies of multiple, divergent ways in which the Circumpolar populations experience, perceive and respond to environmental, political and socio-economic changes from within distinct horizons of knowledge & modes of sociality. By focusing on social and historical processes as well as current/emerging practices, worlds/cosmologies, the course will analytically evaluate such notions as Anthropocene, the Fourth World, indigeneity and decolonisation as well as examine attempts of various scholars to better understand complex interconnections of climate, environment and society.
Instructors: Olga Ulturgasheva
Are You For Sale? Performance Making, Philanthropy and Ethics
DAN 357 / AMS 358 / THR 357 / VIS 357
In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics. How are performing artists financing their work, and what does this mean in relationship to economic and social justice? How did we arrive to the current conditions of arts funding? What is the connection between wealth and giving and when are those ties inherently questionable? What is at stake in the debate of public versus private support? Does funding follow artists' concerns or delimit them?
Instructors: Miguel Gutierrez
Topics in 18th-Century Literature: The Red Atlantic and the Enlightenment
ENG 338 / HIS 318 / AMS 348
Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor notes the word "indian" is a "colonial enactment" that "has no referent in tribal languages or cultures." But as a trope it has long provided Western culture with a vision of romantic primitivism, of savage cruelty, or of the doomed victims of colonial expansion. This course will examine eighteenth-century transatlantic representations of North American Indigenous people and consider the cultural functions of these representations and their role in settler colonialism. In addition to literary texts, we will also examine art and visual culture, collected objects, and philosophical writing from the period.
Instructors: Robbie Richardson
Global Novel
ENG 444 / ASA 444 / AMS 443
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 interdisciplinary 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.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular Culture
ENV 357 / AMS 457 / GSS 357 / ENG 315
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?
Instructors: Anne McClintock
The Sixties: Documentary, Youth and the City
HIS 202 / URB 203 / AMS 202 / AAS 203
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, biography, memoir, ethnography and journalism. Trenton NJ is the case study. Themes include: civil rights & Black power; immigration & migration; student uprisings & policing; gender & sexuality; high school & college; churches & city institutions; sports & youth culture; labor, class & neighborhood; politics & government. Working with documentary narrative, the course asks how a new generation of storytellers will shape public conversations and policy.
Instructors: Purcell Carson, Alison E. Isenberg
U.S. Legal History
HIS 379 / SPI 362 / AMS 420
This class views legal history broadly as the relationship between formal law, popular legal culture, state governance, and social change in the U.S., from the colonial period to the present. We will examine changing conceptions of rights, equality, justice, the public interest. We also will consider questions about the operation of law in U.S. history: How is law made? What do people expect from law? Who controls law? How did that change over time? These questions open up a rich, layered past in which the law was a source of authority that mediated social and political conflicts, even as those conflicts ultimately changed the law.
Instructors: Laura F. Edwards
Archiving the American West
HIS 431 / AMS 432
Working with Princeton's Western Americana collections, students will explore what archives are and how they are made. Who controls what's in them? How do they shape what historians write? Using little studied collections, students will produce online "exhibitions" for the Library website, and research potential acquisitions for the Library collections. Significant time will be devoted to in-class workshops focused on manuscript and visual materials. Special visitors will include curators, archivists, librarians, and dealers.
Instructors: Martha A. Sandweiss
The History of Incarceration in the U.S.
HIS 459 / GSS 459 / AMS 459
The prison is a growth industry in the U.S.; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. 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.
Instructors: Wendy Warren
Latino Urban History
HIS 465 / LAO 465 / AMS 465
Using cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami as case studies, this course seeks to understand the history of Latinos in urban places. Casting a geographically broad net and focusing largely on the 20th century, this course will comparatively analyze Latinos of different national origins (e.g. Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans). In addition, the course will look at a broad cross-section of the Latino community to get at changing understandings of gender, class, race, and immigration status. This course will include readings from traditional historical monographs and autobiographies.
Instructors: Rosina A. Lozano
Abraham Lincoln and America, 1809-1865
HIS 470 / HUM 471 / AMS 471
This course surveys aspects of mid-19th century American culture through the life of Abraham Lincoln. This includes the imaging, ideologies, concepts, visions of behavior, institutions -- and the means for disseminating these -- which abounded in American life between 1848 and 1877, and which intersected at various points with the life of Abraham Lincoln. It pays attention to the emergence of markets for the arts and the restraints which those markets and 19th-century technology placed on them. The purpose is to have you at 'the cutting edge' of Civil War-era and Lincolnian cultural history scholarship.
Instructors: Allen Carl Guelzo
Excavate/Illuminate: Creating Theater from the Raw Material of History
HUM 321 / THR 362 / AMS 331 / AAS 324
Excavate/Illuminate will guide students' archival research and collaborative exploration of US history, journalism, and performance, focusing on the pivotal Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) as a case study. We will read several examples of documentary theater to see how artists create theater from the raw materials of history. For the first half of the semester, students will work in small groups, exploring online resources in order to develop and perform original scripts in the style of Federal Theatre Project Living Newspapers. During weeks 7-12, students will select collaborators and historical topics of interest to devise final performances.
Instructors: Arminda F. Thomas, Catherine M. Young
Race Across the Americas
LAS 313 / ANT 313 / LAO 313 / AMS 305
This course explores transnational and diasporic formations of race in the Americas. Drawing on Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, and anthropological and historical approaches, we explore racial formations in Latin America and its transnational communities. A central goal for this course is to understand race and racial formations as culturally contextualized and situated within the politics of difference. How are U.S. racial-ethnic categories embraced, contested, or reconfigured across the Americas, and vice versa? Topics include multiculturalism, mestizaje, border thinking, transnationalism, and racial democracy among others.
Instructors: Alberto E. Morales
American Deaf Culture
LIN 215 / AMS 214 / GHP 315
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 rights, bioethics, and education. No American Sign Language knowledge required.
Instructors: Noah A. Buchholz
'Cult' Controversies in America
REL 271 / AMS 341
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."
Instructors: Judith Weisenfeld
Muslim America
REL 393 / CHV 393 / AMS 391
The course begins with the intertwined history of Muslims in America and America itself. We will then apply that foundation to topics in contemporary Muslim American life - for example, authority in mosques, fashion and coolness, and representation in movies. Students will encounter primary as well as secondary sources. For example, students will read an 1831 autobiography of an enslaved Muslim named Omar ibn Said and analyze a Chicago-based Ahmadi newspaper from the 1920s. We will use a range of media, including film and material culture, to emphasize the varieties of Muslim experience in America.
Instructors: Rebecca L. Faulkner
Reimagining the American Theatrical Canon
THR 223 / AMS 346 / ENG 253 / GSS 444
This course offers an intensive survey of ongoing efforts to revisit and revise the American theatrical canon and repertoire. Students will examine the economic, institutional and cultural forces shaping the landscape of new play production in the United States as they also read a broad selection of plays from the contemporary American theater. Working in partnership with McCarter Theatre's "Bard at the Gate" initiative, students will develop dramaturgical and other resources in response to this uniquely curated virtual platform for noteworthy but overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.
Instructors: Brian E. Herrera
Storytellers - Building Community Through Art
THR 313 / AAS 312 / AMS 387 / GSS 453
In this Princeton Challenge course, students will participate in building a relationship between a historically significant Black theater company, Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, and the university community. Co-taught by Sydne Mahone, Director of play development at Crossroads 1985-1997, students will research the theater through its people and its art, while making the role of women in Black art-making more visible. Students will consider their own role in movements for change, and the role of storytelling as a call to action. Our work will culminate in creative responses and roadmaps for continuing community relationship.
Instructors: Jane F. Cox, Sydne J. Mahone
Decentering/Recentering the Western Canon in the Contemporary American Theater
THR 416 / AMS 416 / COM 453 / ENG 456
Why do some BIPOC dramatists (from the US and Canada) choose to adapt/revise/re-envision canonical texts from the Western theatrical tradition? While their choices might be accused of recentering and reinforcing "white" narratives that marginalize and/or exoticize racial and ethnic others, we might also see this venture as a useful strategy to write oneself into a tradition that is itself constantly being revised and reevaluated and to claim that tradition as one's own. What are the artistic, cultural, and economic "rewards" for deploying this method of playmaking? What are the risks?
Instructors: Michael W. Cadden
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Fall 2021
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America Then and Now
This course introduces students to the subjects of American studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in America’s past and present in order to understand America as it exists today. It examines both 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, and it engages the voices of diverse individuals and cultures in telling the story of America then and now.
Instructors: Anne Cheng, Rachael Ziady DeLue, Yaacob Dweck
Native American Literature
An analysis of the written and oral literary traditions developed by Native Americans. American Indian and First Nation authors will be read in the context of the global phenomenon of indigeneity and settler colonialism, and in dialogue with each other. Through readings, discussions, and guest speakers, we will consider linguistic, historical, and cultural approaches. This course offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people.
Instructors: Sarah Rivett
In the Groove: Technology and Music in American History, From Edison to the iPod
When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, no one, including Edison, knew what to do with the device. Over the next century Americans would engage in an ongoing dialogue with this talking machine, defining and redefining its purpose. This course will track that trajectory, from business tool to scientific instrument to music recorder to musical instrument. By listening to the history of the phonograph, and by examining the desires and experiences of phonograph users, students will perceive more generally the complex relationships that exist between a technology and the people who produce, consume, and transform it.
Instructors: Emily Thompson
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Art and Politics of Food
This course brings methods and ideas from two fields — American studies and the environmental humanities — to examine the role of the arts in U.S. food movements related to agriculture, culinary experimentation and environmental justice. Course materials will include film, visual and performance art, journalism, political ephemera and culinary artifacts. Course participants will develop both an independent research-based essay and a multimedia collaborative project that build on the seminar’s guiding questions and assigned materials.
Instructors: Allison Carruth
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: The Disney Industrial Complex
This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the history and evolution of the Walt Disney Company not only as a multinational media and entertainment conglomerate but also as a powerful cultural force — from the early films and theme parks to the highly successful streaming service. We’ll consider the ever-expanding Disney multiverse (which now includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, among others) as well as the company’s global reach, while paying special attention to its impacts on, and representations of, American history, society, and culture, particularly as they touch on matters of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and place.
Instructors: William Albert Gleason
ANT 328 / AAS 396 / AMS 314 / ART 327
Reckoning: Complicated Histories and Collective Identities
How do we grapple with complicated, violent, and disavowed aspects of our collective histories in contemporary society? This class takes as its central issue how societies chose (or not) to reckon with, redress, and repair their difficult pasts. This course will challenge students to take on the difficult work of grappling with violent and otherwise negative pasts through the cultural media of memorial, monument, museum, and collaborative heritage practice. See "Other Information" below about a possible break trip to a memorial to the victims of racial terrorism in the U.S. South, located in Montgomery, Alabama.
Instructors: Tiffany Cherelle Fryer
Supply-side Aesthetics: American Art in the Age of Reagan
This course investigates the art and the aesthetics of the age of Reagan and Reaganism with an eye toward the present. How did supply-side economics transform the art world and art itself during the 1980s? How did certain period styles propagate Reaganism? Drawing on artworks from the Princeton University Art Museum, art criticism, cultural criticism, political journalism, and an emerging history, we study critically sanctioned as well as controversial artistic movements of the period, including Neo-Expressionism, Graffiti Art, and Commodity Art, asking what this art can teach us about the age, in which an entertainer-turned-politician was elected president.
Instructors: AnnMarie Perl
Princeton Atelier: Women's Work: The Evelyn Brown Project
This course will use the reconstruction of Evelyn Brown, a movement piece by María Irene Fornés, to interrogate questions of female labor and its portrayal on stage. Fornés, arguably the most important Latina dramatist of the 20th century, sourced Evelyn Brown from the diary of an early 20th century New England domestic servant. The class will explore the relation of Evelyn Brown to Fornés larger body of work and lead to deeper questions about staging mundane labor as performance during our time when labor inequality has grown exponentially. Our final project will be a first step to re-staging this little-known work in a professional venue.
Instructors: Gwendolyn A. Alker, Alice Reagan
Cinema in Times of Pandemic: Research Film Studio
This course is dedicated to the study of critical film curation. The pandemic disrupted traditional film production, distribution and canonization. Could this disruption be turned into a creative subversion of the strong industrial and commercial aspect of American filmmaking and the Jim Crow system of Hollywood? In cooperation with the Sundance and the Berlin Film Festivals, we will practice critical curation of films made by women and Afro-American directors and interview filmmakers, film festival directors and leaders of the film industry. Work-products of the class (interviews, reviews, synopses) can be published on our course website.
Instructors: Erika Anita Kiss
Black Dance: History, Theory, Practice
How do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.
Instructors: Jasmine E. Johnson
Conspiracy in America
How do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.
Instructors: Zahid Rafiq Chaudhary
ENV 357 / AMS 457 / GSS 357 / ENG 315
Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular Culture
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?
Instructors: Anne McClintock
GSS 337 / MTD 302 / THR 347 / AMS 336
Gender Crossings in American Musical Theater
This course offers an intensive survey of gender crossings on the American musical theater stage. The course’s study of American musicals (in terms of form, content and context) will be anchored in a historical exploration of world theatrical traditions of cross-gender performance. The course will examine multiple modes of cross-gender performance, while also considering musicals that stage gender role reversals and those that open questions of gender expression and identity.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Graphic Memoir
An exploration of the graphic memoir focusing on the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to expand the possibilities of autobiographical narrative. Through our analysis of highly acclaimed graphic memoirs from the American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese traditions, we examine the visual and verbal constructions of identity with an emphasis on the representation of gender dynamics and cultural conflict.
Instructors: Alfred Bendixen
Asian American History
This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.
Instructors: Beth Lew-Williams
U.S. Intellectual History: Development of American Thought
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.
Instructors: Peter Wirzbicki
HIS 388 / URB 388 / AMS 380 / AAS 388
Unrest and Renewal in Urban America
This course surveys the history of cities in the United States from colonial settlement to the present. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of “melting pots” and cutting-edge innovation, as well as urban crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; downtown and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment.
Instructors: Alison Ellen Isenberg
Arab America: Culture, Activism, and Resistance
This course explores the history of Arabs and Arab Americans in the United States beginning from the 1850s to the present and analyzes the political, cultural, and economic conditions that have influenced Arab American communities. In doing so, the course covers a wide range of topics including: issues of citizenship, racial discrimination and exclusion; racial formation; labor, activism, and resistance; transnational networks; and cultural productions and representations of Arab Americans. Alongside academic publications, we will be reading a variety of sources including legal documents, newsletters, court rulings, poetry, and films.
Instructors: Neama Alamri
HIS 484 / LAS 484 / LAO 484 / AMS 484
Borderlands, Border Lives
The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.
Instructors: Rosina Amelia Lozano
THR 308 / AMS 307 / COM 385 / ENG 260
Metatheater, Then and Now
In 1963, Lionel Abel invented the term "metatheater" to discuss self-referential, anti-illusionist devices — introduced, as he thought, by some Renaissance playwrights — which had become ubiquitous in the theater of his day. "Very meta!" was soon used to describe almost every play ever written. But some plays are more "meta" than others and the methods and motives of their authors vary considerably. This seminar will spend six weeks focused on Greek, Renaissance, and Modern examples of the genre before turning to contemporary American playwrights who have found new and often jaw-dropping uses for metatheatrics.
Instructors: Michael William Cadden
URB 300 / ARC 300 / HUM 300 / AMS 300
Urban Studies Research Seminar
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.
Instructors: Aaron P. Shkud
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Spring 2021
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Introduction to American Popular Culture
This course engages critically with the artifacts and archives of contemporary American culture, inviting students to view, read, and create these artifacts with an eye toward what they tell us about how the United States represents itself and its citizens through various genres including theatre, musicals, film, TV, music, graphic and written novels, games, and the internet. Who are the heroes and villains in contemporary U.S. pop culture? How are family, work, and romance represented across races, genders and sexualities? How are economics and social class portrayed? Do the narratives we consume still promise an American Dream?
Instructors: Jill Dolan
American Genres: Western, Screwball Comedy, Film Noir
Why did three American genres become classics in the same twenty-year period, 1936-56? 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, will focus our discussion.
Instructors: Lee Clark Mitchell
AMS 351 / GSS 427 / AAS 345 / REL 393
Islam in/and America: Race, Religion, and Gender in the United States
What is American Islam and who are U.S. Muslims? This seminar employs lectures, discussions, and a diverse array of texts, including novels, scholarly works, films, arts, music, and much more, to respond to this question, revealing how a focus on Islam and Muslims in the United States produces critical counter-narratives of race, religion, and gender in the United States from the colonial era to the present.
Instructors: Sylvia Chan-Malik
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Fixing a Bug in Democracy: The Math and Practice of Fair Redistricting
Democracy in the United States is looking a bit rickety. Decades of progress in voting rights are countered by recent efforts to weaken the connection between popular opinion and representational outcomes. This course will address redistricting, the process of redrawing legislative and congressional lines, which every state will do in 2021. Redistricting can remedy a distorted Census count — or make its effects tenfold worse. We will address how lines can be drawn to enhance fairness and the representation of diverse communities. As case studies we may redistrict Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Instructors: Samuel Sheng-Hung Wang
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Multiethnic American Short Stories: Tales We Tell Ourselves
Short stories have been used by writers to make concise, insightful comments about American national identity and individuality. Taken up by African-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and many others, the genre has been used to convey experiences with immigration and assimilation, discrimination and oppression, generational divides, and interactions across difference. Examination of such stories deepens our understanding of America’s multiethnic landscape. In this seminar, we will explore stories written by a diverse group of writers to consider the ties that both link and divide multiethnic America.
Instructors: Tessa Lowinske Desmond
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: The Disney Industrial Complex
This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the history and evolution of the Walt Disney Company not only as a multinational media and entertainment conglomerate but also as a powerful cultural force — from the early films and theme parks to the recently launched streaming service. We’ll consider the ever-expanding Disney multiverse (which now includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, among others) as well as the company’s global reach, while paying special attention to its impacts on, and representations of, American history, society, and culture, particularly as they touch on matters of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and place.
Instructors: William Albert Gleason
AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. We will explore how Black activists and artists from the United States have partnered with people of color in Latin America and the Caribbean to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
Instructors: Reena N. Goldthree
Postblack - Contemporary African American Art
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.
Instructors: Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
ANT 223 / AMS 223 / AAS 224 / URB 224
Policing and Militarization 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.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Laurence Ralph
Native American and Indigenous Studies: An Introduction
This course will introduce students to the comparative study of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. We will take a broad hemispheric approach instead of focusing solely on the experiences of any particular native community, allowing students to both acquaint themselves with the diversity of Indigenous communities and better understand the multitude of Indigenous experiences — or, what it means to be Indigenous — across regional contexts. How do processes of imperial expansionism and settler colonialisms shape the conditions within which Indigenous Americans now live? How do native peoples relate to settler colonial governing bodies today?
Instructors: Tiffany Cherelle (Cain) Fryer
Cinema in Times of Pandemic: Research Film Studio
In cooperation with the Sundance and the Berlin Film Festivals, our workshop will investigate the crisis of film production, distribution and canonization made acute by the pandemic as well as divisive culture wars. We will uncover how the formation of film canons is informed by the ebb and flow of the civil rights movement. Our focus will be on stories of injustice filmed by women and Afro-American artists. The seminar work will consist of making short digital presentations and scholarly film-montage essays. The class will record Zoom interviews with critically acclaimed filmmakers, film festival directors and leaders of the film industry.
Instructors: Erika Anita Kiss
DAN 314 / AMS 335 / ANT 356 / THR 314
Performance in Extraordinary Times: Documenting and Analyzing the Present
Performance and crisis have always been partners: entangled in epidemics, state violence and resistance, and austerity regimes, as well as the crisis ordinariness of settler colonialism and structural racism. This seminar examines performance in our extraordinary present using autoethnography, ethnography, and interviews. Course readings and viewings offer historical and contemporary case studies. Guests will discuss the paired challenges of antiracism and the COVID-19 pandemic for performance organizations. Students will collaborate on analyses of dance and performance organizations’ responses to COVID-19 and anti-racist imperatives.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
Moving Writing: Memoir and the Work of Dance
What can memoirs teach us about navigating the demands of a life in dance, and about the ways these demands are profoundly intersectional: shaped by racial, gender, and class hierarchies and economies? This seminar examines memoir as an activist project and mode of performance illuminating the work of dance. Readings include works by Carlos Acosta, Misty Copeland, Li Cunxin, Mark Morris, Jock Soto, and others. Theories of personal narrative theory and autobiography guide our discussions. Students will conduct oral history interviews and investigate personal papers in local archives as forms of memoir. Emphasis on dancers in the Americas.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
Wounded Beauty
This course studies the entanglement between ideas of personhood and the history of ideas about beauty. How does beauty make and unmake persons -socially, legally and culturally- at the intersection of race, gender and aesthetics? Let us move beyond the good versus bad binary that dominates discussions of beauty to focus instead on how beauty in literature and culture have contributed to the conceptualization of modern, western personhood and its inverse (the inhuman, the inanimate, the object). We will trace beauty and its disruptions in the arenas of literature, visual culture, global capitalism, politics, law, science and technology.
Instructors: Anne Cheng
ENG 318 / LAO 318 / LAS 306 / AMS 318
Topics in Latinx Literature and Culture: Latinx Literary Worlds
This course will look to the many narratives and histories that comprise the multiple worlds of Latinx literatures. How does the term Latinx respond to questions of gender and language? What does the history of naming this pan-ethnic group tell us about U.S. racial-ethnic categories? How do borders become an occasion to rethink space and psyche, as well as entangled crisis? Taking a hemispheric approach, this course will examine how Latinx texts lend imagination and poetic vision to the experience of migration, the movements of diaspora, and the lasting effects of colonization.
Instructors: Christina León
Topics in 18th-Century Literature: North American ‘Indians’ in Transatlantic Contexts
Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor notes the word “indian” is a “colonial enactment” that “has no referent in tribal languages or cultures.” But as a trope it has long provided Western culture with a vision of romantic primitivism, of savage cruelty, or of the doomed victims of colonial expansion. This course will examine 18th-century transatlantic representations of North American Indigenous people and consider the cultural functions of these representations and their role in settler colonialism. In addition to literary texts, we will also examine art and visual culture, collected objects, and philosophical writing from the period.
Instructors: Robbie John Richardson
Reading Islands: Caribbean Waters, the Archipelago, and its Narratives
The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas — islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, we will explore questions of indigeneity, colonial contact, iterations of enslavement, and the plantation matrix in literary texts. How do island-writers evoke gender and a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction?
Instructors: Christina León
Conspiracy in American Literature and Culture
How do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.
Instructors: Zahid Rafiq Chaudhary
ENV 357 / AMS 457 / GSS 357 / ENG 315
Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular Culture
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?
Instructors: Anne McClintock
Pleasure, Power and Profit: Race and Sexualities in a Global Era
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.
Instructors: Anne McClintock
Asian American History
This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.
Instructors: Beth Lew-Williams
Race, Labor, and Empire
This course explores histories of race, labor, and empire in the United States from late 19th century to the present from a transnational perspective. In doing so, we will examine the history of race as a product of modernity and colonization. By the end of this course, students will have a keen understanding of how racial constructions (in intersection with gender, sexuality, and class) are deeply intertwined with histories of empire, labor, and immigration. Yet, we will also discuss how groups have resisted, survived, and thrived. We will engage a wide range of sources including legal documents, court rulings, newspapers, and literature.
Instructors: Neama Alamri
Archiving the American West
Working with Princeton’s Western Americana collections, students will explore what archives are and how they are made. Who controls what’s in them? How do they shape what historians write? Using little studied collections, students will produce online “exhibitions” for the Princeton University Library website, and research potential acquisitions for the library collections. Significant time will be devoted to in-class workshops focused on manuscript and visual materials (all digitized for the class). Special visitors will include curators, archivists, librarians, and dealers.
Instructors: Martha A. Sandweiss
Reconstructing the Union: Law, Democracy, and Race after the American Civil War
The Reconstruction of the Union, following the American Civil War, remade the United States. This course will examine how Reconstruction set the stage for rest of the 19th century in all its contradictions. One big theme for the course is how the Civil War and Reconstruction shaped American political philosophy, especially how later debates of the Progressive Era over the size of the government and over laissez-faire capitalism developed out of Reconstruction. We will examine some of the major constitutional and political changes that occur during the aftermath of the Civil War.
Instructors: Peter Wirzbicki
The History of Incarceration in the U.S.
The prison is a growth industry in the United States; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. 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.
Instructors: Wendy Warren
Violence in America
This course considers the history of collective violence in America. We will define “collective violence” broadly to encompass people acting on behalf of the U.S. government (i.e., police, soldiers, militiamen, and immigration officers) and people acting as civilians (i.e., slaveholders, vigilantes, terrorists, and protestors). A series of case studies (drawn primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries) will introduce disparate forms of violence, including vigilantism, slavery, massacre, imperialism, riot, segregation, and terrorism.
Instructors: Beth Lew-Williams
Writing Lincoln: Biography, Film, Literature
This seminar explores how the historical image of Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) has been developed in American memory through writing, film and literature. Issues to be examined are the major groups of biographical interpreters (the “personal life,” the “Progressive Lincoln,” the “Liberal Hero”), the portrayals of Lincoln in literature (Whitman, Vidal), and how concepts of Lincoln have been shaped by film (Spielberg’s Lincoln, 2012) and television episodes (The Twilight Zone, Star Trek).
Instructors: Allen Carl Guelzo
Introduction to Latino/a/x Studies
This is an introductory survey of critical topics, themes, and approaches to the interdisciplinary field of Latin@x Studies. Drawing from anthropology, sociology, history, literature, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, this course will analyze the role and position of Latin@x in the United States alongside the policies and practices of the United States in the Caribbean and Latin America. The course will explore questions of citizenship, immigration, imperialism, settler/colonialism, border crossing/borderlands, mass incarceration, policing, globalization, and other emerging formations of latinidad from a transnational perspective.
Instructors: Heidy Sarabia
Latinx Autobiography
This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse — but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
Race and Religion in America
In this seminar we examine the tangled and shifting relationship between religion and race in American history. In doing so, we explore a broad landscape of racial construction, identity, and experience and consider such topics as American interpretations of race in the Bible, religion and racial slavery, race and missions, religion, race, and science, popular culture representations of racialized religion, and religiously-grounded resistance to racial hierarchy.
Instructors: Judith Weisenfeld
The Orange Bubble
This seminar uses the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality to help students understand undergraduate life at Princeton. We will make sense of how the experiences you have had over the past four years are strongly influenced by historical, cultural, social, and technological forces. The aim is to develop a sociological understanding of the Princeton experience, and use that to reflect more generally on the organization of communities. Topics covered include sports, town-gown relationships, nightlife, academics, sexual assault, eating clubs, admissions, systematic racism, the concepts of merit, inclusion, and equality.
Instructors: Mitchell Duneier, Shamus Rahman Khan
THR 385 / AMS 385 / GSS 385 / LAO 385
Theater and Society Now
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of “real” life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
THR 416 / AMS 416 / COM 453 / ENG 456
Decentering/Recentering the Western Canon in the Contemporary American Theater
Why do some BIPOC dramatists (from the United States and Canada) choose to adapt/revise/re-envision/deconstruct/rewrite/appropriate canonical texts from the Western theatrical tradition. While their choices might be accused of recentering and reinforcing “white” narratives that often marginalize and/or exoticize racial and ethnic others, we might also see this risky venture as a useful strategy to write oneself into a tradition that is itself constantly being revised and reevaluated and to claim that tradition as one’s own. What are the artistic, cultural, and economic “rewards” for deploying this method of playmaking? What are risks?
Instructors: Michael William Cadden
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Fall 2020
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America Then and Now
An introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American studies. Employing history, theater, law, and politics, and focusing on such critical concepts as “community,” “xenophobia,” and “race,” we will consider the structures of knowing and feeling that have formed America since its founding. Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to the ways that culture and difference have shaped, and continue to shape, the signature ideas and debates that have made the nation what it is today. In the fall 2020 semester, we will be particularly interested in the political, social, and cultural questions that inform the current U.S. presidential election.
Instructors: Patricia Fernández-Kelly, William Albert Gleason, Ali Adam Valenzuela
Issues in American Public Health
The study of public health is an interdisciplinary inquiry involving issues of politics, policy, history, science, law, philosophy, ethics, geography, sociology, environmental studies, and economics, among others. Students will examine governments’ role in assuring and promoting health, through the exploration of issues on America’s “public health agenda,” such as epidemic response, tobacco use, the impact of weight on health, mandatory vaccination, disease prevention, and violence. In doing so, they will consider the impact of race, income, gender, place and environment, education, capitalism and democracy on health outcomes.
Instructors: Leslie E. Gerwin
Sondheim’s Musicals and the Making of America
In this course, we’ll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from Company (1970) 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.
Instructors: Stacy E. Wolf
Privacy, Publicity, and the Text Message
This seminar will explore how we negotiate the distance between ourselves and others through text messages. Texts sustain an ambient intimacy that is increasingly redefining borders that range from the interpersonal — via anonymous mental health support — to the international — via reporting platforms for immigrant communities. What technical and social expectations of privacy do we operate with when sending a point-to-point message? How do novelists incorporate text messages into works of fiction? What does it mean that Frank Ocean can sing, “you text nothing like you look”?
Instructors: Grant R. Wythoff
FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body
The fat body operates at the conjuncture of political economy, beauty standards, and health. This seminar asks, How does this “f-word” discipline and regulate bodies in /as public? What is the “ideal” American public body and who gets to occupy that position? How are complex personhood, expressivity, health, and citizenship contested cultural and political economic projects? We will examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness using dance, performance, memoirs, and media texts as case studies. Intersectional dimensions of the fat body are central to the course. No previous performance experience necessary.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
Topics in Race and Public Policy: Race and Inequality in American Democracy
This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.
Instructors: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
ANT 419 / AMS 417 / GSS 423 / LAS 419
Race, Gender, Empire
How is empire made? How is it imagined and reimagined, mutating and creating new global relations? What are its social, political and material signatures? In this seminar we will explore how empire’s derivative manifestations and entrenched mechanisms (e.g. race, gender or capitalism) influence our understandings of history and the structuring of our social relationships. Engaging transdisciplinary works we will focus on how empire constructs contradictory logics of belonging in localized contexts through the formation of intimate, biopolitical and ecological relationships between people, territories and collective institutions of governance.
Instructors: Tiffany Cherelle Cain
Model Minority Fictions
Where did the stereotype of Asian Americans as model minorities — overachieving whiz kids, industrious workers, “tiger mothers,” “crazy rich” Asians — come from? What accounts for the model minority myth’s persistence today? How has its representational scheme changed over time? Does model minoritism have a literary (and not only social) history? By reading across fiction, visual culture, and economic history, this seminar traces the changing definitions of Asians in the United States from “yellow peril” to model minorities: from the myth’s wartime origins, to the birth of American neoliberalism, and onward to the global rise of Asia in the 21st century.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Special Topics in Creative Writing: Writing Political Fiction
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.
Instructors: A.M. Homes
DAN 314 / AMS 335 / ANT 356 / THR 314
Performance in Extraordinary Times: Documenting and Analyzing the Present
Performance and crisis have always been partners: entangled in epidemics, state violence and resistance, and austerity regimes, as well as the crisis ordinariness of settler colonialism and structural racism. This seminar examines performance in our extraordinary present using autoethnography, ethnography, and interviews. Course readings and viewings offer historical and contemporary case studies. Guests will discuss the paired challenges of anti-racism and the COVID-19 pandemic for performance organizations. Students will collaborate on analyses of dance and performance organizations’ responses to COVID-19 and anti-racist imperatives.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
DAN 348 / AMS 349 / GSS 418 / MTD 349
The Reverence and Violence of Modern Dance
This hybrid studio/seminar course progresses in two tracks: one of embodied movement practices and the other of theoretico-historical critique. The canon of modern dance — arguably an American trajectory — is the source material for our interdisciplinary work. We will mimic and examine landmark choreographies in order to explore foundational tenets of modern art and modernity at large. Ableism and nihilism, sovereignty and sexuality, race and gender, are some of the themes that we will face along the path of analyzing the work of Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Vaclav Nijinsky.
Instructors: Netta Carnit Yerushalmy
DAN 357 / AMS 358 / THR 357 / VIS 357
Are You For Sale? Performance Making, Philanthropy and Ethics
In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics. How are performing artists financing their work, and what does this mean in relationship to economic and social justice? How did we arrive to the current conditions of arts funding? What is the connection between wealth and giving and when are those ties inherently questionable? What is at stake in the debate of public versus private support? Does funding follow artists’ concerns or delimit them?
Instructors: Miguel Gutierrez
Introduction to Indigenous Literatures
This course reads Indigenous literatures to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. Students engage in projects that impact Indigenous studies initiatives at Princeton by building partnerships with Indigenous communities, locally, nationally, and internationally. Community-engaged projects and readings by Native American and Aboriginal Canadian authors will connect Indigenous histories across time and space invite new ways of thinking about the past, present, and future of the Americas and the world.
Instructors: Sarah Rivett
American Literature: 1930-Present
A study of eleven modern American writers over eighty years that emphasizes the transition from modernism to postmodernism to retro-realism.
Instructors: Lee Clark Mitchell
Forms of Literature: American Short Stories
The short story reveals narrative at its most succinct, stripped bare (or rather contained within indispensable parts). Often viewed as insufficient novels, stories expose more fully the possibilities of narrative itself in revealing the flashes of character, lyricism, comedy, voice, coincidence, even fate that shape all fictional forms. This course examines the development of American short fiction over two centuries, revealing its extraordinary variety and complexity.
Instructors: Lee Clark Mitchell
Queer Literatures: Theory, Narrative, and Aesthetics
This course will read from various trajectories of queer literature and engage “reading queerly” across race, gender, ability, class, and geography. We will consider the etymology of queer and think through its affiliate terms: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans. How are such narratives encounters with power that are historically situated in relation to the national formations, carceral states, and racial capitalism?
Instructors: Christina A. León, R.L. Goldberg
Major Author(s): Mourning America: Emerson and Douglass
This course focuses on the relations and differences between these two “representative men” of the 19th century. Demonstrating that Douglass’ strategies of writing have relays with Emerson’s points will enable us to bring out the radically political and historical character of Emerson’s writings but also the profoundly literary elements of Douglass’ political writings. Using the writings of these two key figures of the 19th century as a kind of measure, the course will seek to understand the governing cultural and political rhetorics through which America thought about such issues as race, slavery, manifest destiny, westward expansion, and identity.
Instructors: Eduardo Lujan Cadava
ENV 357 / AMS 457 / GSS 357 / ENG 315
Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular Culture
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?
Instructors: Anne McClintock
Feminist Futures: Contemporary S. F. by Women
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.
Instructors: Alfred Bendixen
U.S. Intellectual History: Development of American Thought
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.
Instructors: Peter Wirzbicki
Arab America: Culture, Activism, and Resistance
This course explores the history of Arabs and Arab Americans in the United States beginning from the 1850s to the present. We will be exploring the historical, political, cultural and economic conditions that have influenced Arab American communities. This course covers a wide range of topics including: issues of citizenship, racial discrimination and exclusion; racial formation; labor, activism and resistance; transnational networks; cultural productions and representations of Arab Americans. We will be exploring a wide range of sources including legal documents, newsletters, court rulings, poetry, novels and films.
Instructors: Neama Alamri
Latinx Autobiography
This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse — but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
Secession, the Civil War, and the Constitution
This seminar explores constitutional and legal issues posed by the attempted secession of eleven states of the Federal Union in 1860-1865 and the civil war this attempt triggered. Issues to be examined include the nature of secession movements (both in terms of the constitutional controversy posed in 1860-1861 and modern secession movements), the development of the "war powers" doctrine of the presidency, the suspension by the writ of habeas corpus, the use of military tribunals, and abuses of civil rights on both sides of the Civil War.
Instructors: Allen Carl Guelzo
THR 385 / AMS 385 / GSS 385 / LAO 385
Theater and Society Now
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of “real” life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
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Spring 2020
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Access to Health: Right, Privilege, Responsibility
What does it mean to be healthy and who should ensure that individuals and communities achieve health? This course will examine the meaning of public health in America exploring the role of government as a regulator, service-provider, and director of personal behaviors. We will consider the legal, ethical, economic and political foundations of government actions and the challenges of addressing societal ills that account for disparities in health outcomes. Students will investigate and analyze health issues seeking to translate academic inquiry into policy prescriptions that impact human health.
Instructors: Leslie E. Gerwin
Education and Inequality
In this course, students examine the relationship between inequality and schooling in the United States. We explore the educational practices and organizational structures through which social inequality is produced and reproduced inside schools and how social class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other social differences shape educational outcomes. Additionally, we examine students’ responses to inequality and theories of resistance. We mainly consider theoretically grounded, qualitative research related to K-12 education. Several readings discuss the realities of urban schooling, and each week we connect the readings to current policy trends.
Instructors: Kathleen M. Nolan
The Architecture of Race
This seminar explores the varied ways American architecture and design have lent themselves to processes of racialization, from embodied experiences of race within the built environment to racialized representations of architecture. How might the built environment change how we perceive, understand, and experience race? How does architecture not only reflect race but constitute a way of seeing and feeling race? To expand our understanding of architecture’s relationship to race, our approach will be interdisciplinary, including readings from fields such as but not limited to urban studies, critical ethnic studies, and performance studies.
Instructors: Ashlie Andrea Sandoval
The American State
As we have increasingly looked to the federal government to provide and protect policies and rights that benefit its population, how have the branches of government risen to this occasion? Where have they struggled? What obstacles have they faced? What barriers have they created? This course is an investigation of the institutional, political, and legal development of the unique “American state” in the contemporary era.
Instructors: Sarah Lynn Staszak
Ruled by Conviction: Confronting Narratives of White Masculinity
The term cis white man is a subject position that is at the center of political discord in America. Whiteness and masculinity, once the foundation from which all other subject positions were constructed, has come to stand in for what is wrong with America, or the frame of power that we should return to. As Sara Ahmed points out in her essay “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” the history of the white body is “the body at home.” I add masculinity to her formulation to study the formation of white masculinity politically and culturally in an American context where the corporeality of white masculinity is considered the origin story of American life.
Instructors: P. Carl
AMS 365 / ENG 365 / GSS 365 / MTD 365
Isn’t It Romantic? The Broadway Musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim
Song. Dance. Man. Woman. These are the basic components of the Broadway musical theatre. How have musical theatre artists, composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and designers worked with these building blocks to create this quintessentially American form of art and entertainment? This course will explore conventional and resistant performances of gender and sexuality in the Broadway musical since the 1940s. Why are musicals structured by love and romance?
Instructors: Stacy E. Wolf
Topics in Global Race and Ethnicity: The Post-Colonial Imagination and Africana Thought
What does the “post-colonial” mean? In this course, we will engage the literary and theoretical production of formerly colonized subjects from parts of Africa and the Caribbean, as we seek to determine what the post-colonial imagination might look like. The emphasis will be on close readings of works that emerge from the crucible of the Black Atlantic’s “encounter” with European and American colonialism, as we question how the identities of formerly colonized subjects inform their views of the world.
Instructors: Kevin A. Wolfe
ANT 379 / HUM 379 / AMS 379 / AAS 375
Making History: Museums, Monuments, and Cultural Heritage
This course contends with how shared histories are collectively made and remade in contemporary society. We will interrogate the meaning of history, memory, heritage, and “the past.” What is at stake in how we represent the past? What do we mean when we make a claim on history as “ours”? What role do museums, monuments, and memorials play in the formation and maintenance of collective identities? Can practices like public history and archaeology promote collective healing?
Instructors: Tiffany Cherelle Cain
ART 393 / SLA 393 / AMS 392 / RES 393
Getting the Picture: Photojournalism in the U.S. and Russia
Just as the Internet does today, the picture press of the last century defined global visual knowledge of the world. The pictures gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers were often heavily edited, presented in carefully devised sequences, and printed alongside text. The picture press was as expansive as it was appealing, as informative as it was propagandistic, regularly delivered to newsstands and doorsteps for the everyday consumer of news, goods, celebrity, and politics. Through firsthand visual analysis of the picture presses of both the United States and Russia, this course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of images.
Instructors: Katherine Anne Bussard, Katherine M.H. Reischl
DAN 215 / ANT 355 / GSS 215 / AMS 215
Introduction to Dance Across Cultures
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.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
Special Topics in Dance History, Criticism, and Aesthetics: Mobilizing Bodies/Dancing the State
Dance is an underrecognized political tool despite the use of performance to project national identity and soft power on the global stage. It also offers strategies for choreographing state initiatives and protest. This course investigates dance as both a state and a resistant practice of mobilization and identity constrction. Forms studied include hula, Soviet ballet, modern dance during WWII and the Cold War, and others. Activities include readings, discussions, performance exercises, and viewings of performances. Guest artists will conduct studio sessions in a number of the dance logics. No prior dance experience is necessary.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
The Reverence and Violence of Modern Dance
This hybrid studio/seminar course progresses in two tracks: one of embodied movement practices and the other of theoretico-historical critique. The canon of modern dance — arguably an American trajectory — is the source material for our interdisciplinary work. We will mimic and examine landmark choreographies in order to explore foundational tenets of modern art and modernity at large. Ableism and nihilism, sovereignty and sexuality, race and gender, are some of the themes that we will face along the path of analyzing the work of Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Vaclav Nijinsky.
Instructors: Netta Carnit Yerushalmy
Topics in American Literature: American Jewish Writers: Citizens, Immigrants, and Iconoclasts
American Jewish Writers adopt a variety of personae: rabbis and rascals; native-born citizens and immigrants; traditionalists and iconoclasts. Why these strategies — and how they shaped the body of fiction, poetry and nonfiction prose that we know as “American Jewish Literature”? We’ll consider the historic sweep of American Jewish writing, from the 18th to the 21st century, focusing on four waves of Jewish immigration: from Austro-Hungary and Prussia, Eastern Europe, Nazi Germany, and the USSR. Students will pursue original research using the holdings of the Firestone’s superb Milberg Collection of Jewish American Writers.
Instructors: Esther Helen Schor
ENG 411 / AAS 413 / AMS 411 / THR 412
Major Author(s): August Wilson: African American Life in the 20th Century
August Wilson completed what many consider the most ambitious project of any American playwright. His cycle of ten plays, one for each decade, chronicles African American life in the 20th century. We will explore all ten plays as individual drama and depictions of history. We will read standard histories to gain background and context.
Instructors: Robert Neil Sandberg
ENV 357 / AMS 457 / GSS 357 / ENG 315
Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular Culture
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?
Instructors: Anne McClintock
Pleasure, Power and Profit: Race and Sexualities in a Global Era
“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.
Instructors: Anne McClintock
Graphic Memoir
An exploration of the graphic memoir focusing on the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to expand the possibilities of autobiographical narrative. Through our analysis of highly acclaimed graphic memoirs from the American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese traditions, we analyze the visual and verbal constructions of identity with an emphasis on the representation of gender dynamics and cultural conflict.
Instructors: Alfred Bendixen
History of the American West
This course examines the history of the place we now call the American West, from pre-contact to the present. Our primary focus will be on the struggles between and among peoples to control resources and political power, and to shape the ways in which western history is told. We will pay particular attention to the role of visual and popular culture in shaping the national imagination of the region.
Instructors: Martha A. Sandweiss
Life-Writing: Diaries, Memoirs, Autobiographies and History
This seminar will explore how historians can read, interpret and use individual testimonies of different kinds: memoirs, diaries and autobiographies. We will focus on writings of this sort by men and women in Britain and the American Colonies/United States from c.1650 to the First World War. Why did these sorts of texts become increasingly popular on both sides of the Atlantic during that period, and what kinds of challenges and opportunities do they present to historians now?
Instructors: Linda Jane Colley
The History of Incarceration in the U.S.
The prison is a growth industry in the United States; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. 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.
Instructors: Regina Kunzel
Abraham Lincoln and America, 1809-1865
This course explores the political biography, principles and practices of Abraham Lincoln. The issues to be examined include the international context of liberal democracy in the 19th century, the war powers of the presidency, the contest of Whig and Democratic political ideas, the relation of the executive branch to the legislative and judicial branches, diplomacy, and the presidential cabinet. While tracing Lincoln’s biography from the Illinois frontier to the White House, we will explore how his own life was shaped by, and shaped, questions of enterprise and society, slavery and emancipation, and Civil War and Reconstruction.
Instructors: Allen Carl Guelzo
HIS 484 / LAS 484 / LAO 484 / AMS 484
Borderlands, Border Lives
The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.
Instructors: Rosina Amelia Lozano
“Cult” Controversies in America
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.”
Instructors: Judith Weisenfeld
THR 353 / AMS 353 / GSS 417 / LAO 353
21st Century Latinx Drama
This course offers a practice-based overview of theater-making in the 21st century through an intensive study of contemporary Latinx dramatists, companies, and movements in the United States. Through weekly readings, discussions and independent research/writing exercises, the seminar will investigate the cultural, artistic, social and political interventions of 21st-century U.S. Latinx drama.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
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Fall 2019
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America Then and Now
An introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American studies that takes “America” as a challenging analytical category rather than a given. Employing literature, theatre and performance, history, visual culture, and politics, this course examines the idea of America in its global, national, community contexts and its material and imaginary manifestations. We will explore a series of central concepts such as “citizenship,” “family,” and “imperialism,” teasing out the tensions and paradoxes that historically structure these terms, while focusing on signature ideas, concerns, and debates that have made the nation what it is today.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, William Albert Gleason, Stacy E. Wolf
Issues in American Public Health
The study of public health is an interdisciplinary inquiry involving issues of politics, policy, history, science, law, philosophy, ethics, geography, sociology, environmental studies, and economics, among others. Students will examine governments’ role in assuring and promoting health, through the exploration of issues on America’s “public health agenda,” such as epidemic response, tobacco use, the impact of weight on health, mandatory vaccination, disease prevention, and violence. In doing so, they will consider the impact of race, income, gender, place and environment, education, capitalism and democracy on health outcomes.
Instructors: Leslie E. Gerwin
Multiethnic American Short Stories: Tales We Tell Ourselves
Short stories have been used by writers to make concise, insightful comments about American national identity and individuality. Taken up by African-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and many others, the genre has been used to convey experiences with immigration and assimilation, discrimination and oppression, generational divides, and interactions across difference. Examination of such stories deepens our understanding of America’s multiethnic landscape. In this seminar, we will explore stories written by a diverse group of writers to consider the ties that both link and divide multiethnic America.
Instructors: Tessa Lowinske Desmond
Creative Ecologies: American Environmental Narrative and Art, 1980-2020
This seminar explores how writers and artists — alongside scientists and activists — have shaped American environmental thought from 1980 to today. The seminar asks: How do different media convey the causes and potential solutions to environmental challenges, ranging from biodiversity loss and food insecurity to pollution and climate change? What new art forms are needed to envision sustainable and just futures? Course materials include popular science writing, graphic narrative, speculative fiction, animation art, documentary film, and data visualization along with research from anthropology, ecology, history, literary studies, and philosophy.
Instructors: Allison Carruth
American Noir: Crime Fiction and Film
A study of a distinctive new genre that is eminently American, distinctively modernist, and brazenly vulgar. Louche as the subject is, writers were able more directly to engage issues of social inequality (racial, sexual, economic) along with changing notions of gender construction. Such fiction continues today, but its appeal for cinema has been tremendous, and we will focus on the ways adaptation modified popular formulas.
Instructors: Lee Clark Mitchell
FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body
The fat body operates at the conjuncture of political economy, beauty standards, and health. This seminar asks, How does this “f-word” discipline and regulate bodies in /as public? What is the “ideal” American public body and who gets to occupy that position? How are complex personhood, expressivity, health, and citizenship contested cultural and political economic projects? We will examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness using dance, performance, memoirs, and media texts as case studies. Intersectional dimensions of the fat body are central to the course. No previous performance experience necessary.
Instructors: Judith Hamera
In the Groove: Technology and Music in American History, From Edison to the iPod
When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, no one, including Edison, knew what to do with the device. Over the next century Americans would engage in an ongoing dialogue with this talking machine, defining and redefining its purpose. This course will track that trajectory, from business tool to scientific instrument to music recorder to musical instrument. By listening to the history of the phonograph, and by examining the desires and experiences of phonograph users, students will perceive more generally the complex relationships that exist between a technology and the people who produce, consume, and transform it.
Instructors: Emily Thompson
AMS Capstone Seminar: About Faces: Case Studies in the History of Reading Faces
What “information” does your face transmit? This course explores aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical theories about human faces as markers of identity and carriers of cultural information, in terms of race, gender and class. We will turn throughout the course to the collections of the Princeton Art Museum to consider how visual art depicts the processes through which we “read” faces. We will also think about the limits of “faciality” — i.e. at what point is a face not a face — especially alongside questions of technology and performance.
Instructors: Monica Huerta
Public Policy in the U.S. Racial State
This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.
Instructors: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Native American and Indigenous Studies: An Introduction
This course will introduce students to the comparative study of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. We will take a broad hemispheric approach instead of focusing solely on the experiences of any particular native community, allowing students to both acquaint themselves with the diversity of indigenous communities and better understand the multitude of indigenous experiences — or, what it means to be Indigenous — across regional contexts. How do processes of imperial expansionism and settler colonialisms shape the conditions within which indigenous Americans now live? How do native peoples relate to settler colonial governing bodies today?
Instructors: Tiffany Cain
Topics in American Literature: American Fiction and Film: Catholics and Jews
We explore the role of religion and ethnicity in 20th- and 21st-century fiction and film, with emphasis on the contributions of Catholic and Jewish writers and auteurs. Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants began to influence American culture in the late 19th century. Jewish descendants established Hollywood film studios in the interwar years; refugees from Hitler settled in Hollywood after WWII to direct and act. By the middle of the 20th century, Catholic and Jewish writers emerged as important fictional voices, a trend that continued through the end of the century and into the 21st.
Instructors: Maria A. DiBattista, Deborah Epstein Nord
Global Novel
How do novels represent the global? How have new media systems and economic exchange transformed not only the way novels are produced and distributed but also the internal form of the literary works themselves? This course examines how writers register the interconnected nature of modern life and the narrative strategies that they invent to make sense of migration, war, urbanization, and financialization. Students will learn interdisciplinary methods for reading literature’s potential for sociological and historical knowledge by considering how the global novel grapples with empire and what political futures it forecloses and opens up.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
ENV 357 / AMS 457 / GSS 357 / ENG 315
Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular Culture
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?
Instructors: Anne McClintock
GSS 337 / MTD 302 / THR 347 / AMS 336
Gender Crossings in American Musical Theater
This course offers an intensive survey of gender crossings on the American musical theater stage. The course’s study of American musicals (in terms of form, content and context) will be anchored in a historical exploration of world theatrical traditions of cross-gender performance. The course will examine multiple modes of cross-gender performance, while also considering musicals that stage gender role reversals and those that open questions of gender expression and identity.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Asian American History
This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.
Instructors: Beth Lew-Williams
Unrest and Renewal in Urban America
This course surveys the history of cities in the United States from colonial settlement to the present. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of immigrant “melting pots” and cutting-edge innovation, as well as urban crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; center and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment.
Instructors: Alison Ellen Isenberg
Race in the American Empire
This seminar takes a comparative, relational, and intersectional approach to the history of race in the American Empire. We will begin with two structuring contexts: European colonialism and transatlantic slavery. Over the semester, we will travel from the Atlantic coast to Puerto Rico, the Lumbee Nation in North Carolina, Hawaii, and the Philippines. We will end in Ferguson, Missouri; Oak Creek, Wisconsin; and at the U.S. - Mexico border. Course readings draw from a range of fields and engage diverse histories to examine the pervasiveness of race in the United States. Themes include labor, migration, violence, science, law, and resistance.
Instructors: Bernadette Jeanne Perez
History of African American Political Thought
This course explores central themes and ideas in the history of African American political thought: slavery and freedom, solidarity and sovereignty, exclusion and citizenship, domination and democracy, inequality and equality, rights and respect. Readings will be drawn, primarily, from canonical authors, including Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ralph Ellison, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This is an introductory course, which emphasizes both thematic and historical approaches to political theory.
Instructors: Desmond D. Jagmohan
SPA 366 / AMS 326 / LAO 366 / GSS 364
Witchcraft, Rituals and Colonialism
This course will explore witchcraft and rituality in the Americas through accusations and identity claims. We will look at how witchcraft has been used in colonial and imperial contexts to control, sanction, and extract power from women and marginalized groups in different periods, as well as how people make claims to witchcraft and rituals as a way to thwart domination. Topics include: shamanism in Latin America, the Mexican Inquisition, Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diasporic religious systems, and the contemporary social media ritual activism of “bruja feminisms.” Students will be introduced to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
THR 332 / AMS 346 / GSS 342 / LAO 332
Movements for Diversity in American Theater
Theater artists routinely bend, twist and break all kinds of rules to create the imaginary worlds they bring to life on stage. Why, then, has the American theater so struggled to meaningfully address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion? In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical overview of agitation and advocacy by theater artist-activists aiming to transform American theatre-making as both industry and creative practice, as we connect those histories with the practices, structures and events determining the ways diversity is (and is not) a guiding principle of contemporary American theater.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Education Policy in the United States
Poor students concentrated in urban centers lag academically behind their more advantaged peers, and explanations for this achievement gap are hotly debated. While some have pointed to the quality of education offered in urban public schools as the primary culprit, others have drawn attention to the role of out-of-school factors in creating and exacerbating these gaps. In this course, we will evaluate the possibilities for and barriers to closing achievement gaps. We will think systematically about the effects of school reform on schools, teachers, and the students they serve.
Instructors: Jennifer L. Jennings
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Spring 2019
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America Then and Now
This course introduces students to the subjects of American studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in America’s past and present in order to understand America as it exists today. It examines both 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, and it engages the voices of diverse individuals and cultures in telling the story of America then and now.
Instructors: Rachael Ziady DeLue, Bernadette Jeanne Perez, Sarah Rivett
AMS 301 / ENG 432 / GSS 338 / ASA 301
Science Fiction and Fact
How does science fiction challenge “facts” about the biology of race, gender, sexuality and other categories of difference? This seminar explores the ways in which contemporary sci-fi that centers the experiences of marginalized communities reconceptualizes the techniques and technologies of social differentiation. The readings couple a sci-fi text with work by scholars across disciplines who have drawn attention to the reemergence of race as a biological rather than social category in genetics and genomics research.
Instructors: Tala Khanmalek
Education and Inequality
In this course, students examine the relationship between inequality and schooling in the United States. We explore the educational practices and organizational structures through which social inequality is produced and reproduced inside schools and how social class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other social differences shape educational outcomes. Additionally, we examine students' responses to inequality and theories of resistance. We mainly consider theoretically grounded, qualitative research related to K-12 education. Several readings discuss the realities of urban schooling, and each week we connect the readings to current policy trends.
Instructors: Kathleen M. Nolan
AMS 315 / MTD 315 / THR 344 / AAS 309
Race and the American Musical from Minstrelsy to Hamilton
This seminar explores how and why race is a key component of the Broadway musical theatre. From 19th-century minstrel shows, in which African American performers “blacked up” to play Black characters previously performed by whites in blackface; to the mid-20th century “golden age” musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, in which Asian characters were created to support a white liberal agenda; to the blockbuster Hamilton, which merges musical theatre conventions and hip hop to re-tell the story of America, performances of race and ethnicity structure the American musical’s aesthetic and political work. How did we get from there to here?
Instructors: Stacy E. Wolf
Decolonizing America: A Seminar in Black Worldmaking
This seminar asks its participants to think critically about notions of American dominance, American exceptionalism, and indeed about American power, through the critical lenses of race, gender and decoloniality. We move back and forth across temporalities and social spaces thinking about what kinds of American futures African Americans imagined in the past, and what kinds of futures feel possible in the present. The course uses scholarly readings, science fiction, poetry, film, television, and popular music as a way to understand how Black people in America try to live out a daily disposition toward the decolonial.
Instructors: Brittney C. Cooper
American Legal Thought
This course surveys American legal thought and the practices of American lawyers. Along the way, it questions the notion of distinctive “schools,” as well as the distinctive legality and the distinctive Americanness of legal thought. It offers an intellectual history of 20th-century American law, with an emphasis on core controversies and debates.
Instructors: Hendrik Arnold Hartog
American Agrarians: Ideas of Land, Labor, and Food
For agrarians, farms and fields are prized over boardrooms and shopping malls. Agrarianism values hard work, self-sufficiency, simplicity and connection with nature. For some today, it is a compelling antidote to globalization and consumerism. This course examines American agrarianism past and present and its central role in our national imaginary, tracing the complex and contradictory contours of a social and political philosophy that seeks freedom and yet gave way to enslaving, excluding, and ignoring many based on race, immigration status, and gender. A focus will be on new agrarianism and movements for food, land, and social justice.
Instructors: Tessa Lowinske Desmond
Topics in Race and Public Policy: Radical Subjects - Race and Deportation
This seminar critically explores the historical practice of deportation in the United States both past and present, looking at how our ideas of human rights, freedom, and belonging intersect with racial and national ideologies. We will work through a wide archive of literature, theory, and art, drawing important connections between the political geographies, experiences, and responses of Indigenous Americans, Black dissidents and Mexican deportees. This study of removal will help us to reflect on the contemporary moment of global mass migrations when humans are increasingly managed through preventative policing, detention, and deportation.
Instructors: Olivia Mena
Postblack - Contemporary African American Art
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.
Instructors: Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
ANT 223 / AMS 223 / AAS 224 / URB 224
Policing and Militarization 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.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Laurence Ralph
Religion and Culture: Muslims in America
The course is an introduction to Muslim cultures in the United States. We will read texts from anthropology, sociology, history and other fields to develop an understanding of the historical and present diversity of Muslim communities in America. The first half provides a survey of Muslim communities in this country from the 17th century onward. The second half is a thematic approach to various topics: 9/11, women and gender, religious conversion, interfaith relations, youth, mosques as institutions, and Islamophobia. In addition to scholarly materials, we will learn from multimedia sources (films, news, cartoons), visitors, and a visit to local mosque.
Instructors: Aly Kassam-Remtulla
Supply-side Aesthetics: American Art in the Age of Reagan
This course investigates the art and the aesthetics of the age of Reagan and Reaganism with an eye toward the present. How did supply-side economics transform the art world and art itself during the 1980s? How did certain period styles propagate Reaganism? Drawing on artworks from the Princeton University Art Museum, art criticism, cultural criticism, political journalism, and an emerging history, we study critically sanctioned as well as controversial artistic movements of the period, including Neo-Expressionism, Graffiti Art, and Commodity Art, asking what this art can teach us about the age, in which an entertainer-turned-politician was elected president.
Instructors: AnnMarie Perl
Literature, Food, and the American Racial Diet
Food, like books, is the site of our greatest consumption of and most vulnerable encounter with “otherness.” This course explores how “taste” informs the ways in which we ingest or dispel racial otherness. Through novels and cinema in American and American multi-ethnic cultural production, we will study how the meeting of food and word inform categories such as race, nationhood, gender, ecology, and family, and class. Topics include: “Transcendental Primitivism,” “Modernist Orientalism,” “Chocolate Women on the Edge,” “Parenting/Consuming,” “Ecology and the Humanimal,” and more.
Instructors: Anne Cheng
Sex, Violence, Death and Other Entertainments for Kids: Challenging Drama for Youth
This course will examine a wide variety of highly imaginative plays for children and teens, focusing on how they work as plays and the challenges they present to youth and family audiences. For much of the 20th century, theater for young audiences was simplistic, safe and shallow. Now, plays for young audiences are tackling subjects like sex and death head on, and playwrights are creating works with sophisticated styles and structures. These are exciting theatrical works of the highest artistic order.
Instructors: Robert Neil Sandberg
GSS 322 / MTD 324 / THR 324 / AMS 325
There She Is: Beauty, Pageantry, & Spectacular Femininity in American Life
As it approaches its centennial, the Miss America Pageant (1921- ) stands among the most enduring — and enduringly controversial — popular performance traditions of American life and culture. This course offers an intensive, method-based historical overview of how "Miss America" as both idea and event documents the shifting ways gender, sexuality, race and embodiment been comprehended in the United States, even as it also examines the disparate ways the “beauty pageant” as a performance genre has been adopted and adapted by/for communities excluded by the rules of Miss America.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Science After Feminism
Science is commonly held to be the objective, empirical pursuit of natural facts about the world. In this course, we will consider an array of theoretical, methodological, and substantive challenges that feminism has posed for this account of science, and for the practice of scientific knowledge production. In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge?
Instructors: Catherine Clune-Taylor
U.S. Intellectual History: Development of American Thought
This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the Puritans 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 complement the thought of these great thinkers with attention to the institutions and social contexts in which those ideas developed. Students will leave this class understanding the inner logistics and social contexts of the major intellectual systems that have marked American life.
Instructors: Peter Wirzbicki
Writing about Cities
How do cities remember the past? From street names to Confederate statutes to urban redevelopment, questions of place and public memory are intertwined and frequently contested. In this seminar, “Writing about Cities: Place and Memory,” you’ll learn to read cities as cultural texts by engaging in cultural analysis, archival research, and geographic fieldwork. You’ll also contribute to discussions about place and memory by proposing a new memorial or monument for Princeton’s campus. Field trips within Princeton and to New York City augment our discussions, as do visits from guest speakers.
Instructors: Sean Patrick Fraga
Society, Politics, and Ideas in 1980s America
This seminar will introduce students to the methods and challenges of contemporary history. Drawing on a variety of sources, we will try to understand what made the 1980s a distinct era in American life. We will examine the decade’s key events and trends, including: the election of Ronald Reagan and the rightward shift in American politics; the swift and sudden end of the Cold War; the spread of computers ; the deepening gulf between rich and poor; and the “culture wars” over topics like abortion and pornography. We will try to answer the question: How do we make sense of a past that is hardly even past?
Instructors: William John Schultz
POL 492 / HUM 492 / AAS 491 / AMS 492
The Politics of Race and Credit in America
The racial wealth gap is today one of the most salient features of the American polity. This course places widening racialized inequalities in a broad historical perspective by connecting them to the politics of money and credit. Ever since colonial times, Americans have passionately, even violently, debated the nature of money. We will follow these debates to study how money and credit have been intimately linked to questions of race from Alexander Hamilton to Martin Luther King Jr. We will connect this historical material to political theoretical debates about race, credit, and money today.
Instructors: Stefan Eich
SPA 377 / AAS 374 / AMS 377 / GSS 372
Transnational Feminisms
Transnational feminist approaches to globalization, race, sexuality, diaspora and nationalisms from Latinx, Black, and Asian American perspectives. Through different methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches to feminism, we will explore issues of women’s and LGBTQIA rights, gender equality, globalization, capitalism, and contemporary debates around race and sexuality.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
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Fall 2018
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Issues in American Public Health
The study of public health is an interdisciplinary inquiry involving issues of politics, policy, history, science, law, philosophy, ethics, geography, sociology, environmental studies, and economics, among others. Students will examine the government’s role in assuring and promoting health, through the exploration of issues on America’s “public health agenda,” such as epidemic response, tobacco use, the impact of weight on health, mandatory vaccination, disease prevention, and violence. In doing so, they will consider the impact of race, income, gender, place and environment, education, capitalism and democracy on health outcomes.
Instructors: Leslie E. Gerwin
AMS 335 / JDS 320 / GSS 323 / ENG 441
American Jews and Sexual Freedom
For more than a century before #metoo, the histories of sexual repression and liberation in America were already strangely and persistently intertwined with the history of American Jews. This course surveys crucial texts and moments in U.S. literature, law, and culture, exploring the interventions of Jewish writers, lawyers, theorists, and activists in transforming the ways all Americans think about and express their sexuality. Topics addressed will include the roles played by Jews in literary censorship and debates about obscenity, the defense of reproductive rights, the Sexual Revolution, pornography, and the rights of sexual minorities.
Instructors: Josh Lambert
Imagining New Orleans
The study of New Orleans offers much insight into American identity. The city’s heritage is profoundly plural, incorporating elements of French and Spanish culture, the cultures of slaves and free people of color, of Native Americans--all folded after 1803 into possibilities of American experience. We will look at various representations of New Orleans, considering literature, art, architecture, music, and film and incorporating perspectives from within and from outside the city. We will explore what makes New Orleans an American city, and think in turn about what New Orleans tells us about America.
Instructors: John W. Axcelson
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: American Properties
This is an experimental and collaborative seminar that will explore selected sites and episodes in the history of property relations in America. We are as interested in hoarding as in wealth production, blood as well as land, cultural identities as well as corporations. The focus is relentlessly interdisciplinary, bringing together legal cases, ethnographies, novels, poems, films, buildings, maps, and other cultural products. The seminar will offer several opportunities for students to “do” American studies through the lens of property law and property conflicts.
Instructors: Anne Cheng, Hendrik Arnold Hartog
AMS 404 / ASA 404 / LAO 404 / THR 404
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Race and Ethnicity in 20th-Century Popular Performance
This course offers an intensive introduction to the particular tools, methods and interpretations employed in developing original historical research and writing about race and ethnicity in twentieth century popular performance (film, television, theater). Through collaborative, in-depth excavations of several genre-straddling cultural works, course participants will rehearse relevant methods and theories (of cultural history, of race and ethnicity, of popular culture/performance) and will undertake an independent research project elaborating the course’s guiding premise and principles of practice.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
AAS 305 / REL 391 / MUS 354 / AMS 355
The History of Black Gospel Music
This course will trace the history of Black gospel music from its origins in the American South to its modern origins in 1930s Chicago and into the 1990s mainstream. Critically analyzing various compositions and the artists that performed them, we will explore the ways the music has reflected and reproached the extant cultural climate. We will be particularly concerned with the four major historical eras from which Black gospel music developed: the slave era; Reconstruction; the Great Migration, and the era of Civil Rights.
Instructors: Wallace DeNino Best
AAS 322 / LAS 301 / LAO 322 / AMS 323
Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States
This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. We will explore how Black activists and artists from the United States have partnered with people of color in Latin America and the Caribbean to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.
Instructors: Reena N. Goldthree
Blackness and Media
Working across a range of sites (film, photography, literature, newsprint, music) this course thinks critically about media, Blackness, and social life. In the service of expanding our conceptions of media we will draw together unlikely titles and works from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. How, we will ask, has media been the site where Blackness gets communicated, created, negotiated, and re-imagined? How does Blackness operate as both a media and medium? And, how do Black writers, thinkers, and artists negotiate the formal limits of media, and what might this reveal about Black aesthetics?
Instructors: Autumn M. Womack
Public Policy in the U.S. Racial State
This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.
Instructors: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Theoretical Approaches in Black Studies
This course stages a critical survey of key theoretical approaches and debates that have shaped the contemporary discourse of Black studies. We will read recent works by scholars who take up what is casually referred to as “the study of Blackness” from different vantage points such as Black feminist theory, postcolonial criticism, Afro-pessimism, queer-of-color critique, and Black radicalism. The course particularly focuses on the question of criticism as it emerges within this discursive field and demonstrates how topics like the archive, citationality, and style provide alternate ways of thinking theory and the project of Black studies.
Instructors: Nijah Cunningham
Exhibiting ‘Nature's Nation’: American Art, Ecology, and Environmental History
This course explores the interface of American art, ecology, and environmental history in the context of a groundbreaking exhibition held at Princeton's art museum in Fall 2018. Using emerging interpretive strategies of ecocriticism, we will approach American art as creative material that has imagined and embodied environmental issues and attitudes concerning nationhood, development, species extinction, pollution, climate change, sustainability, and justice since the 18th century, when the foundations of ecology began to emerge. We will also address conceptual and practical issues surrounding the mounting of a major traveling loan exhibition.
Instructors: Karl E. Kusserow
ASA 347 / AMS 347 / ENG 426 / GSS 358
The Asian American Family
This seminar examines the emergence and transformation of the Asian American family as a social form. We will investigate how U.S. labor demands and legal restrictions on immigration and citizenship militated against the formation of Asian American families, and how paper sons, military wives, refugees, adoptees, and LGBT family experiences eluded norms of kinship. We will also study the significance of the intergenerational trope in Asian American literature, and how writers responded to neoliberalism's remaking of the “Asian” family according to the model minority myth.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Princeton Atelier: American Pop: A Masterpiece with a Missing Piece
Broadway Director Trip Cullman and Award-winning playwright and performer Eisa Davis lead an exploration into one of the final works of the late composer Michael Friedman. American Pop examines the history of American popular music from 1846 to 1923, from Stephen Foster composing the first American pop song to Bessie Smith as the first American pop star. The piece presents a complex and engaging inquiry into the economics, social constructs and cultural appropriation that defined early American popular entertainment. The course will include topical research and look at how an unfinished work can live on after the loss of its creator.
BANNED: The Paradox of Free Speech in Cinema
The First Amendment protection of free expression was only extended to motion pictures in 1952, yet from the beginning of its history film was caught up in the paradox of free speech and civil rights. We will examine the paradoxical effects of local, state, market and self-censorship on filmmaking and cinematic innovation. We will search for the aesthetic criteria that can separate propaganda film from genuine art through close reading of some of the most scandalous films of cinema history.
Instructors: Erika Anita Kiss
Forms of Literature: American Short Stories
This course examines the development of American short fiction over two centuries, revealing the genre’s extraordinary variety and complexity.
Instructors: Lee Clark Mitchell
Queer Literatures: Theory, Narrative, and Aesthetics
In this course, we will both read from various trajectories of queer literature and engage what it means to read queerly. We will consider the historical etymology of the term queer and think through its affiliate terms and acronyms: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans. We will investigate how discourses of power and institutions of normativity have come up against queer bodies, narratives, and politic — and how such encounters are historically situated. As the class reads through texts that range across both region and time, we will pay close attention to the ways in which desire, gender, and sexuality are queerly told.
Instructors: Christina A. Leon
Empire of the Ark: The Animal Question in Film, Photography and Popular Culture
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?
Instructors: Anne McClintock
GSS 345 / AAS 355 / ENG 399 / AMS 373
Pleasure, Power and Profit: Race and Sexualities in a Global Era
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.
Instructors: Anne McClintock
Commodity Histories: From Sugar to Cocaine
What is a commodity? What does it do? Can it shape history? This course will introduce students to a recently popular genre of historical writing which concentrates on single commodities like cotton, sugar, bananas, and oil. We will consider how commodity histories offer a unique approach to rethinking the boundaries of history. Our readings will cross conceptual and geographic borders, raising questions about the relationship between the global and the local. Course themes will include: environmental change, imperialism/colonialism, capitalism, slavery, race, identity, consumerism, and the relationship between nation-states and corporations.
Instructors: Bernadette Jeanne Perez
HUM 346 / AMS 348 / LAS 385 / COM 336
Introduction to Digital Humanities
This course will introduce students to debates and approaches in the digital humanities (DH) from a global perspective. We will consider the foundations of DH while also discussing concerns involving access, maintenance, and care for projects over time in regions with physical restraints such as connectivity restrictions. On seminar days, we will work through theoretical concerns and explore the possibilities and limits of existing tools. On studio days, we work in small teams to gather data from primary sources in RBSC, which we will then use with software and platforms to build skills in computational analysis, data collection, and DH research.
Instructors: Nora C. Benedict
Battle Lab: The Battle of Princeton
Revolution! Espionage! Alexander Hamilton! George Washington! Cannon fire on Nassau Hall! This fall, think outside of the classroom and explore the past in your own backyard: Revolutionary-era Princeton and the physical remains of the legendary battle between American and British forces on January 3, 1777. What happened on that day? Who died? Where are their bones? Why are lawyers fighting over the land? In this new, interdisciplinary course, you will undertake to answer these questions and help solve the longstanding puzzle of the Battle of Princeton. In the process, you will explore how events of the past persistently shape the present day.
Instructors: Nathan Todd Arrington, Rachael Ziady DeLue
Music Traditions in North America
From Native American song to modern hip-hop, the North American continent has a rich history and repertory of musical expressions. This course will delve into the many historical themes, social issues, and musical aspects of the diverse musical traditions of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. We will focus particularly on comparing colonial traditions, examining the musics of the United States South, comparing protest music of the 1960s, and exploring newer contributions to global music trends. While mostly taking a historical approach, we will also examine issues of authenticity, appropriation, migration, race/gender/class, and the music industry.
Instructors: Maria Josefa Velasco
SPA 366 / AMS 326 / GSS 364 / LAO 366
Witchcraft, Rituals and Colonialism
This course will explore witchcraft and rituality in the Americas through accusations and identity claims. We will look at how witchcraft has been used in colonial and imperial contexts to control, sanction, and extract power from women and marginalized groups in different periods, as well as how people make claims to witchcraft and rituals as a way to thwart domination. Topics include: shamanism in Latin America, the Mexican Inquisition, Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diasporic religious systems, and the contemporary social media ritual activism of “bruja feminisms.” Students will be introduced to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.
Instructors: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
THR 385 / AMS 350 / GSS 385 / LAO 385
Theater and Society Now
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of “real” life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera
Civil Society and Public Policy
Civil society is the arena of voluntary organizations (churches, social welfare organizations, sporting clubs) and communal activity. Scholars now tell us that such voluntary and cooperative activities create “social capital” — a stock of mutual trust that forms the glue that holds society together. The course will be devoted to the study of the history of these concepts, and to the analysis of their application to the United States and other societies. This will be an interdisciplinary effort, embracing history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines.
Instructors: Stanley Nider Katz
Education Policy in the United States
Poor students concentrated in urban centers lag academically behind their more advantaged peers, and explanations for this achievement gap are hotly debated. While some have pointed to the quality of education offered in urban public schools as the primary culprit, others have drawn attention to the role of out-of-school factors in creating and exacerbating these gaps. In this course, we will evaluate the possibilities for and barriers to closing achievement gaps. We will think systematically about the effects of school reform on schools, teachers, and the students they serve.
Instructors: Jennifer L. Jennings