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

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

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

Despite the stereotypes of the over-bearing Tiger Mom and the Immigrant Mom, the figure of the mother has been surprisingly absent (either missing, dead, or otherwise gone) in 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and cinema. This class explores how the missing maternal figure structures the lifeline of Asian American imagination. Why is such a primal figure of origin ghostly? What happens to the mother-child relationship in the shifting contexts of diaspora, migration, nationhood, interracial relation, technology, and/or adoption? What happened to the "Asian Mother" in the late stage of American neoliberalism and racial reckoning?

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

The course examines the gendered racialization of Asian American women. It identifies and interrogates experiences of everyday violence, looking at their hypersexualization, labor market precarity, intimate partner violence, and poverty. It situates the discussion in the law, family, workplace, and campus community.

This course delves into East Asian-styled architecture in the US through the lens of diaspora. By surveying Chinatowns, Japanese gardens, and period rooms via immersive field trips and the visual and textual documents, we examine how the experiences of immigration, racialization, and cultural exchange are reflected in the formal language, spatial interaction, cultural symbolism, and social dynamics of the built environment. Additionally, we interpret the process of representation, appropriation, modification, and ultimately, reinvention of architecture and space, all within the context of negotiation between the home and host land.

What is the relationship between race and genre? Through a survey of major works and debates in Asian American literature, this course examines how writers employ a variety of generic forms--novels, comics, memoirs, film, science fiction--to address issues of racial and ethnic identity, gender, queerness, memory, immigration, and war. By placing racial formation in relation to social, economic, and intellectual developments, we will explore the potential of literary texts to deepen our historical understanding of Asians in the U.S. and beyond, and probe into what labeling a work of literature as "Asian American" allows us to know and do.

This course will analyze and evaluate through a psychological lens the psychosocial causes and consequences of significant current events that impact different Asian groups in the U.S., such as pandemic-spurred anti-Asian sentiment and educational policy (e.g., the debate over magnet schools moving to lottery systems rather than test based), as well as long-standing "everyday" experiences common to Asian Americans (e.g., navigating biculturalism, microaggressions and model minority stereotypes) that may impact identity and mental health.

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 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.

This course focuses on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Monkey), some of its central themes, and its long history of adaptation across media, regional and historical boundaries. We read a good part of the 100-chapter novel, investigate some of the texts that preceded it, and look at the illustrations, comics, rewritings, films, and videogames that it inspired. If Monkey represents the spirit of play and the ability to change at will, how does remediation ask us to think about this in terms of media and philosophy, politics and language? When and how does adaptation turn into appropriation?

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.