Spring 2024
spring 2024 Course Schedule
*The Spring2024 course schedule is subject to change. Please check CAESAR for all up to date course information, including day/times, course descriptions, and mode of instruction.
Spring 2024 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Spring 2024
AMER_ST 301-2-30: Seminar for Majors:
The Seminar for Majors course aims to provide a "how-to" of American Studies from an integrative, multiracial, and socio-cultural perspective. Taking U.S. American cultures as a site for testing classic and contemporary theories about how society works, this seminar in American Studies serves to introduce resources and techniques for interdisciplinary research. Students will be exposed to and experiment with a wide range of current theoretical and methodological approaches applied in American Studies and contributing disciplinary fields. The goal of the course is not only for students to develop knowledge of main currents in the field of American Studies but also to become practitioners through a series of assignments that will permit students to exercise their newfound skills. For instance, as students develop rhetorical analyses, describe and evaluate visual culture, or conduct and analyze interview data, they will also examine themes such as national narratives, civil rights and immigration, and the historical and social meanings of work, discipline, and justice.
AMER_ST 310-0-1: The Chicago Way: Urban Spaces and American Values (co-listed ENGLISH 378-0-22)
Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city.
AMER_ST 310-0-2: Black Religion (co-listed RELIGION 262-0-20 BLK_ST 262-0-2 )
How does violence change life stories and national narratives? How can a nation remember and retell obscured histories of violence, reconcile past violence, and resist future violence? What does it mean that lynching emerged as a category in the same historical moment as the Bill of Rights, and that certain kinds of violence have been central to American identity? The story of the United States is built on the inclusion or omission of violence: from the genocide of Native Americans to slavery to imperial conquest, from “private” pain of women to the nationalized pain of soldiers. This lecture course brings violence to the center of U.S. history. Moving from Early America to the present, we will discuss these overlapping stories in terms of their visibility and invisibility, addressing questions of representation and the haunting function of traumatic experience. Following an emerging subfield of scholarship in Histories of Violence, this course examines narrative, archival, and political issues around studying, teaching, and writing such stories.
AMER_ST 310-0-30: Reality TV and Legal Theory (co-listed LEGAL_ST 376-0-22)
For the past thirty years, reality television – a genre of programming that aims to give us a view into the “unscripted” actions of our peers – has been a dominant force in U.S. entertainment. Many of us watch these shows to relax, to turn off our critical thinking, and to immerse ourselves wholly into some manufactured drama and schadenfreude. Considered as a cultural text, though, reality television can illuminate some profound truths: about how we decide what is right and wrong, about the tension between written and unwritten rules, and whether anyone can simply be “here to make friends.” In this course, we ask what reality TV can teach us about the nature of law. We’ll read and discuss key works in the philosophy of law from H.L.A. Hart, Lon Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, Scott Shapiro, and others, and then see how their ideas stand up to the test of shows like Survivor, The Circle, and Bachelor in Paradise. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to explain the main currents of thought in legal philosophy with reference to elimination ceremonies, confessionals, alliances, and other fundamentals of reality TV gameplay.
AMER_ST 310-0-40 Natural Disasters (co-listed ENVR_POL 390-0-22
From earthquakes to hurricanes, fires to floods, we tend to think of natural disasters as spontaneous occurrences. The word disaster originates in the idea of being born under an unlucky constellation or struck down by an uncaring universe. When homes are flooded or crops are destroyed, we see the natural world encroaching on lives and livelihoods in seemingly unpredictable and certainly unwanted ways. But are these disasters truly a product of nature?
In this class, we will engage with the complex history of natural disasters: how people experience and rationalize these events, how communities respond to them, and how the causes of disaster are explained by various stakeholders, from victims to insurance companies. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed historical, cultural, and theoretical tools for understanding the nature of the natural disaster.
AMER_ST 310--0-5 Language in Asian America (co-listed ASIAN_AM 235-0-1)
Language is an integral part of Asian American identities, communities, and racialization. This course explores introductory and intermediate level linguistic anthropology concepts (indexicality, code-switching, intertextuality, affect, register, and others) as they pertain to language in Asian America, including: "Yellow English"; heritage language maintenance and loss; authenticity and representation in media and public culture; and expressive culture and performance. Course materials include readings on Canvas, film, television, and social media; evaluation includes group projects, essays, and class presentations.
AMER_ST 310-0-6 Chicago and the Making of the Modern World (co-listed ART_HIST 390-0-3)
This undergraduate seminar will try—and given the enormity of the topic, undoubtedly fail—to come to grips with the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. The Exposition was central to the city of Chicago’s ambitions for rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, but its larger importance in the project of imagining a new American role for the twentieth century cannot be overstated. 27 million people visited the Exposition (the vast majority coming by rail) at a time when the population of the United States was only 62 million. This World’s Fair showcased global cultures, new inventions (the Ferris wheel, the movie theater, numerous products that have become household names), art and architecture—and the racial, colonial, and gendered ideologies of the Jim Crow era. In the seminar, within the wealth of possible topics, we will look at Ida B. Wells's crusading journalism, the founding collections of the Field Museum, Buffalo Bill Cody's “Wild West” show, the fair’s Beaux-Arts architecture and its broader impact on Chicago, the Woman's Building, the development of the mythology of Christopher Columbus, violently racist human spectacles, political intrigues, and the fair’s aftermath. In addition to working with primary visual and textual materials available digitally and in local collections, we will read literary works such as Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.
WCAS Class Descriptions can be found here.