Winter 2024
winter 2024 Course Schedule
*The Winter 2024 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.
winter 2024 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Winter 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 390-1-21: Senior Project
The purpose of this course is to provide a framework within which you can pursue your own interests and develop your own ideas, rather than to introduce a series of texts or a corpus of concrete information. This course is a hybrid of the research seminar and the writing workshop, and we will confront the challenges of both researching and writing in a collaborative manner. To that end, some of our sessions will be devoted to reading and responding to one another's work. While it can be difficult and intimidating to publicly present your work, and to publicly critique or question another's work, we will undertake both in the spirit of support and assistance in the hopes of creating a community of researchers, writers, and scholars. Becoming a careful reader, responder, and recipient of constructive criticism are invaluable skills that fundamentally inform the process by which virtually all scholarly work is produced.
AMER_ST 310-0-1: Contemporary Issues in Asian American Communities (co-listed ASIAN_AM 225-0-1)
Framing Asian Americans as “model minorities” has long obscured the “issues” Asian American communities face. In this course, we examine the contradictions and convergences around forming “Asian American community,” including the personal, political, and material stakes of identity and cultural citizenship, group consciousness within and between communities, and family and intergenerational relationships. We explore the debates about and opportunities for solidarity through Asian American communities’ relationships to immigration, labor, mental health, education, transnationalism, environmental racism, and gentrification. Throughout the course, we ask about the role of space and place for these communities in various regions of the U.S. and locally in the Chicagoland area. Students will co-construct knowledge by learning with and from local Asian American communities.
AMER_ST 310-0-2: Histories of Violence (co-listed HIST 300-0-22)
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: American Novel: Defining America Post 1830 (co-listed ENGLISH 371-0-20)
In this class, we will examine the related ideas of the Great American Novel and “the American Dream” to explore the ongoing construction of American identity, values, and literature. We will operate from two basic points: America can be understood as a text, constantly being rewritten, revised, and contested; and American identity is relational, situated in culture, history, and the body. The questions we will examine include: In a racially and ethnically diverse (even divided) nation, what constitutes American identity, the quality of "Americanness"? Who, if anyone, speaks for all Americans? What sort of literary voice best expresses American realities and ideals? How does the dynamic of culture and counter-culture, dominant and marginal, get worked out aesthetically and ideologically?
WCAS Class Descriptions can be found here.