Print Settings
 

AMSTUD 1B: Media, Culture, and Society (COMM 1B)

The institutions and practices of mass media, including television, film, radio, and digital media, and their role in shaping culture and social life. The media's shifting relationships to politics, commerce, and identity.
Last offered: Winter 2014 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 2: Introduction to American National Government and Politics (POLISCI 2)

American political institutions (the Presidency, Congress, and the Court) and political processes (the formation of political attitudes and voting) have for some time now been criticized as inadequate to the task of making modern public policy. Against the backdrop of American culture and political history we examine how public policy has been and is being made. We use theories from Political Science and Economics to assess the state of the American system and the policy making process. We use case studies and lectures to analyze contemporary issues including environmental policy, taxes and spending , gun control , economic growth and inequality and mobility. In some of these issue areas we use comparative data from other countries to see how the U.S. is doing relative to other countries. In addition to class room lecture and discussion, student groups are formed to analyze policy issues of relevance to them. (This course has merged with Political Science 123/PubPol 101)
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 3E: Michelle Obama in American Culture (AFRICAAM 3E, CSRE 3E, FEMGEN 3E, HISTORY 3E)

Never before has the United States had a First Lady like Michelle Obama. During her eight years in the White House, Michelle Obama transformed traditional meanings of womanhood, marriage, motherhood, and style and created new possibilities for what it means to be strong and what it means to be beautiful. No First Lady has ever been so scrutinized but also so beloved: from her J. Crew dresses to her Let's Move campaign, from her vegetable gardens to her chiseled arms, and from her powerful speeches to her casual and always authentic personality. This class examines the impact on American culture of the most popular First Lady in American history.
Terms: Spr | Units: 1
Instructors: ; Brody, J. (PI); Hobbs, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 10Q: Dystopian California: Imagining the Golden State in Disaster and Science Fiction Film

Dystopian California examines the ways the Golden State has been popularly imagined both historically as the Land of Promise and more recently as the land of apocalypse in science fiction and disaster films. Through this lens, we¿ll be exploring anxieties articulated through images of natural disaster, environmental degradation, urbanization and urban decay, invasion (both viral and ¿alien¿), societal collapse, overpopulation, and nuclear holocaust ¿ as well as the tenacity of the human spirit. We¿ll be discussing conceptions of survival and the ways these films both articulate societal fears and help to neutralize them. More broadly we will discuss how these films metaphorically address, through the loss of innocence, the possibility of establishing a truly Utopian California ¿ the Golden Land of Opportunity promised to us ¿ that had been unattainable or lost in the melee of postmodernity
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 3

AMSTUD 10SC: A Strange Land: Edward Hopper's Paintings of America (ARTHIST 11SC)

In 2015 Stanford's Cantor Arts Center acquired New York Corner (1913), an early painting by the celebrated American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967). In honor of the acquisition, this seminar will explore Hopper's paintings in detail but with a twist. In each class meeting we will pair Hopper's paintings with the work of another artist or, in some cases, a filmmaker or novelist. The work of these other figures, all notable in their own right, will be given equal if not greater emphasis in each seminar meeting. In classroom discussion, our goal will be to build a rich description of Hopper's art and to understand something of the times when he painted (especially the late 1920s through the late 1950s). If you have wanted to learn how to look closely at a work of art, and how to interpret film and literature with equal depth doing so in intensive conversation with the professor and your peers this is the class for you. Some of the questions we will address: What is an artist?; What is an artist's career?; What does it mean for an artist (or anyone) to develop a lifelong vision of American culture, of American places, of American life?; What is a place (as opposed to a space)?; Is making a painting (or speaking or writing about a painting) a meaningful act in the world?; What does it mean (for Hopper, for any of us) to emerge out of a coherent tradition?; What is high art?; What is popular art?; What are the strengths and limitations of each?
Terms: Sum | Units: 2
Instructors: ; Nemerov, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 12A: Introduction to English III: Introduction to African American Literature (AFRICAAM 43, ENGLISH 12A)

(Formerly English 43/143). In his bold study, What Was African American Literature?, Kenneth Warren defines African American literature as a late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century response to the nation's Jim Crow segregated order. But in the aftermath of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement, can critics still speak, coherently, of "African American literature"? And how does this political conception of African American literary production compare with accounts grounded in black language and culture? Taking up Warren's intervention, this course will explore African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals and slave narratives to texts composed at the height of desegregation and decolonization struggles at mid-century and beyond.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Rasberry, V. (PI)

AMSTUD 15: Global Flows: The Globalization of Hip Hop Art, Culture, and Politics

This course consists of film screenings, dialogues, and performances that examine and engage Hip Hop Cultures and artists from around the world. We will explore diverse scenes and artists, from the formation of new musical genres such as hiplife in Ghana, to the impact of the first Hip Hop concert in Morocco, to comparative investigations of race and citizenship in Japan, Cuba, Palestine, France, and the United States (including Black, Mexican and Arab-Americans).
Last offered: Spring 2011 | Units: 1-2

AMSTUD 25Q: The Origins of the Modern American City, 1865-1920 (HISTORY 55Q, URBANST 25Q)

Are we living in a new Gilded Age? To answer this question, we go back to the original Gilded Age, as well as its successor, the Progressive Era. How did urban Americans around the turn of the twentieth century deal with stark inequalities of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And what can we learn from their struggles for our own time? Students use primary and secondary sources in digital and print formats. Possible field trip to San Francisco.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 50N: The Literature of Inequality: Have and Have-Nots from the Gilded Age to the Occupy Era

Not since the turn of the last century have Americans experienced such a profound gap between those who have and those who do not, between wealthy and working poor, between defacto upper and lower classes, between those of the status quo and those who slip to the social periphery. We will be examining literary and artistic explorations of social and economic inequity, fiction and art that looks at reversals of fortune as well as the possibilities for social change. Readings include Jacob Riis¿ How the Other Half Lives, W.E.B. Du Bois¿ The Souls of Black Folk, Edith Wharton¿s House of Mirth , James Agee & Walker Evans¿ Let Us Not Forget Famous Men , T.C. Boyle¿s The Tortilla Curtain, Julie Otsuka¿s When the Emperor Was Divine and Occupy Movement art.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul

AMSTUD 51Q: Comparative Fictions of Ethnicity (COMPLIT 51Q, CSRE 51Q)

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"?
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP, Writing 2
Instructors: ; Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI)

AMSTUD 54N: African American Women's Lives (AFRICAAM 54N, CSRE 54N, FEMGEN 54N, HISTORY 54N)

Preference to freshmen. We will examine the struggles of African American women to define their own lives and improve the social, economic, political and cultural conditions of black communities. Topics will include women¿s enslavement and freedom, kinship and family relations, institution and community building, violence, labor and leisure, changing gender roles, consumer and beauty culture, social activism, and the politics of sexuality.
Terms: Win | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Hobbs, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 54Q: African American Women's Lives (AFRICAAM 54Q, FEMGEN 54Q, HISTORY 54Q)

Preference to sophomores. African American women have been placed on the periphery of many historical documents. This course will encourage students to think critically about historical sources and to use creative and rigorous historical methods to recover African American women¿s experiences. Drawing largely on primary sources such as letters, personal journals, literature and film, this course explores the everyday lives of African American women in 19th- and 20th-century America. We will begin in our present moment with a discussion of Michelle Obama and then we will look back on the lives and times of a wide range of African American women including: Charlotte Forten Grimké, a 19th-century reformer and teacher; Nella Larsen, a Harlem Renaissance novelist; Josephine Baker, the expatriate entertainer and singer; and Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, two luminaries of civil rights activism. We will examine the struggles of African American women to define their own lives and improve the social, economic, political and cultural conditions of black communities. Topics will include women¿s enslavement and freedom, kinship and family relations, institution and community building, violence, labor and leisure, changing gender roles, consumer and beauty culture, social activism, and the politics of sexuality.
| Units: 3-4

AMSTUD 55N: Social Movements through Song in Modern America (FEMGEN 55N, HISTORY 55N)

This discussion class will explore a series of social movements in modern America through the songs produced to support efforts to achieve labor unions, civil rights and racial justice, peace, and women's rights. For each class we will read short historical texts to provide contexts for the movements and then concentrate on the role of music within them. We will listening to and discuss several core songs for each topic. Biographical and autobiographical readings on a key set of musicians (including Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, and Bernice Johnson Reagon) will provide personal accounts of the relationship of songs to social movement . The music we include in class will range from ballads to anthems, from oral traditions to the work of singer-songwriters.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-4 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Freedman, E. (PI)

AMSTUD 57Q: 10 American Photographs

Preference to sophomores. ¿The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!¿ wrote Jack Kerouac of photographer Robert Frank¿s iconic collection, The Americans. This seminar takes Kerouac¿s enthusiasm and applies it to ten American photographs, a new one each week. Examples span the medium¿s history and were taken as art, science, commerce, journalism, or personal mementos. Close study of the photo of the week will address how it looks and why; its history, from initial responses to later reception; and its relationship to the larger American visual and cultural context. Also under discussion: What story does this set of pictures tell about Americanness? What might another set of photos convey?
Terms: Aut | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

AMSTUD 66: Ten Ways to Study Cars

This class is a lunch seminar on the car and auto-mobility in twentieth-century America. We will talk about cars with a guest each week from one of ten disciplines; and topics will range from design and mechanics, to film and literature, the mapping of the United States, a gas dependent economy, social mobility, car collectability, and the history of the driver¿s license. Guests from Design and the Stanford Revs Digital Archive will also attend. Once a week TBD at Noon. Manzanita Seminar Room. Limited Enrollment. Sophomore Priority. One Unit.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 1

AMSTUD 68N: Mark Twain and American Culture (ENGLISH 68N)

Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain defined the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He recognized our extravagant promise and stunning failures, our comic foibles and  tragic flaws. He is viewed as the most American of American authors--and as one of the most universal. How does his work illuminate his society's (and our society's) responses to such issues as race, gender, technology, heredity vs. environment, religion, education, art, imperialism, animal welfare, and what it means to be "American"?
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Fishkin, S. (PI)

AMSTUD 73: Mexican Migration to the United States (CHILATST 173, HISTORY 73, HISTORY 173)

This class examines the history of Mexican migration to the United States. In the United States we constantly hear about Obama¿s immigration plan, the anti-immigrant laws in Arizona, and the courage of DREAM Activists; in Mexico news sources speak about the role of remittances, the effect of deportations, and the loss of life at the border. Unfortunately, few people truly understand the historical trends in these migratory processes, or the multifaceted role played by the United States in encouraging individuals to head there. Moreover, few people have actually heard the opinions and voices of migrants themselves. This course seeks to provide students with the opportunity to place migrants¿ experiences in dialogue with migratory laws as well as the knowledge to embed current understandings of Latin American migration in their meaningful historical context.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5

AMSTUD 89: Race, Ethnicity, and Electoral Politics (CSRE 89)

This course explores the role that racial and ethnic politics play in American political campaigns and elections. This will include readings that explore the power of ethnoracial voting blocs (e.g. the Black vote and the Latino vote), as well as the challenges and advantages of candidates that are people of color. We will discuss how changing demographics are changing the political landscape, and how candidates and political parties are responding to those changes. This will include, of course, significant attention to ongoing battles at the national (e.g. Trump v. Clinton), state (e.g. Kamala Harris v. Loretta Sanchez), and local levels, most often in California but in other geographic areas as well. We will also explore historic candidacies and elections (e.g. Jesse Jackson) and political parties (e.g. La Raza Unida party) that help put the 2016 races into perspective.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Michelson, M. (PI)

AMSTUD 91: Exploring American Religious History (HISTORY 260K, RELIGST 91)

This course will trace how contemporary beliefs and practices connect to historical trends in the American religious landscape.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Lum, K. (PI)

AMSTUD 92: Food in America

This course examines the history and culture of food in the United States, exploring topics that have fueled debates about what Americans should eat over the last hundred years. We will examine the rise of restaurant cuisine and celebrity chefs; of the nation¿s concern about the obesity epidemic and its long-standing obsession with fitness and the quantified self; and controversies about diet politics, fast food, food processing, and the importance of the iconic `home cooked meal. Sources include historic cookbooks, food writing, food literature, advertisements, and film. Course activities include guest lectures and a visit to the Stanford teaching kitchen.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3
Instructors: ; Bitar, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 93: Food and Popular Culture

This course introduces students to the social history, political economy and aesthetics of eating in America, paying particular attention to representations of food in popular culture over the last hundred years. Though firmly grounded in American Studies, an interdisciplinary perspective draws from the material and methods of anthropology, cultural studies, art history, and history. Topics include the California citrus industry, competitive eating, food art, utopias, and edible landscapes. Students will actively engage with primary sources including cookbooks, paintings and art installations, diet books, TV shows, film, and advertisements.
Terms: Win | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Bitar, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 94: Topics in Food Studies

This course examines food in the United States over the last hundred years as it relates to the broad themes of nature, disease, technology, and labor. Though firmly grounded in American Studies, an interdisciplinary perspective draws from the material and methods of anthropology, cultural studies, art history, and history. Specific topics include diet-related disease, tipping and the subminimum wage, the concept of agrarian democracy, supermarkets, and food preservation. Creative assignments include writing a menu, conducting a food observation, and reviewing a restaurant. Students will actively engage with paintings, sculpture, film, advertisements, restaurant reviews, commercials, and music videos.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Bitar, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 95: Consumer Culture

This course will examine consumerism in the United States, first focusing on the rise of advertising, mass market goods, catalogues, and department stores at the turn of the 20th century. We will then examine post-WWII suburbia and the rise of the "good life" and the ensuing backlash in 1960s counterculture anti-consumerist movements. Our topics will include the annual no-shopping day, back to nature movements, urban homesteading, thrift, slow food activism, and the efforts to resist mass production in food, clothing, and housing. Sources include novels, films, magazines, music, and advertisements.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Bitar, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 101: American Fiction into Film: How Hollywood Scripts and Projects Black and White Relations

Movies and the fiction that inspires them; power dynamics behind production including historical events, artistic vision, politics, and racial stereotypes. What images of black and white does Hollywood produce to forge a national identity? How do films promote equality between the races? What is lost or gained in film adaptations of books?nLimited Enrollment, Instructor¿s Consent Required. Class meetings held in Manzanita Multipurpose Room.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 102: Art and Social Criticism (AFRICAAM 102B, ARTHIST 162B, CSRE 102A, FEMGEN 102)

Visual artists have long been in the forefront of social criticism in America. Since the 1960s, various visual strategies have helped emergent progressive political movements articulate and represent complex social issues. Which artists and particular art works/projects have become key anchors for discourses on racism, sexism, economic and social inequality, and immigrant rights? We will learn about a spectrum of political art designed to raise social awareness, spark social change and rouse protest. The Art Workers¿ Coalition¿s agit-prop opposing the Vietnam War and ACT-UP¿s emblematic signs and symbols during the AIDS/HIV crisis of the 1980s galvanized a generation into action. Works such as Judy Chicago¿s The Dinner Party (1979), Fred Wilson¿s Mining the Museum (1992), and Glenn Ligon¿s paintings appropriating fragments from African-American literature all raised awareness by excavating historical evidence of the long legacy of marginalization and modeled ways of resisting that marginalization. For three decades feminist artists Barbara Kruger and the Guerilla Girls have combined institutional critique and direct address into a provocative form of criticality. Recent art for social justice is reaching ever broadening publics by redrawing the role of artist and audience exemplified by the democratization of poster making and internet campaigns of the Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter movements. Why are each of these examples successful as influential and enduring markers of social criticism? We will also consider the visual culture of new protest strategies in the Post-Occupy era. What have these socially responsive practices contributed to our understanding of American history? We will conclude with an investigation into large-scale transnational participatory projects, including Tania Bruguera¿s Immigrant Movement International and Ai Weiwei¿s @Large on Alcatraz Island.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Hertz, B. (PI)

AMSTUD 103: On the Road: Cars and the Auto-Mobility of Race, Gender, Class, and Age in American Literature

The car in American literature, history, and culture, provides hope and makes it possible to relocate, transcend social status, and reinvent oneself. In this class we will examine how the car allows Americans to navigate identity in new ways. Readings include: Fitzgerald, Stein, Steinbeck, Escovedo-Colton, Nabokov, Barrett, Walker, Murray, Simpson, Wolfe, Kerouac, Davis, Freeman, Gilroy, Lucasi, Hamper, Moore, and Nass.
Last offered: Spring 2012 | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

AMSTUD 104: America at Play: A History of Leisure in the United States

This course examines recreational pursuits from the 19th century to the present. It investigates how changes in values, economics, politics, technology, and modes of social interaction affected what Americans did for fun. We will see how the 1950s¿ DIY craze and today¿s maker movement, for instance, differ due to historical context. Central course themes include the work/leisure dichotomy, consumption, community formation, gendered divisions, and amateurs¿ expertise. The class draws upon popular and critical sources, conversations with guests, and hands-on experience.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 105Q: Law and Popular Culture (LAWGEN 105Q)

(Same as AMSTUD 105Q) This seminar focuses on the interface between two important subjects: law and popular culture. Before class, students will see a series of films or television shows relating to law, lawyers, and the legal system. There is also a weekly homework assignment based on materials in the assigned text and the assigned film or TV show. We will discuss the pop culture treatment of subjects such as the adversary system, good and bad lawyers, female and gay lawyers, the work life of lawyers, legal education, ethical issues, the jury system, and criminal and civil justice. The seminar discussions will draw on film theory and film-making technique to deepen understanding of the interrelationship between law and popular culture. The discussions will illuminate the ways in which pop culture products both reflect and change social views about law and lawyers. The assigned text is Michael Asimow & Shannon Mader, "Law & Popular Culture: A Course Book" (Peter Lang, 2d edition, 2013).
Terms: Win | Units: 3
Instructors: ; Asimow, M. (PI)

AMSTUD 105R: Religion and War in America (CSRE 105, HISTORY 154D, HISTORY 354D, RELIGST 105)

Scholars have devoted much attention to wars in American history, but have not agreed as to whether religion was a major cause or simply a cover for political, economic, and other motives. We will compare interpretations that leave religion out, with those that take it into account. We will also look at the impact of war on the religious lives of ordinary Americans. We will examine both secondary as well as primary sources, beginning with King Philip's War in the 17th century, and ending with the "War on Terror" in the present day.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

AMSTUD 106: Spectacular Trials: Sex, Race and Violence in Modern American Culture (CSRE 66)

This course will use the phenomenon of the spectacular trial as a framework for exploring the intersections of sex, race, and violence in the formation of modern American culture. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the 1990s, we will focus our inquiry on a number of notorious cases, some associated with familiar names¿the ¿Scottsboro Boys,¿ Emmett Till, O.J. Simpson¿others involving once-infamous actors¿like Joan Little and Inez Garcia¿whose ordeals have receded into historical memory, considering a range of questions arising from this thematic nexus. For instance, in what ways are sexual transgressions racialized and gendered? What are the practical and theoretical ramifications of the seemingly inextricable conjunction of sex and violence in legal and popular discourse? And what insights might such spectacles afford when broached as an arena in which sexual meanings, identities, and practices are refracted and ultimately constructed? We will also examine the role of the pertinent professions in the evolution of these events, in particular how the interplay of law, medicine, psychiatry, and forensic science helped define the shifting boundaries of legality, and how print, radio, and television journalism operated not only in sensationalizing, but also in reflecting, modeling, and shaping prevailing attitudes and behaviors. Our study of this vital facet of our ¿society of the spectacle¿ will draw on a series of compelling secondary readings complemented by a diverse array of primary sources¿from contemporaneous pamphlets and newspaper accounts to photographs, letters, trial testimony, and psychological commentary¿that will enable class members to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different textual genres, experiment with alternative methods of fashioning historical interpretations, and contemplate the ways history might be employed to illuminate the persistent problems of racial bias, reflexive sexualization, and the packaging of trials as mass entertainment in the present day.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 107: Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (CSRE 108, FEMGEN 101, TAPS 108)

Introduction to interdisciplinary approaches to gender, sexuality, queer, trans and feminist studies. Topics include the emergence of sexuality studies in the academy, social justice and new subjects, science and technology, art and activism, history, film and memory, the documentation and performance of difference, and relevant socio-economic and political formations such as work and the family. Students learn to think critically about race, gender, and sexuality from local and global perspectives.
Terms: Win | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Brody, J. (PI)

AMSTUD 108: Race and the Law: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (CSRE 81)

When Obama began his presidential tenure in 2009, many commentators declared the U.S. a truly colorblind society, a place where race (read: non-whiteness) no longer served as an impediment to individual and group aspirations, indeed had become so insignificant as to be practically invisible. In late fall 2014,in the aftermath of the police-involved killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, society is confronted with a radically different social and political landscape. Yet events like these, while doubtless underscoring the fallaciousness of the equalitarian narrative, are regrettably commonplace. What, if anything, occurred during the intervening years that might explain the apparent displacement of hope by despair? With the advent of the Black Lives Matte movement, the persistence of bias and discrimination against people of color, particularly at the interface of African American males and law enforcement authorities, has attained a place of prominence on the public agenda, presenting a significant opportunity for citizen-activists, legislators, and policymakers to combine forces to effectuate meaningful change. To take advantage of this moment, it is imperative to understand the origins and development of the entrenched structural inequalities manifest in contemporary America. What role have law and legal institutions played in hindering and facilitating the promise of equality for all citizens? How far are we from realizing that vaunted democratic aspiration? This course offers participants an opportunity to systematically engage with recent events in Baltimore, Ferguson, and elsewhere in an historically informed manner that foregrounds questions of race, citizenship, and law. Against the backdrop of the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, it considers such topics as the rise of urban ghettos and the use of segregationist practices like redlining and steering in helping to sustain them; resegregation in the late 20th-early 21st century; differential arrest and sentencing patterns; and, crucially, the extraordinary growth of the American carceral state.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 109Q: On the Road: A History of Travel in 20th Century America (HISTORY 69Q)

From Mark Twain's Roughin It to Cheryl Strayed's Wild, this seminar explores epic road trips of the twentieth century. Travel is a cultural practice through which Americans have constructed ideas about the self, society, race, the past, and the future. Engaging historical and literary texts, film, autobiography, photography, and music, we will consider how writers have explored the theme of travel and what the differences in their texts tell us about American writing, American history, and American life.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3
Instructors: ; Hobbs, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 110D: War and Peace in American Foreign Policy (INTNLREL 110D, POLISCI 110D, POLISCI 110Y)

(Students not taking this course for WIM, register for 110Y.) The causes of war in American foreign policy. Issues: international and domestic sources of war and peace; war and the American political system; war, intervention, and peace making in the post-Cold War period.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 111: Reproductive Politics in the United States and Abroad (FEMGEN 111)

Course description: This course examines the issues and debates surrounding women's reproduction in the United States and beyond. It pays special attention to how knowledge and technology travel across national/cultural borders and how women's reproductive functions are deeply connected to international politics and events abroad. Topics include: birth control, population control, abortion, sex education, sex trafficking, genetic counseling, assisted reproductive technologies, midwifery, breastfeeding, menstruation, and reproductive hazards.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Takeuchi, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 111Q: Recording Race and Religion in America

This course will explore the relationship between race and religion, as manifest in America¿s aural cultures. From Gospel and Avant Garde jazz to Contemporary Christian Music and hip hop, we will listen in on the ways in which music has served as a powerful mode of organizing, constructing, transcending and complicating ideas about religion and race in America. Focusing on a select playlist, this course will expand our critical vocabularies and enable us to hear American culture differently.
| Units: 5

AMSTUD 114Q: Visions of the 1960s

Preference to sophomores. Introduction to the ideas, sensibility, and, to a lesser degree, the politics of the American 60s. Topics: the early 60s vision of a beloved community; varieties of racial, generational, and feminist dissent; the meaning of the counterculture; and current interpretive perspectives on the 60s. Film, music, and articles and books.
Last offered: Autumn 2014 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 114X: Reading Comics (FILMSTUD 114, FILMSTUD 314)

The modern medium of comics, a history that spans 150 years. The flexibility of the medium encountered through the genres of humorous and dramatic comic strips, superheroes, undergrounds, independents, journalism, and autobiography. Innovative creators including McCay, Kirby, Barry, Ware, and critical writings including McCloud, Eisner, Groenstee. Topics include text/image relations, panel-to-panel relations, the page, caricature, sequence, seriality, comics in the context of the fine arts, and relations to other media.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

AMSTUD 116: American Economic History (ECON 116, HISTORY 156)

The American economy from colonial times to the present, illustrating the role of history in economic life. Topics: U.S. economic development in global and comparative context; slavery as an economic system; emergence of American technology and business organization; economics of the Great Depression and the New Deal; post-World War II economic performance and social change; globalization, information technology, and inequality. Prerequisite: 1 or 1V.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Wright, G. (PI)

AMSTUD 117N: Losing My Religion: Secularism and Spirituality in American Lives (EDUC 117N, RELIGST 13N)

In this seminar you will explore theory and practice, sociological data, spiritual writing, and case studies in an effort to gain a more nuanced understanding about how religion, spirituality, and secularism attempt to make legible the constellation of concerns, commitments, and behaviors that bridge the moral and the personal, the communal and the national, the sacred, the profane, and the rational. Together we will cultivate critical perspectives on practices and politics, beliefs and belonging that we typically take for granted.
Terms: Aut, Sum | Units: 2-4 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Kelman, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 117R: Christianity in 21st-century America (RELIGST 117)

As the largest religion practiced in the United States, Christianity not only shapes the lives of a large number of its citizens but also impinges on public discourse, policies, and debates. This course investigates the ways in which Christianity in America is changing and what these changes bode for its role in the public and private spheres. Issues include shifting demographics lead to declining numbers in 'mainline' denominations; the polarization of Christian conservatives and religious 'nones'; interfaith toleration and cooperation alongside interreligious conflict; the rise of 'spiritual, not religious' young adults; the effects of immigration; religion and science.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Pitkin, B. (PI)

AMSTUD 120: Digital Media in Society (COMM 120W, COMM 220)

Contemporary debates concerning the social and cultural impact of digital media. Topics include the historical origins of digital media, cultural contexts of their development and use, and influence of digital media on conceptions of self, community, and state. Priority to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 121X: Hip Hop, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language (AFRICAAM 121X, ANTHRO 121A, CSRE 121X, EDUC 121, LINGUIST 155)

Focus is on issues of language, identity, and globalization, with a focus on Hip Hop cultures and the verbal virtuosity within the Hip Hop nation. Beginning with the U.S., a broad, comparative perspective in exploring youth identities and the politics of language in what is now a global Hip Hop movement. Readings draw from the interdisciplinary literature on Hip Hop cultures with a focus on sociolinguistics and youth culture.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | Units: 3-4

AMSTUD 121Z: Political Power in American Cities (POLISCI 121, PUBLPOL 133, URBANST 111)

The major actors, institutions, processes, and policies of sub-state government in the U.S., emphasizing city general-purpose governments through a comparative examination of historical and contemporary politics. Issues related to federalism, representation, voting, race, poverty, housing, and finances.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Nall, C. (PI)

AMSTUD 123D: American Literature, 1855 to World War I

A survey of American writers from Whitman to T.S. Eliot, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry James. Topics include the tension between romance and realism, the impact of naturalism and modernism, as well as race, gender, and the literary evolution of the American language.
Last offered: Autumn 2010 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

AMSTUD 123G: Mark Twain: A Fresh Look at an Icon and Iconoclast, 100 Years after His Death

The vitality and versatility of a writer who has been called America's Rabelais, Cervantes, Homer, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare. Journalism, travel books, fiction, drama, and sketches by Mark Twain; how Twain engaged such issues as personal and national identity, satire and social justice, imperialism, race and racism, gender, performance, travel, and technology. What are Twain's legacies in 2010, the centennial of his death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the 125th anniversary of his most celebrated novel? Guests include actor Hal Holbrook.
Last offered: Spring 2010 | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul

AMSTUD 123X: Politics and Public Policy (POLISCI 102, POLISCI 123, PUBLPOL 101, PUBLPOL 201)

(Formerly PS 2) American political institutions (the Presidency, Congress, and the Court) and political processes (the formation of political attitudes and voting) have for some time now been criticized as inadequate to the task of making modern public policy. Against the backdrop of American culture and political history we examine how public policy has been and is being made. We use theories from Political Science and Economics to assess the state of the American system and the policy making process. We use case studies and lectures to analyze contemporary issues including environmental policy, taxes and spending , gun control , economic growth and inequality and mobility. In some of these issue areas we use comparative data from other countries to see how the U.S. is doing relative to other countries. In addition to class room lecture and discussion, student groups are formed to analyze policy issues of relevance to them. Undergraduate Public Policy students are required to enroll in this class for five units.
Terms: Win | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 124A: The American West (ARTHIST 152, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)

The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 125: Perspectives on American Journalism (COMM 125, COMM 225)

An examination of American journalism, focusing on how news is produced, distributed, and financially supported. Emphasis on current media controversies and puzzles, and on designing innovations in discovering and telling stories. (Graduate students register for COMM 225.)
Terms: Aut | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 125C: The Lost Generation: American literature between the World Wars

An exploration of American literature between the World Wars, with a focus on themes such as expatriation, trauma, technology, race, modernism; writers include Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 127: American Style and the Rhetoric of Fashion (ARTHIST 165B, FILMSTUD 165B)

Focus on the visual culture of fashion, especially in an American context. Topics include: the representation of fashion in different visual media (prints, photographs, films, window displays, and digital images); the relationship of fashion to its historical context and American culture; the interplay between fashion and other modes of discourse, in particular art, but also performance, music, economics; and the use of fashion as an expression of social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 128: Representing Fashion (ARTHIST 166)

Course on the representation of fashion in the 20th and 21st century, with focus on American fashion photography. Topics include: history of fashion illustration, fashion photography, and fashion films; intersection of art and commerce; role of designers, photographers, editors, and models; studio v. street photography; the place of mass media, alternative magazines, and online publications; and use of media, photography, and design theory for interpretation of fashion representations. Illustrators and artists include Lepape, Erte, Avedon, Penn, Klein, Newton, Sherman, and Leibovitz.
Terms: Win | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

AMSTUD 129: Animation and the Animated Film (FILMSTUD 129, FILMSTUD 329)

The fantasy of an image coming to life is ancient, but not until the cinema was this fantasy actualized. The history of the movies begins with optical toys, and contemporary cinema is dominated by films that rely on computer animation. This course considers the underlying fantasies of animation in art and lit, its phenomenologies, its relation to the uncanny, its status as a pure cinema, and its place in film theory. Different modes of production and style to be explored include realist animation, abstract animation; animistic animation; animated drawings, objects, and puppets; CGI, motion capture, and live/animation hybrids.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

AMSTUD 130A: In Sickness and In Health: Medicine and Society in the United States: 1800-Present (HISTORY 30A, HISTORY 130A)

Explores the history of medical institutions, ideas and practices in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. How are ideas of illness and health historically rooted and socially constructed? How did scientific and medical discoveries lead to the rise of scientific medicine, and how were these innovations adopted within the American cultural landscape? Topics include the transformation of therapeutics and technologies, medicine and the scientific ideal in the U.S., gender and race and medicine, the history of public health, and the professionalization and specialization of American medical practice.
| Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 132: American Art and Culture, 1528-1910 (ARTHIST 132, ARTHIST 332)

The visual arts and literature of the U.S. from the beginnings of European exploration to the Civil War. Focus is on questions of power and its relation to culture from early Spanish exploration to the rise of the middle classes. Cabeza de Vaca, Benjamin Franklin, John Singleton Copley, Phillis Wheatley, Charles Willson Peale, Emerson, Hudson River School, American Genre painters, Melville, Hawthorne and others.
Last offered: Autumn 2013 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 134: Museum Cultures: Material Representation in the Past and Present (ARCHLGY 134, ARCHLGY 234, ARTHIST 284B, CSRE 134, EDUC 214, NATIVEAM 134)

Students will open the "black box" of museums to consider the past and present roles of institutional collections, culminating in a student-curated exhibition. Today, museums assert their relevance as dynamic spaces for debate and learning. Colonialism and restitution, the politics of representation, human/object relationships, and changing frameworks of authority make museum work widely significant and consistently challenging. Through thinking-in-practice, this course reflexively explores "museum cultures": representations of self and other within museums and institutional cultures of the museum world itself.n3 credits (no final project) or 5 credits (final project). May be repeat for credit
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE | Repeatable 3 times (up to 15 units total)
Instructors: ; Hodge, C. (PI)

AMSTUD 135: Deliberative Democracy and its Critics (COMM 135, COMM 235, COMM 335, POLISCI 234P, POLISCI 334P)

This course examines the theory and practice of deliberative democracy and engages both in a dialogue with critics. Can a democracy which emphasizes people thinking and talking together on the basis of good information be made practical in the modern age? What kinds of distortions arise when people try to discuss politics or policy together? The course draws on ideas of deliberation from Madison and Mill to Rawls and Habermas as well as criticisms from the jury literature, from the psychology of group processes and from the most recent normative and empirical literature on deliberative forums. Deliberative Polling, its applications, defenders and critics, both normative and empirical, will provide a key case for discussion.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-ER, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Siu, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 136X: Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Change in the North American Wes

This course explores the dynamic relationships between indigenous communities and the continuously changing environmental landscapes of the North American West from before European contact to the present. In particular, it examines how specific indigenous communities of the region have navigated and adapted their relationship with the natural world amidst the challenges of colonialism, globalization, climate change, and an increasing national dependency on the natural resources of the North American West.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 137: The Dialogue of Democracy (COMM 137W, COMM 237, POLISCI 232T, POLISCI 332T)

All forms of democracy require some kind of communication so people can be aware of issues and make decisions. This course looks at competing visions of what democracy should be and different notions of the role of dialogue in a democracy. Is it just campaigning or does it include deliberation? Small scale discussions or sound bites on television? Or social media? What is the role of technology in changing our democratic practices, to mobilize, to persuade, to solve public problems? This course will include readings from political theory about democratic ideals - from the American founders to J.S. Mill and the Progressives to Joseph Schumpeter and modern writers skeptical of the public will. It will also include contemporary examinations of the media and the internet to see how those practices are changing and how the ideals can or cannot be realized.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:EC-EthicReas, WAY-ER, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 140: Stand Up Comedy and the "Great American Joke" Since 1945 (CSRE 140C)

Development of American Stand Up Comedy in the context of social and cultural eruptions after 1945, including the Borscht Belt, the Chitlin¿ Circuit, the Cold War, censorship battles, Civil Rights and other social movements of the 60s and beyond. The artistry of stories, monologues, jokes, impersonations, persona, social satire, scatology, obscenity, riffs, rants, shtick, and more by such artists as Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, as well as precursors such as Mark Twain, minstrelsy and vaudeville and related films, TV shows, poems and other manifestations of similar sensibilities and techniques.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 142: The Literature of the Americas (COMPLIT 142, CSRE 142, ENGLISH 172E)

A wide-ranging overview of the literatures of the Americas inncomparative perspective, emphasizing continuities and crises that are common to North American, Central American, and South American literatures as well as the distinctive national and cultural elements of a diverse array of primary works. Topics include the definitions of such concepts as empire and colonialism, the encounters between worldviews of European and indigenous peoples, the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations, slavery, the New World voice, myths of America as paradise or utopia, the coming of modernism, twentieth-century avant-gardes, and distinctive modern episodes--the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magic realism, Noigandres--in unaccustomed conversation with each other.
Last offered: Winter 2013 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 143A: American Architecture (ARTHIST 143A, ARTHIST 343A, CEE 32R)

A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How these ideas are being transformed in today's globalized world.
Last offered: Autumn 2015 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 143X: Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination (ARTHIST 264B, FILMSTUD 264B)

Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

AMSTUD 145M: Culture Wars: Art and Social Conflict in the USA, 1890-1950 (ARTHIST 145, ARTHIST 345, FEMGEN 145)

This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.
Last offered: Spring 2014 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 146: Asian American Culture and Community (ASNAMST 146S, COMPLIT 146, CSRE 146S)

This course introduces students to the histories of Asians in America, specifically as these histories are part of a broader Asia-US-Pacific history that characterized the 20th century and now the 21st. We will combine readings in history, literature, sociology, with community-based learning.nnThe course takes place over two quarters. The first quarter focuses on gaining knowledge of Asian America and discussion key topics that students wish to focus on collaboratively. During this first quarter we also learn about community-based learning, set up teams and projects, and develop relationships with community organizations. The second quarter students work with student liaisons (senior students who have experience in service learning) and complete their work with the community¿there are no formal class meetings this second quarter. Service Learning Course (certified by Haas Center). Course can be repeated once.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI | Repeatable 2 times (up to 10 units total)

AMSTUD 146A: Steinbeck (ENGLISH 146A)

Introduction to the work of an American writer, beloved by general readers, often reviled by critics, whose career spanned from the Great Depression through World War II to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Focus on the social and political contexts of Steinbeck's major works; his fascination with California and Mexico; his interdisciplinary interest in marine biology and in philosophy; his diverse experiments with literary form, including drama and film.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 146C: Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald (ENGLISH 146C)

While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Hurston and Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. Focus on the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in representing the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished.
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 147A: Speaking of Baseball (ENGLISH 147A)

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, baseball has been steeped in lore and rhetoric. A cultural commentator recently pegged it one of three significant American contributions to world culture, along with jazz and the U.S. constitution. Literary and artistic representations of baseball abound, often treating it as more than a game and only a little less than a religion. In this class, we¹ll track representations and grand claims made for baseball by American poets, novelists, and commentators of all sorts. We'll weigh the cornucopia of literary nonfiction depicting the game. The goal will be to map the scope of this literature, defining a tradition's edges, determining its peaks, assessing its limits, challenges, and stakes. This class is open to anyone, whether familiar with the game, or totally new to it. We'll cover a variety of issues: Americana, mythologies of sport, gender and class, race, history, sociology, lots of poetry, and film.
Terms: Sum | Units: 3-5
Instructors: ; Nathan, J. (PI)

AMSTUD 147J: Studies in Music, Media, and Popular Culture: The Soul Tradition in African American Music (AFRICAAM 19, CSRE 147J, MUSIC 147J, MUSIC 247J)

The African American tradition of soul music from its origins in blues, gospel, and jazz to its influence on today's r&b, hip hop, and dance music. Style such as rhythm and blues, Motown, Southern soul, funk, Philadelphia soul, disco, Chicago house, Detroit techno, trip hop, and neo-soul. Soul's cultural influence and global reach; its interaction with politics, gender, place, technology, and the economy. Pre-/corequisite (for music majors): MUSIC 22. (WIM at 4 units only.)
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 3-4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 150: Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (ENGLISH 11B)

(Formerly English 23/123). A survey of early American writings, including sermons, poetry, captivity and slave narratives, essays, autobiography, and fiction, from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 150A: Colonial and Revolutionary America (HISTORY 150A)

(Same as HISTORY 50A. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for HISTORY 150A.) Survey of the origins of American society and polity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Topics: the migration of Europeans and Africans and the impact on native populations; the emergence of racial slavery and of regional, provincial, Protestant cultures; and the political origins and constitutional consequences of the American Revolution.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 150B: Nineteenth Century America (AFRICAAM 150B, HISTORY 150B)

(Same as HISTORY 50B. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 150B.) Territorial expansion, social change, and economic transformation. The causes and consequences of the Civil War. Topics include: urbanization and the market revolution; slavery and the Old South; sectional conflict; successes and failures of Reconstruction; and late 19th-century society and culture.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; White, R. (PI); Su, A. (GP)

AMSTUD 150C: The United States in the Twentieth Century (HISTORY 150C)

(Same as HISTORY 50C. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 150C.) This course begins around 1900, when women and most African-Americans could not vote; automobiles were virtually unknown and computers unimaginable; and the U.S. was a minor power overshadowed by Europe. Yet fierce debates over the purpose of government and role of the U.S. in the world animated national politics, as they do today. This course surveys U.S. politics, culture, and social movements to answer the question: How did we get from there to here? Suitable for non-majors and majors.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 150J: Queer Poetry in America (ENGLISH 150J, FEMGEN 150J)

Some poets are known for portraying alternative sexualities in their poetry. Others seem to cover sexuality up. Can we use a poem to determine whether a poet is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning? Or do some poets simply defy categorization? What makes a poem queer? Is poetry somehow more or less queer than other literary forms? Even if we can answer these questions, what would they tell us about literature in general? This course will investigate such topics and more by tracking queer poetry in twentieth-century America. We'll start with nineteenth-century figures Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, then move on to Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and others. We'll ask what their poetry meant in their own times, as well as what it means to us in our present era of expanding civil rights and changing sexual attitudes.
Terms: Sum | Units: 3-5
Instructors: ; Tackett, J. (PI)

AMSTUD 150X: From Gold Rush to Google Bus: History of San Francisco (HISTORY 152E, URBANST 150)

This class will examine the history of San Francisco from Native American and colonial settlement through the present. Focus is on social, environmental, and political history, with the theme of power in the city. Topics include Native Americans, the Gold Rush, immigration and nativism, railroads and robber barons, earthquake and fire, progressive reform and unionism, gender, race and civil rights, sexuality and politics, counterculture, redevelopment and gentrification. Students write final project in collaboration with ShapingSF, a participatory community history project documenting and archiving overlooked stories and memories of San Francisco. (Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center)
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Kahan, M. (PI)

AMSTUD 151H: ID21 STRATLAB: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Improvising Identities (CSRE 151H, DANCE 151H, DANCE 251H, TAPS 351H)

A quarter-long exploration of improvisation in relationship to identity and race in the 21st century in which students investigate new dynamics of doing and thinking identities through the arts. Panel discussions, performances, and talks that engage critically with the theme, concept, and practice of improvising identity across a variety of contexts and genres such as jazz music, modern dance, contemporary art, race comedy, food, and hip-hop poetry/freestyle. Strategies that artists/scholars have used to overturn essentializing notions of identity in theory and practice.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | Units: 4-5

AMSTUD 152A: "Mutually Assured Destruction": American Culture and the Cold War

The temperature of the early Cold War years via readings of Soviet and U.S. propaganda; documentary film and film noir; fiction by Bellow, Ellison, O¿Connor, and Mailer; social theory by Arendt, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School; and political texts such as Kennan¿s Sources of Soviet Conduct, the ¿Truman Doctrine¿ speech, and the National Security Council Report 68. Major themes include the discourse of totalitarianism, MacCarthyism, strategies of containment, the nuclear threat, the figure of the ¿outsider¿ and the counterculture, and the cultural shift from sociological to psychological idioms.
Last offered: Winter 2013 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

AMSTUD 152C: The JFK Era and American Literature

Few U.S. presidents have exerted so great a fascination on the national¿and global¿post-World War II imagination as John F. Kennedy. As the 2013¿s semi-centennial anniversary of Kennedy¿s assassination attests, the production of films, television and multimedia programs, biographies, conspiracy theories, academic studies, and literary texts about the iconic JFK and his fabled, thousand-day presidency continues unabated. In this course, we will explore the attention Kennedy has drawn from writers and filmmakers in texts by Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others.
Last offered: Autumn 2014 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 152K: Mixed-Race Politics and Culture (AFRICAAM 226, CSRE 152K)

Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? This course approaches issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st-century U.S. Issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation, and racial prejudice in American society. Topics include the political and social formation of race; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the "one-drop rule" and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of census categories and the rise of the multiracial movement.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 154: American Intellectual and Cultural History to the Civil War (HISTORY 154)

(Same as HISTORY 54. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 154.) How Americans considered problems such as slavery, imperialism, and sectionalism. Topics include: the political legacies of revolution; biological ideas of race; the Second Great Awakening; science before Darwin; reform movements and utopianism; the rise of abolitionism and proslavery thought; phrenology and theories of human sexuality; and varieties of feminism. Sources include texts and images.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 154X: The American Civil War: A Visual History (ARTHIST 154, ARTHIST 354)

A painting of men charging across a field, a photograph of dead bodies in a ditch, a fragment of metal, a sliver of bone, and a brass button: how do we make sense of the visual record of the American Civil War (1861-65)? From the Capitol Dome to a skeleton dug up in a highway project a hundred years after the last battle, the course will consider the strange and scattered remnants of a famous era. Drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, the paintings of Winslow Homer, the photographs of Alexander Gardner, and the oratory of Abraham Lincoln, the course will examine what cannot be portrayed: the trauma of war.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 155C: Abstract Expressionism: Painting/Modern/America (ARTHIST 155C)

The course will focus on American abstract painting from the 1930s to the 1960s, emphasizing the works of art at the Anderson Collection at Stanford. We will focus on looking closely at pictures by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other renowned abstract painters, developing skills of speaking and writing about these works of art. We will also place these pictures in their mid-20th century context: World War II and the Cold War; Hollywood and popular culture generally; Beat literature; and locations such as New York and San Francisco.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Nemerov, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 156H: Women and Medicine in US History: Women as Patients, Healers and Doctors (FEMGEN 156H, HISTORY 156G)

Women's bodies in sickness and health, and encounters with lay and professional healers from the 18th century to the present. Historical consttruction of thought about women's bodies and physical limitations; sexuality; birth control and abortion; childbirth; adulthood; and menopause and aging. Women as healers, including midwives, lay physicians, the medical profession, and nursing.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Horn, M. (PI)

AMSTUD 157: The Constitution: A Brief History (HISTORY 157, POLISCI 128S)

A broad survey of the Constitution, from its Revolutionary origins to the contemporary disputes over interpretation. Topics include the invention of the written constitution and interpretative canons; the origins of judicial review; the Civil War and Reconstruction as constitutional crises; the era of substantive due process; the rights revolution; and the Constitution in wartime.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul

AMSTUD 157P: Solidarity and Racial Justice (AFRICAAM 157P, CSRE 157P, FEMGEN 157P)

Is multiracial solidarity necessary to overcome oppression that disproportionately affects certain communities of color? What is frontline leadership and what role should people play if they are not part of frontline communities? In this course we will critically examine practices of solidarity and allyship in movements for collective liberation. Through analysis of historical and contemporary movements, as well as participation in movement work, we will see how movements have built multiracial solidarity to address issues that are important to the liberation of all. We will also see how racial justice intersects with other identities and issues. This course is for students that want to learn how to practice solidarity, whether to be better allies or to work more effectively with allies. There will be a community engaged learning option for this course. Students who choose to participate in this option will either work with Stanford's DGen Office or a community organization that is explicitly devoted to multiracial movement-building.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4-5

AMSTUD 157X: Language as Political Tool: Feminist and LGBTQ Movements and Impacts (FEMGEN 157, FEMGEN 257)

How does a social or political movement gain traction? For example, how did 20th-century movements of the disenfranchised, such as the Civil Rights movement, LGBTQ movements, or feminist movements, gain a voice and eventually enact change? In the mediascape of today, where everyone with access to a computer could have a voice, how does a movement change the national conversation? How do written and verbal choices of the movements impact their success and outreach to supporters? In this course, students will write and revise their own arguments in order to best understand the rhetorical potential in these movements¿ choices and to consider how those rhetorical moves are incorporated into political discourse. We'll examine the role of rhetoric, the use of argument to persuade, in social movements working toward social justice, party platforms, and public policy.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Hanlon, P. (PI)

AMSTUD 159X: American Photographs, 1839-1971: A Cultural History (ARTHIST 159, ARTHIST 359)

This course concentrates on many important American photographers, from the era of daguerreotypes to near the end of the pre-digital era. We study photographs of the Civil War, western exploration, artistic subjects, urban and rural poverty, skyscrapers, crime, fashion, national parks, and social protest, among other topics. Among the photographers we study: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Emphasis on developing students' abilities to discuss and write about photography; to see it.
Last offered: Spring 2014 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 160: Perspectives on American Identity

Required for American Studies majors. In this seminar we trace diverse and changing interpretations of American identity by exploring autobiographical, literary, and/or visual texts from the 18th through the 20th century in conversation with sociological, political, and historical accounts.
Terms: Aut, Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 161: Women in Modern America (CSRE 162, FEMGEN 161, HISTORY 161)

This course explores the transition from Victorian to modern womanhood in the U.S. from the 1890s to the end of the 20th century, including the experiences of Native, European, African, Mexican, and Asian American women. It asks how, when, and why the majority of American women become wage earners, gained full citizenship, and enacted political opportunities; how race- and class-specific ideals of womanhood changed in popular culture; and how women have redefined their reproductive and sexual relations.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 163: Queer America (ARTHIST 163, FEMGEN 163)

This class explores queer art, photography and politics in the United States since 1930. Our approach will be grounded in close attention to the history and visual representation of sexual minorities in particular historical moments and social contexts. We will consider the cultural and political effects of World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, psychedelics, hippie culture and sexual liberation, lesbian separatism, the AIDS crisis, and marriage equality.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul

AMSTUD 164C: From Freedom to Freedom Now: African American History, 1865-1965 (HISTORY 164C)

(Same as HISTORY 64C. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 164C.) Explores the working lives, social worlds, political ideologies and cultural expressions of African Americans from emancipation to the early civil rights era. Topics include: the transition from slavery to freedom, family life, work, culture, leisure patterns, resistance, migration and social activism. Draws largely on primary sources including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, personal journals, newspaper articles, pamphlets, speeches, literature, film and music.
Last offered: Spring 2011 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul

AMSTUD 165: History of Higher Education in the U.S. (EDUC 165, EDUC 265, HISTORY 158C)

Major periods of evolution, particularly since the mid-19th century. Premise: insights into contemporary higher education can be obtained through its antecedents, particularly regarding issues of governance, mission, access, curriculum, and the changing organization of colleges and universities.
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5

AMSTUD 166: Introduction to African American History - the Modern Freedom Struggle (AFRICAAM 166, CSRE 166, HISTORY 66, HISTORY 166)

Using the unique documentary resources and publications of Stanford's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, this course will utilize multi-media materials to shed light on the relationship between grassroots activism and King's visionary leadership.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul
Instructors: ; Carson, C. (PI)

AMSTUD 175E: Animals and the Fictions of Identity (ENGLISH 175E)

In a post-Darwin world, the notion that we might all have an animal alter-ego lurking inside seems quite familiar. But ideas about animals¿how they think and feel, act and react¿involve identity categories such as race, gender, class and ability in surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animality and human life in twentieth-century American fiction, from race and indigeneity in Jack London¿s dog stories to the storytelling practices of contemporary animal advocacy groups. The course may also include an experiential component in which students will have the opportunity to explore multispecies concerns with a local organization.
Terms: Sum | Units: 3-5
Instructors: ; Googasian, V. (PI)

AMSTUD 178: Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (ARTHIST 178, ARTHIST 378)

The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.
Last offered: Spring 2004 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 179: Introduction to American Law (POLISCI 122, PUBLPOL 302A)

For undergraduates. The structure of the American legal system including the courts; American legal culture; the legal profession and its social role; the scope and reach of the legal system; the background and impact of legal regulation; criminal justice; civil rights and civil liberties; and the relationship between the American legal system and American society in general.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci
Instructors: ; Friedman, L. (PI)

AMSTUD 183: Re- Imagining American Borders (CSRE 183, FEMGEN 183)

How novelists, filmmakers, and poets perceive racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, and class borders in the context of a current volatile national discussion about the place of Americans both here and in the world. How Anna Deavere Smith, Sherman Alexie, Shailja Patel or Ta-Nehisi Coates consider redrawing such lines so that center and margin, or self and other, do not remain fixed and divided. How linguistic borderlines within multilingual literature by Caribbean, Arab, and Asian Americans function. Can Anzaldúa's 1986 conception of borderlands be constructed through the matrix of language, dreams, music, and cultural memories in these recent American narratives? Course includes creatively examining one's own identity.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Duffey, C. (PI)

AMSTUD 185: American Studies Internship

Restricted to declared majors. Practical experience working in a field related to American Studies for six to ten weeks. Students make internship arrangements with a company or agency, under the guidance of a sponsoring faculty member, and with the consent of the director or a program coordinator of American Studies. Required paper focused on a topic related to the internship and the student's studies. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum | Units: 1-3 | Repeatable for credit

AMSTUD 186: Tales of Three Cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles (ENGLISH 186)

How urban form and experience shape literary texts and how literary texts participate in the creation of place, through the literature of three American cities as they ascended to cultural and iconographical prominence: New York in the early to mid 19th century; Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and Los Angeles in the mid to late 20th century.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Richardson, J. (PI)

AMSTUD 186A: American Hauntings

Cultural, psychological, social, and political dynamics of haunting in American literature, from the early national period to the late 20th century. Sources include ghost stories and other instances of supernatural, emotional, or mental intervention. Authors include Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, and Stephen King.
| Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

AMSTUD 186B: American Song in the 20th Century and after (MUSIC 186B, MUSIC 286B)

Critical and creative exploration of song in the Americas. About twenty-five key examples will guide discussion of the interactions between words, music, performance and culture. Weekly listening, reading and assignments will be organized around central themes: love, sex and romance; war and politics; labor and money; place; identity; society and everyday life. Genres include art song; blues, gospel, jazz and country; pop, soul, rock and hip-hop; bossa nova, nueva canción and salsa; electronic and experimental. Takehome and in-class assignments will include critical and creative writing, and music composition, production and performance; final projects may emphasize any of the above.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 3-4 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE

AMSTUD 187S: Literature, Film, and Adaptation (ENGLISH 187S)

This course studies many aspects of translating fiction into film, written media into visual and written. Topics include short story into feature film: Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, into Sarah Polly's Away from Her ; conventional police procedural into post-WWII Japanese hybrid of procedural and film noir: Ed McBain's King's Ransom into Kurosawa's High and Low which deals with changing standards of Japanese business, class issues, the effects of the American atomic bomb; classic southern gothic horror novel (Davis Grubb's Night of the Hunter) into Charles Laughton's American expressionist masterpiece; complete revision of Dorothy B. Hughes novel into Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (Humphrey Bogart); Philip K. Dick and the various interpretations of Blade Runner.
| Units: 5

AMSTUD 197: Dance in Prison: The Arts, Juvenile Justice, and Rehabilitation in America (DANCE 197, TAPS 197)

This class works collaboratively with a local juvenile hall to use civic engagement and performance to explore the aesthetic, cultural and legal issues in the lives of incarcerated youth. In the process students gain an understanding of incarceration on an immediate and personal scale. Taught jointly by a Dance Studies scholar and a lawyer specializing in Juvenile Justice, we will consider what unique understandings are possible if we position the arts as central to an exploration of punishment, rehabilitation and recidivism in America. The course will examine case studies, historical and contemporary narratives about the social, imaginative and behavioral change possible through arts programs in prison.Half of the class meetings will be in Hillcrest Juvenile Hall in San Mateo, where our class will join with a group of 13-18 year old youths currently detained there. Dance will be used to help shape their individual expressive voices, and ours, through collaborative hip hop dance classes. Books to be read are Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, and Last Chance in Texas by John Hubner.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Ross, J. (PI)

AMSTUD 201: History of Education in the United States (EDUC 201, HISTORY 258B)

How education came to its current forms and functions, from the colonial experience to the present. Focus is on the 19th-century invention of the common school system, 20th-century emergence of progressive education reform, and the developments since WW II. The role of gender and race, the development of the high school and university, and school organization, curriculum, and teaching.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5
Instructors: ; Gordon, L. (PI)

AMSTUD 214: The American 1960s: Thought, Protest, and Culture

The meaning of the American 60s emphasizing ideas, culture, protest, and the new sensibility that emerged. Topics: black protest, the new left, the counterculture, feminism, the new literature and journalism of the 60s, the role of the media in shaping dissent, and the legacy of 60s protest. Interpretive materials from film, music, articles, and books.
Last offered: Autumn 2014 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 216: Education, Race, and Inequality in African American History, 1880-1990 (AFRICAAM 116, CSRE 216X, EDUC 216, HISTORY 255E)

Seminar. The relationship among race, power, inequality, and education from the 1880s to the 1990s. How schools have constructed race, the politics of school desegregation, and ties between education and the late 20th-century urban crisis.
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul
Instructors: ; Gordon, L. (PI)

AMSTUD 220B: Being John Wayne (FILMSTUD 220, TAPS 220A)

John Wayne's imposing corporeality and easy comportment combined to create an icon of masculinity, the American West, and America itself. Focus is on the films that contributed most to the establishment, maturation, and deconstruction of the iconography and mythology of the John Wayne character. The western and war film as genres; the crisis of and performance of masculinity in postwar culture; gender and sexuality in American national identity; relations among individualism, community, and the state; the Western and national memory; and patriotism and the Vietnam War.
Terms: Win | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Bukatman, S. (PI)

AMSTUD 226: Race and Racism in American Politics (CSRE 226, POLISCI 226, POLISCI 326)

Topics include the historical conceptualization of race; whether and how racial animus reveals itself and the forms it might take; its role in the creation and maintenance of economic stratification; its effect on contemporary U.S. partisan and electoral politics; and policy making consequences.
Last offered: Autumn 2015 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 226X: Curating Experience: Representation in and beyond Museums (CSRE 226X, EDUC 226)

In an age when some 50% of museum visitors only "visit" museums online and when digital technologies have broken open archival access, anyone can be a curator, a critic, an historian, an archivist. In this context, how do museums create experiences that teach visitors about who they are and about the world around them? What are the politics of representation that shape learning in these environments? Using an experimental instructional approach, students will reconsider and redefine what it means to curate experience. (This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units to satisfy a Ways requirement.)
Terms: Win | Units: 2-4 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Kelman, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 231X: Learning Religion: How People Acquire Religious Commitments (EDUC 231, JEWISHST 291X, RELIGST 231X)

This course will examine how people learn religion outside of school, and in conversation with popular cultural texts and practices. Taking a broad social-constructivist approach to the variety of ways people learn, this course will explore how people assemble ideas about faith, identity, community, and practice, and how those ideas inform individual, communal and global notions of religion. Much of this work takes place in formal educational environments including missionary and parochial schools, Muslim madrasas or Jewish yeshivot. However, even more takes place outside of school, as people develop skills and strategies in conversation with broader social trends. This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to questions that lie at the intersection of religion, popular culture, and education. May be repeat for credit.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | Repeatable 2 times (up to 8 units total)
Instructors: ; Kelman, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 240A: Pre-Honors Seminar

Methods, interpretations, and issues pertinent to honors work in American Studies. Open to juniors interested in honors.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 1-5

AMSTUD 240Y: The Yiddish Story (JEWISHST 240, SLAVIC 240)

The Yiddish language is associated with jokes, folktales, and miracle legends, as well as modern stories. This class traces the development of Yiddish literature through these short oral and written forms, following Jewish writers out of the East European market town to cities in the Soviet Union, Israel, and especially the United States. We conclude with stories written in other languages about Yiddish writers. Readings include Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Esther Singer-Kreitman, Cynthia Ozick, and Dina Rubina. Readings in English; optional discussion section for students who read Yiddish.
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 244: The Visual Culture of the American Home Front, 1941-1945 (ARTHIST 244)

How does home front of WWII look now? What sort of meanings appear with the vantage of more than sixty years' distance? Examining Hollywood films from those years -films made during the war but mostly not directly about the war - the seminar focuses on developing students' abilities to write emotion-based criticism and history. Weekly short papers, each one in response to a film screening, are required. Among the films screened: Shadow of a Doubt, Gaslight, I Walked with a Zombie, The Best Years of Our Lives.
Last offered: Winter 2013 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

AMSTUD 246B: Pop Art (ARTHIST 246B)

A new course on the history and meaning of Pop art in the United States and abroad. The course will feature close study of paintings, photographs, and prints at the Cantor Art Center. The course will be given in the Denning Family Resource Room, located in The Anderson Collection building. If you have any questions regarding the location, please contact Linda Esquivel at lindae@stanford.edu.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 250: Senior Research

Research and writing of senior honors thesis under the supervision of a faculty member. The final grade for the thesis is assigned by the chair based on the evaluations of the primary thesis adviser and a second reader appointed by the program. Prerequisite: consent of chair.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum | Units: 1-15 | Repeatable for credit
Instructors: ; Fishkin, S. (PI)

AMSTUD 255D: Racial Identity in the American Imagination (AFRICAAM 255, CSRE 255D, HISTORY 255D, HISTORY 355D)

From Sally Hemings to Barack Obama, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal and literary texts and films, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped our understanding of racial identity. This course also draws on other imaginative modes including autobiography, memoir, photography and music to consider the ways that racial identity has been represented in American society. Most broadly, this course interrogates the problem of American identity and examines the interplay between racial identity and American identity. This course moves along both chronological and thematic axes to investigate the problems of racial mixture, mixed-race identity, racial passing and racial performance across historical periods. Themes of ambiguous, hidden and hybrid identity will be critical to this course. This course will also explore the interplay of the problems of class, gender and sexuality in the construction of racial identity.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4-5
Instructors: ; Hobbs, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 257: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (COMM 278)

Walt Whitman spent twenty-five years as a journalist before publishing his first book of poems. Mark Twain was a journalist for twenty years before publishing his first novel. Topics include examination of how writers¿ backgrounds in journalism shaped the poetry or fiction for which they are best known; study of recent controversies surrounding writers who blurred the line between journalism and fiction. Writers include Whitman, Fanny Fern, Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Theodore Dreiser, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Meridel LeSueur.
Last offered: Spring 2011 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 258: Sexual Violence in America (AFRICAAM 192, CSRE 192E, FEMGEN 258, FEMGEN 358, HISTORY 258, HISTORY 358)

This undergraduate/graduate colloquium explores the history of sexual violence in America, with particular attention to the intersections of gender and race in the construction of rape. We discuss the changing definitions of sexual violence in law and in cultural representations from early settlement through the late-twentieth century, including slavery, wartime and prison rape, the history of lynching and anti-lynching movements, and feminist responses to sexual violence. In addition to introducing students to the literature on sexual violence, the course attempts to teach critical skills in the analysis of secondary and primary historical texts. Students write short weekly reading responses and a final paper; no final exam; fifth unit research or CEL options.nnLimited enrollment, permission of instructor required. Submit application form (available in course syllabus or History department main office, 200-113) by November 15, 2016 and indicate interest in CEL option. Priority admission to History, FGSS, CSRE, AFRICAAM, and AMSTUD declared majors and minors. (Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center)
Terms: Win | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Freedman, E. (PI)

AMSTUD 260: Disability, Gender, and Identity: Women's Personal Experiences (FEMGEN 260, FEMGEN 360)

This course explores visible and invisible disabilities, focusing on issues of gender and identity in the personal experiences of women. The course emphasizes psychological as well as physical health, the diversity of disability experiences, self-labeling, caretaking, stigma and passing, and social and political aspects. Disabilities covered include blindness, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, arthritis, emotional and learning disabilities, and conditions requiring wheelchairs and other forms of assistance. The readings draw from the disability studies literature and emphasize women's personal narratives in sociological perspective. Note: Instructor Consent Required.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Krieger, S. (PI)

AMSTUD 261A: Geography, Time, and Trauma in Asian American Literature (ASNAMST 187)

The notion that homes can be stable locations for cultural, racial, ethnic, and similarly situated identity categories. Tthe possibility that there really is no place like home for Asian American subjects. How geography, landscape, and time situate traumas within fictional Asian American narratives.
Last offered: Autumn 2010 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 261E: Mixed Race Literature in the U.S. and South Africa (AFRICAAM 261E)

As scholar Werner Sollors recently suggested, novels, poems, stories about interracial contacts and mixed race constitute ¿an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.¿ Yet the theme of mixed race is at the center of many national self-definitions, even in our U.S. post-Civil Rights and South Africa¿s post-Apartheid era. This course examines aesthetic engagements with mixed race politics in these trans- and post-national dialogues, beginning in the 1700s and focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries.
Last offered: Winter 2011 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 262C: African American Literature and the Retreat of Jim Crow (AFRICAAM 262C, CSRE 262C)

After the unprecedented carnage of WWII, the postwar era witnessed the slow decline of the segregated Jim Crow order and the onset of landmark civil rights legislation. What role did African American literature and culture play in this historical process? What does this shift in racial theory and praxis mean for black literary production, a tradition constituted by the experience of slavery and racial oppression? Focus on these questions against the backdrop of contemporaneous developments: the onset of the Cold War, decolonization and the formation of the Third World, and the emergence of the "new liberalism.".
Last offered: Spring 2016 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 262D: African American Poetics (AFRICAAM 262D)

Examination of African American poetic expressive forms from the 1700s to the 2000s, considering the central role of the genre--from sonnets to spoken word, from blues poetry to new media performance--in defining an evolving literary tradition and cultural identity.
Last offered: Winter 2011 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 265: Writing Asian American History (ASNAMST 265, HISTORY 265, HISTORY 365)

Recent scholarship in Asian American history, with attention to methodologies and sources. Topics: racial ideologies, gender, transnationalism, culture, and Asian American art history. Primary research paper.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 267E: Martin Luther King, Jr. - His Life, Ideas, and Legacy (AFRICAAM 267E, HISTORY 267E)

Using the unique documentary resources and publications of Stanford's King Research and Education Institute, this course will provide a general introduction to King's life, visionary ideas, and historical significance. In addition to lectures and discussions, the course will include presentations of documentaries such as Eyes on the Prize. Students will be expected to read the required texts, participate in class discussions, and submit a research paper or an audio-visual project developed in consultation with the professor.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 4-5

AMSTUD 271: Mexicans in the United States (CHILATST 171, CSRE 171H, HISTORY 271)

This course explores the lives and experiences of Mexicans living in the United States, from 1848 to the present. Themes and topics include: the legacies of colonialism, the Mexican-American War, transnational migration, the effects of economic stratification, race and racialization, and the impact of sexual and gender ideologies on the lives of Mexicans residing north of the border.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 5

AMSTUD 272E: Theories of Citizenship and Sovereignty in a Transnational Context (CHILATST 172, CSRE 172H, FEMGEN 272E, HISTORY 272E, HISTORY 372E)

This course explores the multiple meanings of citizenship and the ways in which they change when examined using different geographic scales (from the local to the transnational). The course will pair theoretical readings on citizenship with case studies that focus on North America. Topics include: definitions of citizenship; the interrelation of ideas of citizenship with those of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; the relationship between sovereignty and territoriality; human and civil rights; and immigration.
Last offered: Autumn 2014 | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 275B: History of Modern Mexico (CHILATST 275B, CSRE 275B, HISTORY 275B, HISTORY 375C)

Surveys the history of governance, resistance, and identity formation in Mexico from the nineteenth century to the present. Explores Mexico's historical struggles to achieve political stability, economic prosperity, and social justice and examines how regional, class, ethnic, and gender differences have figured prominently in the shaping of Mexican affairs. Topics include Mexico's wars and their legacies, the power of the state, violence and protest, debates over the meaning of "Mexicanness," youth culture, and the politics of indigenismo.
Last offered: Winter 2016 | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI

AMSTUD 275R: Roads Not Taken, 1880-1960 (ETHICSOC 275R, PHIL 275R, POLISCI 335L)

This course is intended to illuminate ideas about justice, freedom, equality, democracy, peace, and social conflict, and to raise persisting questions about such topics as the role of violence in politics through looking at the ideas of America writers such as Edward Bellamy, W.E.B. DuBois, Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Last offered: Spring 2015 | Units: 4

AMSTUD 276: Water Resources: Culture and Context (ENVRES 276)

Students in this discussion-based seminar will examine both the social and environmental challenges of managing California¿s freshwater resources. The multidisciplinary team of instructors will introduce a range of textual sources - engineering, cartographic, art historical, and ecological, to name a few - and the class will engage directly with Cantor¿s `Art of Water¿ exhibition as well as local feats of water infrastructure. Students will gain historically-grounded insights through tailored weekly assignments and develop creative solutions for freshwater security as the final project.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5

AMSTUD 279X: American Jewish History: Learning to be Jewish in America (EDUC 279, HISTORY 288D, JEWISHST 297X, RELIGST 279X)

This course will be a seminar in American Jewish History through the lens of education. It will address both the relationship between Jews and American educational systems, as well as the history of Jewish education in America. Plotting the course along these two axes will provide a productive matrix for a focused examination of the American Jewish experience. History students must take course for at least 3 units.
Last offered: Winter 2015 | Units: 2-4

AMSTUD 281: Asian Religions in America; Asian American Religions (ASNAMST 281, RELIGST 281, RELIGST 381)

This course will analyze both the reception in America of Asian religions (i.e. of Buddhism in the 19th century), and the development in America of Asian American religious traditions.
Last offered: Winter 2014 | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP

AMSTUD 293: Church, State, & Schools: Issues in Education & Religion (EDUC 293, RELIGST 293X)

This course will examine interactions between religion and education, focusing on both formal and experiential sites in which people and communities explore, articulate, encounter, and perform religious ideologies and identities. The class will focus on different religious traditions and their encounters the institutions and structures of education in American culture, both in the United States and as it manifests in American culture transnationally.
Last offered: Autumn 2015 | Units: 4
© Stanford University | Terms of Use | Copyright Complaints