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AMSTUD 43X: Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination

(Same as AMSTUD 143X. Students who wish to take it for 5 units, register for AMSTUD 143X.) 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: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

AMSTUD 55F: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1830 to 1877 (AFRICAAM 55F, AMSTUD 155F, HISTORY 55F, HISTORY 155F)

(History 55F is 3 units; History 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically challenged categories of race and citizenship. Topics covered include: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problems and personal experiences; the horrors of total war for individuals and society; and the challenges--social and political--of Reconstruction.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 99: American Studies Senior Colloquium

This workshop course offers a supportive, open-ended intellectual maker space where upperclass American Studies students can develop individual capstone projects in conversation with fellow majors and with guidance from the program's capstone mentor.
Terms: Aut, Win | Units: 1-2 | Repeatable 2 times (up to 4 units total)
Instructors: ; Bolten, R. (PI)

AMSTUD 100A: Decolonizing Methodologies: Introduction to Native American Studies (NATIVEAM 100)

This course provides students with an introductory grasp on major concepts, theoretical highlights, and important figures in Native American and Indigenous Studies, also known as American Indian Studies or First Nations Studies. The discipline emerged in the United States during the late 1960s when Native student-activists demanded the inclusion of their histories alongside the dominant white settler narratives in universities¿ educational catalog. By examining historical and legal documents, storytelling accounts, images, films, and literary works, students will explore a diverse range of themes and perspectives, gaining an understanding of Native American cultures, histories, and contemporary lifeworlds. The course emphasizes materials from relevant sources produced by and about Natives to foster critical thinking and analysis. It also aims to cultivate an appreciation for the richness and complexity of Native American experiences while introducing major concepts, theoretical highlights, and important figures in the field of Native American Studies. Throughout the course, students will explore the global development of the discipline from a pan-Indian perspective, discussing keywords, histories, politics, disciplinary concerns, and the recent "decolonial turn" within academia. By the end of the course, students will have an introductory understanding of key disciplinary jargon, methodological research, and constitutive issues in Native American Studies.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Stone, P. (PI)

AMSTUD 104A: Introduction to African American Studies: Black Religion, Culture, and Experience to the Civil War (AFRICAAM 104)

Beginning in 16th century West Africa and ending in the 19th century United States, this course will survey the religious, cultural, and experiential histories of African-descended people in the Atlantic world. From the early histories of the slave trade to the violence of American racial hierarchies, we will delve into the cosmologies, practices, rituals, aesthetics, and other cultural expressions of free and enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, with a particular emphasis on the United States. What did Africa mean to those displaced from their ancestral homelands? How did African descended people perceive, navigate, and resist their racialization? How did they reshape the Americas through their intellect, creativity, and culture? Prioritizing the voices, thought, and sensory registers of the persons involved in these historical processes, this course will explore African Americans' experiences - from the spectacular to the quotidian - as windows into the human experience.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors: ; Wells-Oghoghomeh, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 104Q: Picturing Americans

What do pictures reveal about individuals and their social, cultural, and historical world? Who or what might they conceal? This seminar uses visual depictions of Americans (paintings, photographs, films, comics, and more) as the starting point for discussions of American history, art, popular culture, social movements, and national identity, as well as questions of who has been represented and who has been overlooked. Literary and historical texts support and complement the close study of pictures from the late 19th century through the present.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

AMSTUD 106: Holy Hipsters: Spiritual Rebellion and Hip Consumerism in Postwar America

This course sketches the history of the "hip" mode of spiritual rebellion from the 1950s Beat Generation to the "hipster witches" of today. In addition to explicating the socio-historical dynamics of spiritual dissent, this seminar will map the shifting terrain of "hip consumerism" and explore the intersection of race, class, and gender in the social construction of hipness.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Greer, J. (PI)

AMSTUD 120: The Rise of Digital Culture (COMM 120W, COMM 220)

(Graduate students register for 220. COMM 120W is offered for 5 units, COMM 220 is offered for 4 units.From Snapchat to artificial intelligence, digital systems are reshaping our jobs, our democracies, our love lives, and even what it means to be human. But where did these media come from? And what kind of culture are they creating? To answer these questions, this course explores the entwined development of digital technologies and post-industrial ways of living and working from the Cold War to the present. Topics will include the historical origins of digital media, cultural contexts of their deployment and use, and the influence of digital media on conceptions of self, community, and state. Priority to juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, 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. COMM 125 is offered for 5 units, COMM 225 is offered for 4 units.)
Terms: Aut | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 126Q: California Dreaming

'A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest,' writes Joan Didion, 'remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.' From the Gold Rush to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, Yosemite to the Salton Sea, in this course we'll encounter a series of writers and artists whose work is set in California, or participates in its imagining, and throughout consider how culture and a sense of place are closely related. How does a novel, photograph, or film conjure a landscape or community? When we think of California, whose stories are included, and whose are left out? Possible texts: works by Mary Austin, Cesar Chavez, Mike Davis, the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, Rebecca Solnit, and John Steinbeck; films: Sunset Boulevard, Clueless, and There Will Be Blood; and the art of Carlton Watkins, Dorothea Lange, Richard Misrach, and Chiura Obata. For the final paper, students will write about a California place of their choice.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Bolten, R. (PI)

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.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 143X: Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination (ARTHIST 264B, FILMEDIA 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: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

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

(HISTORY 50A is 3 units. HISTORY 150A is 5 units) This course surveys early American history from the onset of English colonization of North America in the late sixteenth century through the American Revolution and the creation of the United States in the late eighteenth. It situates the origins and the development of colonial American society as its peoples themselves experienced it, within the wider histories of the North American continent and the Atlantic basin. It considers the diversity of peoples and empires that made up these worlds as well as the complex movement of goods, peoples, and ideas that defined them. The British North American colonies were just one interrelated part of this wider complex. Yet out of that interconnected Atlantic world, those particular colonies produced a revolution for national independence that had a far-reaching impact on the world. The course, accordingly, explores the origins of this revolutionary movement and the nation state that it wrought, one that would rapidly ascend to hemispheric and then global prominence.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

AMSTUD 155F: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1830 to 1877 (AFRICAAM 55F, AMSTUD 55F, HISTORY 55F, HISTORY 155F)

(History 55F is 3 units; History 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically challenged categories of race and citizenship. Topics covered include: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problems and personal experiences; the horrors of total war for individuals and society; and the challenges--social and political--of Reconstruction.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

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 199A: American Studies Honors Seminar

*Enrollment Required for American Studies Honors students in their senior year.
Terms: Aut | Units: 1
Instructors: ; Kessler, E. (PI)

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

AMSTUD 261A: Black Aliveness (AFRICAAM 261, ARTHIST 261)

Based on Kevin Quashie's 2021 book "Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being," this seminar will explore moments of possibility, love, and being in works of literature and art. With Quashie as our guide, we will look closely at poems, stories, photographs, and paintings by, among others, Lucille Clifton, Audrey Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Toi Derricotte, Gordon Parks, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Featuring intense discussion and emphasis on developing powers of black aliveness in one's own writing.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5
Instructors: ; Nemerov, A. (PI)

AMSTUD 263: The Religions and Cultures of Enslaved People in America (RELIGST 263, RELIGST 363)

More than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery--its histories and legacies--remains the subject of heated debate among the institution's descendants and the millions of others who live in its wake. As a global institution predicated upon the exchange of human bodies, slavery helped to forge political and economic empires, divided nations, and crystallized racialized caste hierarchies that persist into the present. Yet, the politically and emotionally charged nature of conversations about slavery has obscured the lives of the women, men, and children who bore the legal status of "slave." In this course, we will explore the meanings of enslavement from the perspectives of those who experienced it, and in doing so, interrogate broader questions of the relationship between slavery and the construction of racialized group identities. Using autobiographical narratives, eyewitness accounts, slaveholder diaries, images, and archeological evidence from the United States, we will examine the religious, philosophical, and experiential orientations that grounded the enslaved psyche and found expression in bondspeople's music, movement, foodways, dress, and institutions. Although the United States South will be our primary region for interrogation, we will analyze the thought and culture formations of U.S. bondspeople in light of the discursive and aesthetic productions of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. In this way, we will endeavor to know the people who helped birth American culture. Undergraduates register for 200-level for 5 units. Graduate students register for 300-level for 3-5 units.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
Instructors: ; Wells-Oghoghomeh, A. (PI)
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