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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 and Popular Culture: A Course Book" (Peter Lang 2013).

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

This course examines the issues and debates surrounding women's reproduction in a transnational framework, including birth control, abortion, surrogacy, prenatal diagnosis, labor and delivery, menstruation, sex trafficking, and the reproductive justice movement. 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.

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.

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.