61 - 70 of 94 results for: AMSTUD

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Methods, interpretations, and issues pertinent to honors work in American Studies. Open to juniors interested in honors.