41 - 50 of 115 results for: AMSTUD

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

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.