Descriptions of American Studies Courses

Graduate Courses

All 400-level courses carry graduate credit. In addition, we offer the following 500-level courses exclusively for graduate students. This page includes links for courses which have syllabi online. Click on the course or instructor name to see the syllabus.

AMST 501- Theory And Methods
The American Studies movement. Its conceptual and methodological development. The way this development was affected by and in turn reflected larger trends in the culture itself.
Syllabus for sections taught by Steinle.

AMST 502T - Seminar: Selected Topics
A particular problem or topic as a case study in the use of interdisciplinary methods in American Studies. May be repeated for credit with a different topic. Topics offered in recent years have included:

Culture and Desire: Theoretical Approaches to the History of the Emotions

Focuses on an advanced analysis of enduring patterns and innovative shifts in the ways Americans have defined, controlled, and expressed emotions such as anger, lust, shame, pride, fear, jealousy, grief, and joy from the 17th century to the present.

American Prejudice in Theory and Actuality

Advanced analysis of prejudice as a cultural process: cultural construction of unreasonably negative perceptions of others. Etiology of various forms of intolerance in the American past and present. Common features of prejudice alongside peculiarities of the holder, target, and moment.

Theoretical Approaches to Studying Popular Culture

This course will examine new theoretical approaches to the interpretation of American popular culture. It will focus on theories examining the relationship between forms of popular culture (including best-selling novels, television, mass amusements, and advertisements) and the society producing them.

Contemporary American Culture: Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Post-WW II America

Advanced analysis of the beliefs, practices, and implications of membership in spatial, fictive, and virtual communities of contemporary cultural participation. Critical examination of the increasingly mediated nature of American experience evidenced in post-WWII technology, architecture, communications, and social organization.

Public Memory

Analyzes narratives of the past encapsulated in museums, memorials, historic preservation sites, living history projects, and popular culture. Emphasizes the cultural politics and packaging of public memory and tensions between national identity narratives and local, ethnic and regional identity narratives.

Gender and Theory in American Studies

An advanced analysis of enduring patterns and innovative shifts in the ways in which Americans have defined, represented, and negotiated gender identity and gender relations from the seventeenth century to the present.

Visual Culture

Theories and case studies of how visual imagery has reflected and influenced Americans' sense of nature, time, memory, authenticity, and reality itself. Attention to television, film and painting, but particular emphasis on still photography as cultural evidence.

Ethnograpy and American Culture

Introduction to the pragmatics and politics of ethnographic research on American culture. Students design, conduct, and write up independent fieldwork projects based on interviews and participant-observation. Topics include: research design, interviewing, participant-observation, ethics, cultural analysis, ethnographic writing, and representational genres.

American Space, Place and Architecture

After analyzing space, place, and architecture as concepts and cultural artifacts, the seminar examines how Americans have shaped nature from the seventeenth century to the present.  Emphasizes diversity of architectural expression in a pluralistic society.  A reading and research colloquium.

AMST 596 - Teaching Tutorial
Prerequisite: AMST 501. Preparation for community college or university teaching. Small group discussion, lecture-discussion, examinations, teaching strategies. Enrollment requires approval of American Studies Graduate Adviser.

AMST 598 - Graduate Thesis
Prerequisites: graduate standing in American studies and consent of graduate adviser. The writing of a thesis based on original research and its analysis and evaluation.

AMST 599 - Independent Graduate Research
Prerequisite: graduate standing in American Studies and consent of graduate adviser. May be repeated for credit.

Click here to see descriptions of General Education courses
Click here to see descriptions of upper-division elective courses

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