This page includes links for courses which have syllabi on-line. Click on the course number or name to see the syllabus. For courses taught by more than one instructor, click on the instructor's name.

AMST 312 - Multicultural Identities and Women's Experience
Examination of the diversity of women's experiences, focusing on both historical and contemporary analysis of African American, Asian American, Native American, Latina, and white ethnic women. Course materials include autobiography, fiction, visual and popular arts, and feminist cultural criticism. Cross-listed with Women's Studies.

 AMST 318 - Hollywood And America: Using Film As A Cultural Document
An examination of Hollywood as a cultural institution. Concentrating on the films of selected periods, analyzes Hollywood's ability to create and transmit symbols and myths, and legitimize new values and patterns of behavior.

AMST 345 - The American Dream
An interdisciplinary analysis, in settings both historical and contemporary, of the myth and reality surrounding the notion of American as a land of unparalleled and unlimited possibilities, especially in the achievement of personal material success.

AMST 346 - American Culture Through Spectator Sports
Study of the shifting meaning of organized sports in changing American society. Includes analysis of sports rituals, symbols and heroes. Focus is on the cultural significance of amateur and professional football, baseball and basketball.

AMST 350 - Seminar In Theory & Method Of American Studies
Prerequisites: American Studies 201 and 301; or consent of instructor. To provide an understanding and appreciation of methodology, theories of society and images of man as they affect American Studies contributions to scholarship. Fulfills the course requirement of the university upper-division baccalaureate writing requirement for American Studies majors

AMST 377 - Prejudice and American Culture
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. Concepts and methods of American culture studies as tools for better understanding the origins and appeal of intolerance, past and present. Particular focus on racism, ethnic and religious bias, sexism, and homophobia.

AMST 401T - Proseminar in American Studies
Prerequisites: American Studies 201 and 301; or consent of instructor. Capstone research course for American Studies majors. Variable topics; see the class schedule for topics each semester. May be repeated for credit with different topic. In recent years the topics have included:  

American Culture and Nature
Analyzes the meaning of nature in American culture, past and present. Traces the development of environmental attitudes as reflected and shaped in such cultural landscapes as the frontier, countryside, city, suburb.

 

Mark Twain and His World
Examination of Mark Twain in context of his family, friends, region, culture, and art over time. Special attention given to issues of race and gender in post-civil war America. Readings include biography, history, literary criticism, diaries, letters, and fiction.

Sexual Orientations and American Culture
Examines the cultural construction of the very idea of a sexual orientation. Shifting meanings of erotic attraction and involvement in America, especially regarding people of the same sex, from the colonial period to the present.

American Culture Through Social Science
Explores the earliest efforts of American sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and political scientists to study American culture, and the ways that they understood urban life, racial and ethnic identity, and the role of the individual in modern society.

American Suburban Culture
What is a suburb, why did America suburbanize, and what sorts of politics do suburbs encourage? This course investigates diverse cultural representations of suburbia in order to consider the cultural power of space, race, class, gender, and the built environment.

Adolescent America: A Cultural History and Contemporary Study of the Teenager in America
This course examines the teenager as a category of cultural participation: the challenges and conditions of adolescence in America, what has held "youth culture" together, what has fragmented and reformulated it across time, with attention to broader beliefs and values.

Reading the City
Cultural life of a major American city as seen through its historical memory and self-image, its diverse racial, ethnic, and class life, and its artistic and expressive culture (literature, film, architecture, music, cuisine). Focus spring 2008 on New Orleans.

Gender in American Life and Thought
Investigates selected topics in the cultural construction of gender in America from colonization to the present. Examines changing idea about women, men, and sexualities, and considers the research methods of gender and American studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

The Body and American Culture
Concentrating on the period from the late nineteenth century to the present, examines the relationship between American culture at large and shifting definitions of the healthy and appealing body. Issues include gender, race, disability, weight control, and bodily alterations.

Race in American Culture
This seminar examines how racial difference is constructed in American culture. Readings offer perspectives on the racial meanings within cultural products and practices, the intersection of stereotypes and social experience, and the changing notions of race over time.

Civil Rights in American Culture
This course explores the meaning of the civil rights movement in American culture. We will use a variety of sources – including literature, music and memoir – to analyze the changing ways the movement has been interpreted, politicized, and commemorated.

AMST 402 - Religion And American Culture
Prerequisite: Upper division standing. An interdisciplinary analysis of the religious dimensions of American core culture from colonial settlement to the present. Topics include: Puritanism; rationalization, secularization and feminization; the conversion experience, revivalism and revitalization; fundamentalism and modernism; and civil religion.

AMST 405 - Images of Crime & Violence in American Culture
Cultural analysis of meanings ascribed to law and order, authority, violence and punishment in the American past and present. Examined in selected symbols, images, traditions, and realities, including: the gun, police, vigilantes, "hard-boiled detectives," "romantic outlaws," and "crime waves."

AMST 407 - American Humor
Prerequisite: American Studies 201 or completion of general education section on American history, institutions and values. analyzes the cultural significance of various types of American humor in past and present settings. How humor reinforces existing culture and also serves as an index and agent of cultural change. Humor's relationship to ethnicity, region, social class and sex.

 AMST 413 - The Shifting Role & Image of the American Male
The effect of economic, social, political and cultural changes on American males. Emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. Ibson. Lystra.

AMST 416 - Southern California Culture: A Study of American Regionalism
Regionalism as a concept and as a fact of American life. Theories of regionalism measured against a study of Southern California and one other distinct American region.

 AMST 417 - Popular Music & American Culture
Examines the development and evolution of popular music in America since the Civil War and the ways in which it has reflected and shaped broader aspects of American society and culture.

AMST 419 - Love in America
Prerequisites: Upper-division standing or consent of instructor. Examines changes in the emotional lives of American men and women from the 17th century to the present. Concentrates on enduring and innovative views on the nature of love and the cultural forces that shape its "legitimate" and "illegitimate" expression.

  AMST 420 - Childhood and Family in American Culture
Historical and contemporary culture study of childhood and family in America. The idea of childhood, changing concepts of child-rearing, growing up in the American past, the impact of modernization, mother and home as dominant cultural symbols.
 

AMST 423 - The Search for Community
Prerequisite: Upper-division standing. Examining the historical transformation and modern reformulation of community in America, the course emphasizes the relationship of the individual to the larger social group. Topics include: freedom, need to belong, alienation, and search for identity.

AMST 433 - Visual Arts in Contemporary America
Prerequisites: Completion of general education section on American history, institutions and values. Visual phenomena in America as they reveal changes in recent American culture. Areas covered include the "high" arts (painting, sculpture) as contrasted with the "low" arts (advertising, television); the artist as innovator, alienation, the business world, and American values in art.

AMST 438 - American Minds: Images of Sickness and Health
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. Historically explores cultural changes in American images of the healthy mind. Topics include medical and legal views of insanity, Freud's impact on American thought, literary treatments of madness, and psychological themes in American popular culture.

AMST 439 - American Photographs as Cultural Evidence
Prerequisite: upper division standing. The cultural work of American photography, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Examines how photographs--especially the vernacular or everyday variety--have both reflected and shaped American beliefs, symbols, and values.

AMST 440 - American Folk Culture
Prerequisite: Upper-division standing or consent of instructor. Considers American culture from the perspectives of particular folk groups and through the eyes of the "common" person, past and present. Topics include: interpretation of artifacts and oral traditions; relationships between regional, ethnic and folk identity; modernization and folk consciousness.

AMST 442 - Television and American Culture
Prerequisite: Completion of the general education section of American history, institutions and values. American television as an interactive form of cultural expression, both product and producer of cultural knowledge. Examines the structure and content of television genres, and social-historical context of television's development and use, audience response, habits and environments of viewing.

 AMST 444 - The Built Environment
Prerequisites: Upper-division standing or consent of instructor. Examines how Americans have shaped and structured space from the seventeenth century to the present. Emphasizes the relationship between space, place, architecture, and material culture; the interpretation of cultural landscapes and architectural style; the changing meanings of the American home.

AMST 445 - The Cold War and American Culture
An examination of the Cold War's impact on American society and culture. Topics include: the meaning of the atomic bomb, civil defense, McCarthyism, gender roles, sexuality, family life, material culture, and national security.

AMST 449 - American West in Symbol and Myth
Prerequisite: American Studies 201 or completion of general education section on American history, institutions and values. The meaning of the West to American culture through analysis of cultural documents such as explorer and captivity narratives, fiction, art and film. Topics include: perception of wilderness, Indians, frontiersmen and role of West in creating a sexist national mythology.

 AMST 460 - Bohemians and Beats: Cultural Radicalism in America
Prerequisite: American Studies 201 or completion of the general education section on American history, institutions and values. Examines the ideas, activities, and legacies of the creators of a "counter-cultural" tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries. Explores their critique of modern civilization as well as their projects for self-transformation, social change, and cultural renewal.

AMST 465 - The Culture of the American South
Prerequisite: AMST 201 or completion of general education section on American history, institutions and values. Examines distinctive cultural patterns in the American South, past and present. Topics include: Southern concepts of work and leisure, race and gender roles, political religious controversies, literature and folklore, and the South as portrayed in the media.

 AMST 468 - Culture in Turmoil: 1960's America
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. Origins, manifestations, and continuing significance of the turbulence in American culture associated with the 1960's. Accelerated changes which occurred (or seemed to occur) in cultural meanings of authority, achievement, patriotism, sexuality, technology, and consciousness.

AMST 473 - Sexual Orientations and American Culture
Examines the cultural construction of the very idea of a sexual orientation. Shifting meanings of erotic attraction and involvement in America, especially regarding people of the same sex, from the colonial period to the present.

AMST 476 - The Cultures of Early America
Explores the variety of cultures of early America and, through an analysis of visual, material and print culture, investigates the beliefs, ideologies, and institutions through which early Americans created their worlds. The course also examines contemporary public memory of early America.

AMST 499 - Independent Study
Supervised research projects in American studies to be taken with the consent of instructor and department chair. May be repeated for credit.
 

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