From Disney films to Nickelodeon cartoons to Newberry award-winning texts, popular children's media offers us the opportunity to analyze how complex issues of identity are represented in cultural productions aimed at a young audience. This course takes, as a site of analysis, media aimed at children to investigate the lessons imparted and ideologies circulate in popular films and books. How is class drawn in Lady and the Tramp? What are the politics of language at play in Moana? What are the sounds of masculinity in Beauty and the Beast? How does Mulan construct gender, race, and militarism? Using an intersectional frame of analysis, we will trace popular tropes, identify images of resistance, and map out the more popular messages children receive about difference in our world.

This course uses Latin music as a lens through which to examine broader social issues in the United States. We will consider how music industries decide what counts as “Latin,” and how these processes intersect or fail to intersect with ideas of Latinx identity on the ground. We will explore topics such as racial identity, immigration, gender and sexuality, transnationalism, and crossover. We will study genres including, but not limited to, banda, norteña, bachata, reggaetón, and pop, and artists such as Aventura, Daddy Yankee, Jenni Rivera, Selena, and Shakira.

This course analyzes the significance of Asian American pop culture. We will investigate cultural constructions of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality through an examination of various kinds of popular media, including film, music, performance, social media, and art. We will read key works in cultural studies alongside transnational feminist works. Central to this course will be an examination of how popular culture can reproduce and challenge racial, sexual, gender, class, and national identity formations in the United States.

Topic for Fall 2025: Writing Massachusetts: Four Authors

Transgender rights, gay marriage, and Hollywood and sports figures' media advocacy are only the latest manifestations of the rich queer history of the United States. This course will explore American LGBTQ history and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on consequential developments in society, politics, and consciousness since Stonewall in 1969. The course will introduce some elements of gender and queer theory; it will address historical and present-day constructions of sexuality through selected historical readings but primarily through the vibrant cultural forms produced by queer artists and communities. The course will survey significant queer literature, art, film, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the inventive new forms of recent decades. It will also emphasize the rich diversity of queer culture especially through the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with class, ethnicity and race.

An interdisciplinary examination of some of the varieties of American experience, aimed at developing a functional vocabulary for further work in American Studies or related fields. Along with a brief review of American history, the course will direct its focus on important moments in that history, including the present, investigating each of them in relation to selected cultural, historical, artistic, and political events, figures, institutions, and texts. Course topics include intersectional ethnic and gender studies, consumption and popular culture, urban and suburban life, racial formation, and contemporary American culture.

This course analyzes the significance of Asian American pop culture. We will investigate cultural constructions of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality through an examination of various kinds of popular media, including film, music, performance, social media, and art. We will read key works in cultural studies alongside transnational feminist works. Central to this course will be an examination of how popular culture can reproduce and challenge racial, sexual, gender, class, and national identity formations in the United States.

This course examines the experiences and cultures of Afro-Latinas/os, people of both African and Latin American descent, in the United States. We will consider how blackness intersects with Latina/o identity, using social movements, politics, popular culture, and literature as the bases of our analysis. This course addresses these questions transnationally, taking into account not only racial dynamics within the United States, but also the influence of dominant Latin American understandings of race and national identity. We will consider the social constructions of blackness and Latinidad; the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the Latina/o community; immigration and racial politics; representations of Afro-Latinas/os in film, music, and literature; and African American-Latino relations.

Benito Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, has quickly risen through the ranks to become one of the most significant and impactful global Latin music stars in history. This course explores what analyzing Bad Bunny can teach us in Latinx Studies. We will explore his role in the 2019 protests in Puerto Rico, and what the summer of 2019 teaches us about U.S. empire and Puerto Rican politics. We will also pay particular attention to the politics of race, gender, and queerness in Bad Bunny’s performance. Finally, we will consider Bad Bunny as a Spanish-language “crossover” star in the United States to understand the place of Latinx artists in the U.S. mainstream. Overall, this course will explore these topics by closely situating Bad Bunny’s work in relation to key texts in Latinx Studies regarding race, empire, gender, and queerness.