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 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.

How can cultural values influence the way we process information, recall memories, or express emotion? What contributes to variations in parenting styles across cultures? How do experiences such as biculturalism, immigration, and racism affect mental health? This course will examine these questions with a specific focus on the cultural experiences of Asian Americans. Our aim is to understand how these experiences interact with basic psychological processes across the lifespan, with attention to both normative and pathological development.

There is a deep crisis of values at the heart of contemporary culture in the United States. On one hand, the nation is unquestionably committed to the principle of radical individualism, marked especially by free-market capitalism, consumerism, and increasingly violent libertarian politics. On the other hand, increasing competition and diversity require principles of the common good to sustain the cultural coherence, social media, and environmental stability necessary for civil society to function effectively. This course will investigate the conflict between these two sets of values through theoretical readings and the inspection of public life in the United States in the twenty-first century. It asks whether there ought to be any constraints on individualism that can be justified by an appeal to the common good and, if so, what those constraints should be.

This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been variously depicted in literature and the arts, from its evolution into the nation’s cultural and financial capital in the nineteenth century to the present.  We’ll consider how urban reformers, boosters, long-time residents, immigrants, tourists, newspaper reporters, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shaped new and often highly contested meanings of this dynamic and diverse city. We'll also consider how each vision of the city returns us to crucial questions of perspective, identity, and ownership, and helps us to understand the complexity of metropolitan experience. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Paule Marshall, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, and Berenice Abbott, and others. Filmmakers may include Vincente Minnelli, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee.

This course examines historical and contemporary contexts and processes of defining Asian/American beauty as well as the ways in which beauty is used to manage bodies, define social hierarchies, and gain or maintain power. Moreover, this course asks how presentations of beauty, especially “beautiful bodies,” could also be used as forms of subversion and resistance. Looking at sites such beauty pageants, cosmetic consumer cultures, drag performances, cosmetic surgery, and the transnational production and consumption of beauty influencers we will investigate how race, gender, sexuality, and class informs definitions of beauty and how definitions of beauty inform constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

An examination of conservative movements and ideas in terms of class, gender, and race. Historical survey and social analysis of such major conservative movements and ideas as paleoconservatism, neoconservatism, and compassionate conservatism. The emergence of conservative stances among women, minorities, and media figures. The conservative critique of American life and its shaping of contemporary national discourse on morality, politics, and culture.

An interdisciplinary introduction to the study of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in North America. Critical examination of different stages of their experience from "coolie labor" and the "yellow peril" to the "model minority" and struggles for identity; roots of Asian stereotypes; myth and reality of Asian women; prejudice against, among, and by Asians; and Asian contributions to a more pluralistic, tolerant, and just American society. Readings, films, lectures, and discussions.

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.

At various times over the past century and a half, America has welcomed, expelled, tolerated, interned, ignored, and celebrated immigrants from Asia and their descendants. This course examines the fictions produced in response to these experiences. Irony, humor, history, tragedy and mystery all find a place in Asian American literature. We will see the emergence of a self-conscious Asian American identity, as well as more recent transnational structures of feeling. We will read novels and short stories by writers including Hisaye Yamamoto, John Okada, Mohsin Hamid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Min Jin Lee. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement

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 will look at representations of prisons, policing, and criminality across US cinema history. We will watch a wide range of movies, from Thomas Edison’s 1901 recreation of Leon Czolgosz’s execution to classic noir, cop procedurals, crime thrillers, horror, and science fiction. Readings will draw from abolitionist, feminist, Marxist, and Black Radical traditions to guide our attention to the ideologies of crime, punishment, policing and incarceration that circulate in and spill out of US cinema. Readings will occasionally invite us to step back and think about the role of cinema in the production of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Jordan T. Camp have called “carceral commonsense.” In addition to Gilmore and Camp, authors will include Angela Y. Davis, Khalil Gibran Muhammed, Dylan Rodriguez, W.E.B Du Bois, Assata Shakur, Stuart Hall, Mariame Kaba, Jonathon Finn, Eric A. Stanley, Gina Dent, Simone Browne, and Erin Gray.

Why are some genres of fiction much more prestigious than others? How do works of fiction get categorized and valued? What accounts for the difference between “genre fiction” and “literary fiction”? This class will read literary-critical debates about genre alongside a survey of 21st century U.S. fiction. We will explore genres ranging from sci-fi to historical fiction to so-called autofiction, and consider how they can help us think about contemporary issues including climate change and the politics of race and gender. Authors may include George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Jeff Vandermeer, Torrey Peters, Elif Batuman, Jonathan Franzen. Theorists and critics may include Pierre Bourdieu, Seo Young Chu, Theodore Martin, Mark McGurl, and others.

This seminar will use food as a lens to explore Asian American history and contemporary political, cultural, and economic issues. We will explore the role of food in histories of immigration; labor in restaurant and service industries; farming and agriculture; and the politics of consumption and circulation of food. We will trace contemporary experiences to larger histories through a critical engagement with interdisciplinary scholarship as well as primary sources like recipe books, food criticism, media, film and television, literature, and memoirs.

This class will look at several pivotal moments in US working class history: slave rebellions, early unionization, Black radical labor formations of the 1960s and 1970s, neoliberal attacks on labor, and 2022’s “Hot Labor Summer.” We will use this series of historical studies to think critically about what and who constitutes the working class in the US, when and how that might change, and about how colonial, racial, and gendered dynamics drive these histories while too often being written out of them. For each moment, we will also look to working class cultural artifacts as their own kind of theoretical and historical texts, including music, pamphlets, poetry, drama, photography, film and video, and memes. Potential authors: Gerald Horne, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, J. Sakai, Philip Foner, James Yaki Sayles, James Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Silvia Frederici, Karl Marx, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kim Kelly, Joshua Clover, Sarah Jaffe