| source Indiana University Bloomington (X) |
level |
department American Studies (X) |
TR 1-2:15p (3cr. hrs.) A&H Students compare and contrast ideas about citizenship, national identity, and the social contract across the hemisphere; focusing on the most basic building block of the nation-state: the formal terms of membership in civil society. Students situate the meaning of the concept in the United States within a hemispheric context.
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SECOND 8 WEEKS ONLY TR 1 - 3p Students compare and contrast ideas about citizenship, national identity, and the social contract across the hemisphere; focusing on the most basic building block of the nation-state: the formal terms of membership in civil society. Students situate the meaning of the concept in the United States within a hemispheric context.
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FIRST 8 WEEKS ONLY Instructor: K. Inouye TR 1 - 3p Students compare and contrast ideas about citizenship, national identity, and the social contract across the hemisphere; focusing on the most basic building block of the nation-state: the formal terms of membership in civil society. Students situate the meaning of the concept in the United States within a hemispheric context.
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Second 8 WEEKS ONLY K. Inouye TR 1 - 3p Students compare and contrast ideas about citizenship, national identity, and the social contract across the hemisphere; focusing on the most basic building block of the nation-state: the formal terms of membership in civil society. Students situate the meaning of the concept in the United States within a hemispheric context.
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MW 2:30p - 3:45p Students compare and contrast ideas about citizenship, national identity, and the social contract across the hemisphere; focusing on the most basic building block of the nation-state: the formal terms of membership in civil society. Students situate the meaning of the concept in the United States within a hemispheric context.
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This course has been canceled.
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11a - 12p (3 cr hr) A&H In this course, we will examine race and labor through the experiences of a variety of groups. We will examine questions such as: Are race and labor defined differently during wartime? How so? What is the relationship between race and labor? How are the lived experiences and representations of these experiences both different and similar?
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3 credit hours A & H Credit The United States is officially a suburban nation. The 2000 U.S. Census reported that slightly more than half of the nation's residents live in the suburbs. The suburban phenomenon has revolutionized American politics, family life, work, leisure, transportation, schooling, and race relations. The suburbs have also captured the American imagination. Novelists, filmmakers, songwriters, and TV producers have painted visions of what suburbia is and what it should be. We have seen portrayals of suburbia in the TV shows The Wonder Years, The Sopranos, and Weeds, and in films such as American Beauty and the Truman Show. In this class, we will examine historical documents, advertisements, newspaper articles, and radio programs; commentary and interpretation by historians, sociologists, and cultural critics; and novels, photographs, films, TV programs, and popular songs. We will explore how the suburbs came to be, what their impact has been, how they are imagined, and where they are going.
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A201 U.S. Movements & Institutions Topic: ÂWhere the Wild Things AreÂ: Children and Youth in American Culture and History Instructor: Susan Eckelmann This upper-level undergraduate class overviews the characteristics of American childrenÂs experiences and culture from the first colonies to our present time. The course looks at the changing conditions of ChildrenÂs lives and attitudes toward children and childhood. Furthermore, the class investigates how children themselves and groups invested in the lives of children and youth understood their cultural and political roles in American Society. Through weekly reading assignments, students will learn about childrenÂs material culture (toys, dress codes, and furniture); institutions and spaces (schools, playgrounds, the work place and the streets); and media (childrenÂs books, advertisements, comics, pictures, films and sound bytes). While the course follows chronological order, each section focuses on specific themes that will allow us to explore recurring and changing conceptions and conditions over time.
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A202  U.S. Arts & Media Topic: Theories and Transformations of Whiteness in the US Context This course, which analyzes whiteness critically, is not a validation of Âwhite people but rather an investigation of what it means to be Âwhite and how such an ideology shapes the attitudes of the Âmajority (i.e. those with access to resources and power) toward those who are deemed to be Âdifferent or Ânonwhite. In reality, nobody is actually white; whiteness nonetheless remains a powerful structuring logic in the United States. It has for centuries validated both inequality and inhumanity in a country that has historically held itself above such behaviors and ideals. Whiteness, and the associations that Âwhite carries in the cultural context of the United States, conveys meaning not only in terms of ideas of ÂraceÂ. It shapes how those in the United States view themselves and Âothers along the lines of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and so on. It plays a critical role in our sense of identity yet remains unacknowledged as such; it occupies the status of the Ânorm against which all difference is judged to be Âabnormal. In this course we will follow the lead of the many scholars, writers, and cultural critics who have tried to make whiteness Âstrange, we will likewise seek to push it to the forefront of cultural consciousness and remove it from its unquestioned and familiar status. Our focus is based primarily in the areas of theory, history, and media. We must first be able to understand the essence of whiteness on a theoretical level to understand how it functions later in our exploration of historical transformations in and mediated representations of whiteness. What whiteness is, what it does, and how it affects our world views and everyday experiences will be explored. The remainder of the course examines whiteness historically and representationally. Our historical exploration of whiteness reveals its numerous shifts to meet new ways of thinking about identity; nowhere is this more evident than in its various mediated representations. The literature, photographs, and films that we will examine are therefore not only Âhistorical but are also instructional and reflective texts that participate in the shaping of cultural attitudes toward Âwhite and Ânonwhite peoples. Media thus function both as the critical lenses through which we can gauge the Âracial pulse of the United States at a particular historical moment and as the nodes in the greater network of cultural transformation that enables us to critically examine the function of whiteness in the past, present, and the future. This is an interdisciplinary class, and the critical approaches that we will utilize are just as diverse as the voices and the texts that we will explore. We will draw on a vast array of disciplinary fields that include Literary Criticism, Film Studies, Critical Race Theory, History, Cultural Studies, and American Studies. Additional areas will also be utilized, and student contributions from their respective departments will contribute further to our analysis of this dominant yet elusive cultural ideology. There are no prerequisites for this course and students from any department are encouraged to sign up.
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The original inhabitants of the deep Southern interior, the Muskogee Creeks descend from ethnically diverse groups of Mississippian moundbuilders, and their cultural heritage includes matrilineal kinship, dualistic gender roles, a long history of agriculture, and a spiritual tradition focused on purity and order. As one of the most populous and politically powerful Native groups in the pre- Removal era, the Creeks have been the focus of writings by Euro- American explorers, missionaries, antiquarians, policymakers, and ethnographers. Recently, Muskogee Creeks have been at the center of a flurry of scholarly inquiry into Native politics, town life, and racial views. This semester we will use diverse sources to explore the dynamic culture of this Native people, while touching on broader themes and patterns in Native and Indigenous Studies. Our topics will include oral tradition, archaeology, gender, spirituality, identity and race, the history and memory of Indian removal, sovereignty and nation-making, and contemporary Creek culture and history. Class discussion is an important component of this reading-intensive course. Students will be evaluated on class participation, take-home exams, and short writing assignments. **Fulfills Culture Studies Requirement
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AMST , The Image of America in the World A300, 28896 , Cullather ________________________________________ TR 9:30a-10:45a (3 cr hrs) S&H Above class meets with HIST-A379 and INTL-I300 People in most countries, a recent global survey reveals, hold negative, and often strongly negative impressions of the United States, and seven out of ten Americans believe the worldÂs opinion of their country is Âgenerally unfavorable. America has always held itself up as a model of liberty and renewal to Âold countries across every ocean. The global appeal of American popular cultureÂ-films, music, and consumer goodsÂ-fuelled economic growth, and furnished a kind of Âsoft power that aided the U.S. triumph over its twentieth century enemies. Our sudden awareness of the worldÂs rejection thus raises important questions: What does the United States actually represent in the world? How, and why, has the image of the United States changed? And, why do we care so much? Whether penned by Alexis de Tocqueville, Antonin Dvorák, or Paul Greengrass, Americans have tended to regard the opinions of outsiders as the most authentic depictions of their true selves. We will examine historical and contemporary examples of anti- and philo-Americanism for clues about our national identity and standing in the world.
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AMST-A350 Instructor: Matt Guterl Topic: Rainbow Families: Multiracial and Transnational Adoption Since 1945. The concept of the family has a long history. In the United States, the family was long thought to be the nation-state in miniature, racially homogenous and linguistically consistent. Adoption added a wrinkle that was hard to smooth out. The history of adoption in the United States thus illuminates the limits, contradictions, and challenges of the American family, and reveals the complex interplay between "family" and "nation" in the American century. In an ascendant, globally important country, transnational and multiracial adoption offered a chance at revising - but not re-writing - the national history of the family. To make sense of this confusing history, we will look at Josephine Baker's Rainbow Tribe and "Brangelina's" postmodern assemblage, adoption as religious practice and adoption as political metaphor, and the DeBolts, the McCains, and everything in-between.
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Course requires authorization from AMST in BH521 (1-3 cr. hrs.) Enables undergraduates of advanced standing to undertake independent research projects under the direction of an American Studies faculty member. Students will typically arrange for a 1 to 3 credit hours of work, depending upon the scope and depth of reading, research, and production. Projects will be interdisciplinary, and should foreground topics clearly within the rubric of American Studies. (May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.)
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Service Learning in American Studies (1-3 cr. hrs.) Enables undergraduates of advanced standing to make intellectual connections between scholarly pursuits and community involvement. Students arrange 1-3 credit hours of service work either on creative projects that benefit a community (howsoever defined), or with local non-profit organizations, government agencies, activist groups, or foundations. Under the direction of their faculty sponsor, students will develop a project outline consistent with American Studies inquiry and concerns, a method of accountability, and a final report. (May be repeated for a maximum of 6 credit hours.)
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Meets with CULS-C 701: (4 CR) This readings seminar is designed to introduce graduate students to the history and contemporary concerns of American Studies as a field. The course will run first historiographically, plotting the emergence of the field, and then thematically, mapping some of the themes that most detain American Studies scholars today. Of particular interest will be the development of American Studies in the context of the Cold WarÂs encouragement for area studies in general, and the shifts in the field provoked by decolonization, U.S. postwar social movements, and corresponding struggles for ethnic studies. The thematic portions of the course will touch upon nationalism, empire, diaspora, border studies, cultural studies, queer studies, space, place, and the transnational turn. Readings will alternate between clusters of journal articles and monographs, both classic and recent. In addition to completing the readings and participating in every seminar, students will present discussion questions for one class, write a book review, compose a bibliography for a sub-field, and write a research prospectus.
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Topic: American Sacred Space Above class open to graduates only Above class meets with HIST-H650 ÂTell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are," writes Ortega y Gasset. In this graduate colloquium we will examine how elements of the American natural and historic landscape are consecratedÂmade sacred--through processes of veneration, defilement, and redefinition. Through a wide variety of case studies from sites of natural wonder, battlefields, overseas embassies, sites of natural disaster and mass murder, popular Âhistoric tourist and pilgrimage sites, and burial sites, for exampleÂwe will appreciate the multi-disciplinary insights of scholars interested in writing Âbiographies of sacred space. We will investigate the cultural functions of such sitesÂrituals of inclusion and exclusion, physical emplacements of clashing national narratives, for example and complicate our understanding of the important term Âthe sacred. Required readings may include: Kenneth Foote, "Shadowed Ground: AmericaÂs Landscape of Violence and Tragedy"; selections from: David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, eds., "American Sacred Space"; Jim Weeks, "Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine"; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., "Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory"; Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres, eds., "Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place"; Mike Davis, "Dead Cities and Ecology of Fear"; Ron Robin, "Enclaves of America: The Rhetoric of American Political Architecture Abroad, 1900-1965"; Mark Monmonier, "From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame"; and John F. Sears, "Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the 19th Century." Course requirements include substantive class participation, short presentations, and short papers. Each colloquium participant will also construct their own outline for a course on ÂAmerican Sacred Space, which will include an annotated bibliography. This project is designed to be an explicit critique of the current course.
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THIS COURSE HAS BEEN CANCELLED!
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G620 - Topos and Territory in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War Instructor: Jonathan Elmer Meets with ENG-L 653 (4 cr hr) Recent work in America literary and cultural studies has shifted decisively to geographic and geopolitical analytic frames, invoking the Atlantic, the hemispheric, global, even the Âplanetary (Dimock). This class will attempt a transverse survey across some of this thinking, trying both to appreciate its powerful achievements and to locate its blind spots. We will look at topics like the creation of Âfederalist space, the place of the Caribbean and the tropics in early national spatial imaginaries, intersections between microcosmic and macrocosmic frames, phenomenological approaches to space and figure, definitions of territory as they inform concepts of individual and population, and the space of Âplay. Readings have not yet been settled but they will probably include some of the following authors: Publius, Bartram, Brackenridge, Burroughs, C.B. Brown, Sansay, Neal, Cooper, Kirkland, Child, Barnum, Poe, Hawthorne, Fuller, Owen, Hunter, Thoreau, Melville, Bierce. Critical and theoretical resources will be drawn from Eric Slauter, Trish Loughran, Ed White, D. W. Meinig, Wai Chee Dimock, Gilles Deleuze, Jennifer Greiman, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Gilroy, Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault, Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and D.W. Winnicott. Students will be asked to be initiate discussion once during the semester with posted remarks before class meetings, be the Âfirst responder to such a posting once a semester, engage in lively and informed discussion, and write two shorter Âconference length papers on topics of their choice.
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Course is G751 not G620 - see G751, section 27271.
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G620 - The Cultural Study of Bodies and Embodiment Instructor: Brenda Weber 4 cr hours Meets with CULS 601/GNDR 701 This class is designed to introduce and engage with two overlapping fields of study: cultural studies and feminist theories about the body and embodiment. Starting first with more conventional literature that helps situate the various meanings of cultural studies (using such theorists as Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, and Antonio Gramsci), we will then turn to more specific theorizations of the social meanings of the body, as inflected through the discursive lens of interdisciplinary feminist scholars such as Susan Bordo, Iris Marion Young, Elizabeth Grosz, and Victoria Pitts- Taylor. We will also trouble the often Western-centric focus of cultural studies and sometimes feminist studies by being particularly attentive to bodily ontologies in non-Western contexts, in specific relation to gender, sex, and sexuality. Themes will include: moral panic and the obesity Âcrisis, plastic surgery, Âothered bodies, and body modification practices.
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Introduction to Comparative Ethnic and Post-Colonial Studies Fall 2009 Guterl/Ingham meets with ENG-L 680 This course is an introduction to key debates and theories of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Post-Colonial Studies. Both Comparative Ethnic and Post- Colonial Studies draw on theories and histories of race, ideology, gender, class, culture, nation, citizenship, and diaspora. Comparative Ethnic Studies focuses on the processes by which particular groups are racialized, foregrounding both differences and interrelations between intra-national groups as articulated during various historical periods. Rather than positing ethnicity as an object to be studied, current work in this field examines the shifting shapes of the categories "race, Âethnicity, and Âculture" along with particular productions of ethnic differences, and the categories used to understand them. As a parallel and related field, Post-Colonial Studies has also been concerned with enduring methodological questions (the problem of the historical archive, canon formation, the exclusion of linguistic and cultural minorities from memory) and with questions of the agency of particular subjects vis-à -vis the hegemony of imperial formations. Bridging these two fields, and engaging with issues of representation and material production, of temporality and the vicissitudes of history-writing, this course will offer a comparative consideration of the methodological moves and interpretive controversies that mark the shared terrain of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Post-Colonial Studies. Course requirements will include engaged seminar participation, short writing assignments, and a final conference style paper, 10-15 pages in length. Cross listed with American Studies.
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Course meets with HPSC-X645 This seminar explores the growth and development of the scientific enterprise in the United States, with a focus on the 20th century. It approaches science as an intellectual and social activity performed by people situated in specific historical contexts, and thus emphasizes the institutional and cultural circumstances that have shaped scientific knowledge about nature and humankind. In charting the rise of the U.S. as a world leader in science, we will study some of the theories and findings produced by American scientists, and examine how they were related to changing political, economic, and social forces. We will explore how science has influenced American society and culture, and conversely, how U.S. social and cultural life has influenced science. The seminar will focus on recent scholarship in the history of American science. We will study the development of the field as an academic specialty, and relate it to more general trends in the history of science as well as American history. Thus we will concentrate on historiographical and methodological issues as we grapple with the ways in which historians have portrayed the scientific enterprise in the national context of the United States. Among the themes and topics we will explore are: the rise of the research university; professionalization and disciplinary differentiation; patterns of patronage and moral support; science, technology, and warfare; the culture of big science; and the social role of the scientist. Each week the seminar will take up one or more items for critical analysis. Each participant will be expected to contribute to the general discussion, and perhaps present special reports on additional readings as well. Written assignments include a biographical sketch (2-3 pages), two book reviews (2-3 pages), and a short research paper or historiographical essay (10-20 pages).
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Course meets with HIST-H650 Above class open to graduates only This course offers an introduction to the history and historiography of the nineteenth- century United States, focusing on such themes as politics, national identity, urban life, religion, intellect, and popular culture. It requires students to read both intensively and broadly, familiarizing themselves with monographs and overview essays that exemplify both a wide range of historical topics and a variety of scholarly approaches. We will read works addressed to scholarly audiences as well as books that seek broader audiences. This course requires students active participation in class discussions. Each week a student will lead class discussion. Students will complete short (1-page) weekly summaries of assigned reading. In addition, students will design a syllabus for an undergraduate course on the nineteenth-century United States, and write either two professional-quality book reviews (approximately 500-800 words each) or a 5-7-page review essay, which considers 3-4 related books in a subfield of the studentÂs choice. These requirements are intended to help students prepare for field examinations, teaching, and the intellectual tasks common in academic careers (such as the writing of reviews).
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Culture Wars and the Struggle over Curriculum 1:00P-03:45PM on Thursdays Room 3004 section 30499 Professor: Jesse Goodman Joint with Education J762 In this seminar, we will explore historical and contemporary cultural struggles over what should be taught U.S. public schools. As many scholars have noted, public schools are one of several social locations where, as citizens of an imperfect democracy, we have fought to influence the nature of our society and the conception of who we are as a people. Some of the struggles to be examined are over: social studies and history, new math, science, sex education, religion, and language arts. This seminar will identify who (social classes and activists) have been advocates for particular curricula, why they promote this curriculum, and the impact this advocacy has had on the schooling of our young people, and what this schooling means for our society.
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