Provisional University Bulletin (2024-2025)

• Major (BA)

The American Studies major takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of American identity and identities – the beliefs, values, ideas, and traditions that have animated American culture and been manifest in the country’s institutions, laws, and art (broadly defined).

The major seeks to provide students with an informed awareness of the ways in which American culture has shaped and been shaped by the lives, aspirations, thinking, and action of its own citizens and the citizens of other nations.

Particular disciplines and areas of focus within the major include History, Literature, Film, Religion, Politics, Journalism, Music, Women’s and Gender Studies, Legal Studies, and Environmental Studies.

Typically, students who major in American Studies anticipate careers in fields such as law, business, public service, education, journalism, and the entertainment industry.

The goal of the American Studies major is to encourage students to view America as a distinct culture – one that has been constructed over time by a series of deliberate actions and unplanned developments, and is composed of a diverse selection of peoples, experiences, traditions, and values.

Ideally, students will come to see American identity as something that must be actively assumed. They will see American culture as something worthy of deep interrogation. And they will be able to situate American culture within a global context, recognizing its indebtedness to and influence on some of the political, legal, artistic, and religious cultures found in other parts of the world.

The major consists of a two-semester sequence of courses that examine the history of American culture from the seventeenth century to the present. Students also take at least one offering from a selection of courses designated as “Main Currents” courses. These courses are organized along broad themes (e.g.: “Hollywood and American Culture”; “Religion and American Life”; “American Environmental History”) and give students the opportunity to explore the construction and evolution of particular American ideas and identities across an extended period of time and within a variety of disciplines and genres.

In addition to the two foundational courses and the one “Main Currents” course, students take six elective courses from a list of approved classes that are either housed in the American Studies program or cross-listed with it.

Knowledge

Students completing the major in American Studies will be able to:

1. Identify and understand many of the most influential, widely regarded, ground-breaking, and pivotal texts in American cultural history.
2. Understand the historical roots of many of the contemporary issues, institutions, movements, and policies affecting life in the United States.
3. Situate American culture within a global context, recognizing its indebtedness to and influence on some of the political, legal, artistic, religious, and environmental cultures found in other parts of the world.
4. View America as a distinct culture – one that has been constructed over time by a series of deliberate actions and unplanned developments, and is composed of a diverse selection of peoples, experiences, traditions, and values.

Core Skills

The American Studies major emphasizes core skills in analysis, critical thinking, research, and communication. Within the major, students are challenged to:

1. Perform "close readings" of a variety of texts – identifying core ideas or arguments within the texts and recognizing the details, evidence, patterns, and forms that reflect or advance the ideas or arguments.
2. Develop clear, logical, substantiated, and convincing arguments and articulate those arguments in writing and in speech.
3. Recognize the difference between a primary and secondary source – and use each kind of source effectively and appropriately.
4. Conduct research utilizing both digital and analog resources.

Social Justice

The American Studies curriculum prepares students for lives of civic engagement, providing the knowledge and skills necessary to contribute to public debate, scholarship, and policy initiatives related to social justice in the modern world. The curriculum fosters an open climate for consideration of a full range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and religious perspectives about the United States in the world.

We take pride in our long tradition of faculty involvement in social and political life, refining ways in which scholarship and activism can be combined to improve the common good. American Studies faculty developed the idea for Brandeis’ Transitional Year Program, which served as a template for many other college programs. Our faculty have also been involved in many public service enterprises at the local, national, and global levels. Numerous American Studies courses, particularly those taught by the directors of the Environmental Studies Program, the Legal Studies Program, and the Journalism Program, incorporate experiential learning components, which directly connect learning to issues of social justice.

Upon Graduation

American Studies graduates go on to careers in a variety of fields, including journalism and communication; law and politics; government and public policy; film, television and the entertainment industry; advertising, public relations, business, and marketing. Majors often enter academic scholarship in a variety of fields, including but not limited to American Studies.

Normally, students declare their major in their sophomore year and complete the three required courses by the end of their junior year. Working with an American Studies adviser, students are urged to develop a coherent selection of electives tailored to their particular interests and gifts. American Studies majors often take several departmental courses that also satisfy the requirements of their program. Courses in other departments that satisfy American Studies elective requirements are listed below and are also listed on the American Studies website. Students who wish to be considered for honors in American Studies must write a senior thesis in a full-year course (AMST 99d). Special opportunities are available for supervised internships (AMST 92a), one-on-one readings courses (AMST 97a,b), and individually directed research courses (AMST 98a,b). Majors are encouraged to gain a valuable cross-cultural perspective on America by studying abroad in their junior year.

Maura Farrelly, Chair
Journalism, religion.

Thomas Doherty
Media and culture.

Affiliated Faculty (contributing to the curriculum, advising and administration of the department or program)
Daniel Breen (Legal Studies)
Leah Gordon (Education)
Rosalind Kahbrel (Legal Studies)
Jonathan Krasner (Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)
Neil Swidey (Journalism)
Jerome Tharaud (English)

1. At least one course from the Main Currents in American Studies cluster: AMST 30b, AMST 35a, AMST 36b, AMST 46b, AMST 50b, AMST 60a, AMST 66b, AMST 103b, AMST 106b, AMST 131b, AMST 136a, AMST 150a, AMST 177b, AMST 180b, AMST 188b, AMST/ED 120a, AMST/ED 121a, AMST/ENG 47a, AMST/ENG 138a, AMST/ENG 167b, AMST/JOUR 109b, AMST/JOUR 113a, AMST/JOUR 137b, AMST/LGLS 140b, AMST/LGLS 141b, AMST/MUS 35a, AMST/MUS 38a, AMST/MUS 39b, AMST/MUS 41a, and AMST/MUS 55a.
2. Two core courses in American culture, taken sequentially: AMST 100a and 100b.
3. Six additional courses from American Studies or from the cross-listed section below. A substitution for the required Main Currents course may be made only with advance permission of the department. Main Currents courses may also be counted as electives.
4. Foundational Literacies: As part of completing the American Studies major, students must:
   • Fulfill the writing intensive requirement by successfully completing: AMST 100a.
   • Any OC-designated course approved for the major.
   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing: AMST 100b.
5. No course, whether required or elective, for which a student receives a grade below a C-minus or any course taken pass/fail may be counted toward the major.
6. To be eligible for honors, seniors must successfully complete AMST 99d (Senior Research) and participate in a year-long honors colloquium. AMST 99d does not satisfy other major requirements.
7. No more than two courses satisfying a second major or minor may be used to complete the American Studies major. Courses taught by American Studies faculty in Journalism, Legal Studies, or Environmental Studies are exempted from this limit. Students should ask the American Studies Chair for a list of such faculty.

AMST 30b American Environmental History
[ ss wi ]

Provides an overview of the relationship between nature and culture in North America. Covers Native Americans, the European invasion, the development of a market system of resource extraction and consumption, the impact of industrialization, and environmentalist responses. Current environmental issues are placed in historical context. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 35a Hollywood and American Culture
[ ss ]

This is an interdisciplinary course in Hollywood cinema and American culture that aims to do justice to both arenas. Students will learn the terms of filmic grammar, the meanings of visual style, and the contexts of Hollywood cinema from The Birth of a Nation (1915) to last weekend's top box office grosser. They will also master the major economic, social, and political realities that make up the American experience of the dominant medium of our time, the moving image, as purveyed by Hollywood. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 36b Television and American Culture
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 130b in prior years.

An interdisciplinary course with three main lines of discussion and investigation: an aesthetic inquiry into the meaning of television style and genre; a historical consideration of the medium and its role in American life; and a technological study of televisual communication. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 46b American Biography
[ ss ]

Focuses on biography as a method of historical inquiry and literary expression. Students grapple with fundamental questions of the genre: Whose lives get memorialized and why? What can one life say about the period in which it was lived? How much attention should biographers pay to the private lives versus public accomplishments of their subjects? How do biographers wrestle with the fallibility of memory? Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 50b Religion in American Life
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 167b in prior years.

Considers the historical influence of religious belief on various aspects of American political, cultural, legal, and economic life. Topics include the use and effectiveness of religious language in political rhetoric, from the American Revolution to the War in Iraq; the role that religious belief has played in galvanizing and frustrating various reform movements; and the debate over the proper role of religion in the public square. Usually offered every second year.
Maura Farrelly

AMST 55a Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration in American Culture
[ ss ]

Provides an introductory overview of the study of race, ethnicity, and culture in the United States. Focuses on the historical, sociological, and political movements that affected the arrival and settlement of African, Asian, European, American Indian, and Latino populations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilizing theoretical and discursive perspectives, compares and explores the experiences of these groups in the United States in relation to issues of immigration, population relocations, government and civil legislation, ethnic identity, gender and family relations, class, and community. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 66b American Scholars: Public Intellectuals in American Life
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 166b in prior years.

Examines the role and influence of public intellectuals in American society. Students explore the ideas put forth by some of the most influential public intellectuals in American life, and they are challenged to consider how and why those ideas have been rendered relevant to a mass audience. Students are also challenged to consider the impact the modern university has had on public intellectualism; the role the broadcast and Internet media are playing in the making of public intellectuals; and whether and how pundits are different from public intellectuals. Usually offered every second year.
Maura Farrelly

AMST 92a Internship in American Studies

Off-campus work experience in conjunction with a reading course with a member of the department. Requires reading and writing assignments drawing upon and amplifying the internship experience. Only one internship course may be submitted in satisfaction of the department's elective requirements. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 97a Readings in American Studies

Enrollment limited to juniors and seniors.

Independent readings, research, and writing on a subject of the student's interest, under the direction of a faculty adviser. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 97b Readings in American Studies

Enrollment limited to juniors and seniors.

Independent readings, research, and writing on a subject of the student's interest, under the direction of a faculty adviser. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 98a Independent Study

Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 98b Independent Study

Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 99d Senior Research

Seniors who are candidates for degrees with departmental honors should register for this course and, under the direction of a faculty adviser, prepare a thesis. In addition to regular meetings with a faculty adviser, seniors will participate in an honors colloquium, a seminar group bringing together the honors candidates and members of the American studies faculty. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.

Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

AMST/MUS 35a Rock, Country, and Hip-Hop: History of American Popular Music
[ ca oc ]

Formerly offered as MUS 35a.

Examines the historical context, stylistic development, and cultural significance of rock and roll and other closely related genres, spanning the 1950s through the present. Close attention is paid to how political and social changes have interacted with technological innovations through commercial music to challenge, affirm and shape ideas of race, gender, class and sexuality in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 38a American Music: From Psalms to Hip Hop
[ ca oc ss ]

Open to music majors and non-majors. Formerly offered as MUS 38a.

Explores the many varieties of folk, popular, and art music in American culture. We will focus on the stylistic development of select repertoires beginning with 18th century New England Psalm singing and African American traditions and continuing on through folk, jazz, art, pop, rock, and hip hop music. Throughout the course, music serves as a lens to examine diverse aspects of American culture and history with an emphasis on America's shifting definition of identity. No musical background is required. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 39b Protest Through Song: Music that Shaped America
[ ca oc ss ]

Open to music majors and non-majors. Does not fulfill the Main Currents in American Studies requirement for the major.

Examines 20th and 21st century protest music to better understand the complex relationships between music and social movements. Through class discussions, reading, writing, and listening assignments, and a final performance students will discover how social, cultural, and economic protest songs helped shape American culture. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 55a Music in Film: Hearing American Cinema
[ ca oc ]

Formerly offered as MUS 55a.

Examines the aesthetics and the history of music in film. Through lecture, class discussions, screenings, and readings, the course teaches students how to critically read image, script, and music as an integrated cultural text, ultimately helping one understand and appreciate the progression of film and sound technology from the 1890s to the present. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST 100a Foundations of American Culture
[ ss wi ]

This is the core seminar for American studies majors; a text-based course tracing the American experience from the earliest colonizations through the nineteenth century. Usually offered every fall.
Staff

AMST 100b Twentieth-Century American Culture
[ dl ss ]

Prerequisite: AMST 100a.

The democratization of taste and the extension of mass media are among the distinguishing features of American culture in the twentieth century. Through a variety of genres and forms of expression, in high culture and the popular arts, this course traces the historical development of a national style that came to exercise formidable influence abroad as well. Usually offered every spring.
Staff

AMST 103b Advertising and the Media
[ ss ]

Combines a historical and contemporary analysis of advertising's role in developing and sustaining consumer culture in America with a practical analysis of the relationship between advertising and the news media in the United States. Usually offered every second year.
Maura Farrelly

AMST 106b Food and Farming in America
[ ss wi ]

Yields four semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

American food is abundant and cheap. Yet many eat poorly, and some argue that our agriculture may be unhealthy and unsustainable. Explores the history of American farming and diet and the prospects for a healthy food system. Includes extensive fieldwork. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 121a The American Jewish Woman: 1890-Present
[ ss ]

Surveys the experiences of American Jewish women in work, politics, religion, family life, the arts, and American culture generally over the last 100 years, examining how the dual heritage of female and Jewish "otherness" shaped often-conflicted identities. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 124b Sex, Love, and Marriage in America
[ ss ]

Ideas and behavior relating to love and marriage are used as lenses to view broader social patterns such as family organization, generational conflict, and the creation of personal and national identity. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 125b Comedy and American Culture
[ ss ]

Drawing upon multiple forms of cultural expression, students examine popular styles of humor and satire, using humor to gain insight into an "American" national character that has both shaped and been shaped by the country's comedic traditions. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 129a From American Movie Musicals to Music Videos
[ ss ]

Examines the spectacle of song and dance in movie musicals and music videos, beginning with the earliest talking pictures in the late 1920's and continuing to the present. Particular emphasis will be on technological change, race, gender and the commodification of culture, among other topics. Usually offered every second year.
James Mandrell

AMST 131b News on Screen
[ ss ]

An interdisciplinary course exploring how journalistic practice is mediated by moving image--cinematic, televisual, and digital. The historical survey will span material from the late-nineteenth-century "actualities" of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers to the viral environment of the World Wide Web, a rich tradition that includes newsreels, expeditionary films, screen magazines, combat reports, government information films, news broadcasts, live telecasts, television documentaries, amateur video, and the myriad blogs, vlogs, and webcasts of the digital age. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 135a Photography and American Culture
[ ss ]

Looks at how photography has (and has not) shaped understanding of certain key themes and issues in American history and culture-and how American history and culture have (and have not) done the same to photography. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 136a Planet Hollywood: American Cinema in Global Perspective
[ hum ss ]

Examines the global reach of Hollywood cinema as an art, business, and purveyor of American values, tracking how Hollywood has absorbed foreign influences and how other nations have adapted and resisted the Hollywood juggernaut. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 149a The Future as History
[ ss ]

What does art have to say about the future? What new ways of conceiving of, and caring for, the future have literary and visual texts devised over the past two centuries? In exploring the art of the future of the past two centuries, you will read sci-fi & fantasy by authors like Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, N.K. Jemisin, and Ursula Le Guin, as well as texts like Invisible Man and Velvet Goldmine that set the future not in worlds to come but in the narrative potential of the present and times gone by. By attending to alternative temporalities and their genres—queer, spectral, cyborg, planetary, and many more—we will engage topics of major importance like reparations, environmental catastrophe, and liberation theology. By the end of the semester, we will develop a new understanding of time and its relation to history. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 150a The History of Childhood and Youth in America
[ ss ]

Examines history, cultural ideas, and policies about childhood and youth, as well as children's literature, television, and other media for children and youth. Includes an archival-based project on the student movement in the 1960s. Usually offered every second year.
Jonathan Krasner

AMST 166b American Political Satire
[ ss ]

Political satire has a rich history as a tool of dissent in America, and has taken many forms, from magazine cartoons to song parodies to television comedy. Today, satirists are part of a national debate over censorship, political correctness, and jokes that 'go too far,' and some critics wonder if satire has been weaponized by the alt-right. In this class, we will explore different types of political satire in the United States, including digital and newspaper cartoons, stand-up comedy, tweets and memes, podcasts, and television shows like Saturday Night Live, from the 19th to the 21st centuries. We will share examples of Presidential satire leading up to the November election. And we will discuss the following questions: Can political satire produce social change? Does it function as entertainment or activism? How has political satire evolved over time? Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

AMST 170a The Paranoid Style in American Culture
[ ss ]

From the Salem witch trials to QAnon, fears of cabals and conspiracies have darkened the American imagination. Course offers a historical overview, along with close attention to novels by Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and Don DeLillo, and such films as The Manchurian Candidate and Chinatown. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 177b True Crime and American Culture_
[ ss ]

Explores a series of enduringly fascinating cases from the true crime files of American culture. Our crime scene investigations range from 1692 Salem to 1994 Brentwood; our line-up includes witches, outlaws, kidnappers, gangsters, murderers, and serial killers; and our evidence is drawn from literature, film, and television. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST/ED 120a History of Higher Education in the U.S.
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the history of higher education in the United States from the nation's formation to the present. Readings outline the competing purposes Americans envisioned for colleges and universities, as well as student life, institutional access, and visions of the relationship between excellence and equity. The course explores patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender and how universities served as sites where class was produced and contested. Students explore the post-World War II democratization of American higher education, the politics of college admissions, and recent movements to make college more affordable. The course also raises questions about the power universities came to hold as centers of knowledge-making networks and universities as sites of political activism. Usually offered every third year.
Leah Gordon

AMST/ED 121a Education and Equity in Modern American History
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

Focusing on educational inequities related to race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, this course examines twentieth century American efforts to make schools more equal, and in the process to make the social, economic, and racial order more just and fair. The course focuses on the ways Americans have addressed three core questions: What is educational equity? What is the relationship between school desegregation and equalization? Can equal schools create an equal society? By exploring how Americans thought about and sought to institutionalize their answers to these questions, the course investigates the promise and pitfalls of treating schooling as an egalitarian tool. Usually offered every third year.

Leah Gordon

AMST/ENG 116b American Culture Across the Disciplines
[ hum ]

Explores the latest research on American culture by Brandeis faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each week a different faculty member will join us to discuss their latest book or article, the questions that animate their research, and the archives, methodologies, and theories they use to answer them. Usually offered every fourth year.

Jerome Tharaud

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/JOUR 109b Reinventing Journalism for the 21st Century
[ dl ss wi ]

Technology has transformed journalism into a genuinely multimedia enterprise. This fast-paced course examines innovation at work, from digital storytelling to data visualization, at both start-up and legacy media outlets. It also explores the political, sociological, legal and ethical issues raised by these new technologies and the impact of business pressures on journalism's watchdog role in our democracy. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. his course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

AMST/JOUR 137b Journalism in Modern America
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 137b in prior years.

Examines what journalists have done, how their enterprise has in fact conformed with their ideals, and what some of the consequences have been for the republic historically. Usually offered every year.

Maura Farrelly

AMST/LGLS 140b Investigating Justice
[ ss ]

Examines methods used by journalists and other investigators in addressing injustices within criminal and civil legal systems. Problems include wrongful convictions, civil rights, privacy protection, and ethical conflicts. Research methods and reporting techniques enhance skills in interviewing, writing, and oral presentation. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST/LGLS 141b Juvenile Justice: From Cradle to Custody
[ deis-us djw ss ]

After an overview of the basics of juvenile justice in the United States, this course examines the realities and remedies for the cradle-to-prison pipeline, analyzing this pattern from the perspectives of law, society, and economics, tracing the child's experience along that path, and exploring creative public solutions. Usually offered every second year.
Rosalind Kabrhel

AMST/LGLS 188b Louis Brandeis: Law, Business and Politics
[ ss ]

Brandeis's legal career serves as model and guide for exploring the ideals and anxieties of American legal culture throughout the twentieth century. Focuses on how legal values evolve in response to new technologies, corporate capitalism, and threats to personal liberty. Usually offered every second year.
Daniel Breen

HIST 161b American Political History
[ deis-us ss ]
Development of American party politics, the legal system, and government. Special attention paid to the social and cultural determinants of party politics, and economic and social policymaking. Usually offered every second year.
Michael Willrich

AMST 100b Twentieth-Century American Culture
[ dl ss ]

Prerequisite: AMST 100a.

The democratization of taste and the extension of mass media are among the distinguishing features of American culture in the twentieth century. Through a variety of genres and forms of expression, in high culture and the popular arts, this course traces the historical development of a national style that came to exercise formidable influence abroad as well. Usually offered every spring.
Staff

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. his course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Formerly offered as AAAS 136a.

Critical examination of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors that have shaped the lives of African-American women in the United States. Analyzing foundation theoretical texts, fiction, and film over two centuries, this class seeks to understand black women's writing and political activism in the U.S. Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.

Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. his course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

AMST/MUS 35a Rock, Country, and Hip-Hop: History of American Popular Music
[ ca oc ]

Formerly offered as MUS 35a.

Examines the historical context, stylistic development, and cultural significance of rock and roll and other closely related genres, spanning the 1950s through the present. Close attention is paid to how political and social changes have interacted with technological innovations through commercial music to challenge, affirm and shape ideas of race, gender, class and sexuality in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 38a American Music: From Psalms to Hip Hop
[ ca oc ss ]

Open to music majors and non-majors. Formerly offered as MUS 38a.

Explores the many varieties of folk, popular, and art music in American culture. We will focus on the stylistic development of select repertoires beginning with 18th century New England Psalm singing and African American traditions and continuing on through folk, jazz, art, pop, rock, and hip hop music. Throughout the course, music serves as a lens to examine diverse aspects of American culture and history with an emphasis on America's shifting definition of identity. No musical background is required. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 39b Protest Through Song: Music that Shaped America
[ ca oc ss ]

Open to music majors and non-majors. Does not fulfill the Main Currents in American Studies requirement for the major.

Examines 20th and 21st century protest music to better understand the complex relationships between music and social movements. Through class discussions, reading, writing, and listening assignments, and a final performance students will discover how social, cultural, and economic protest songs helped shape American culture. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 55a Music in Film: Hearing American Cinema
[ ca oc ]

Formerly offered as MUS 55a.

Examines the aesthetics and the history of music in film. Through lecture, class discussions, screenings, and readings, the course teaches students how to critically read image, script, and music as an integrated cultural text, ultimately helping one understand and appreciate the progression of film and sound technology from the 1890s to the present. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ANTH 61b Language in American Life
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines both language-in-use and ideas about language varieties in the United States from an anthropological perspective. Explores how language-in-use emerges from and builds relationships, social hierarchies, professional authority, religious experience, dimensions of identity such as gender and race, and more. Usually offered every second year.
Janet McIntosh

ANTH 159a Museums and Public Memory
[ oc ss ]

Explores the social and political organization of public memory, including museums, cultural villages, and memorial sites. Who has the right to determine the content and form of such institutions? Working with local community members, students will develop a collaborative exhibition project. Usually offered every second year.
Ellen Schattschneider

ED 170a Race, Power, and Urban Education
[ deis-us oc ss wi ]

Examines the nature of urban schools, their links to the social and political context, and the perspectives of the people who inhabit them. Explores the historical development of urban schools; the social, economic, and personal hardships facing urban students; and challenges of urban school reform. Usually offered every year.
Derron Wallace

LGLS 10a Introduction to Law
[ oc ss ]

Surveys the nature, process, and institutions of law: the reasoning of lawyers and judges, the interplay of cases and policies, the impact of history and culture, and the ideals of justice and responsibility in a global context. Usually offered every fall.
Daniel Breen

LGLS 132b Environmental Law and Policy
[ oc ss wi ]

Provides a basic survey of environmental law. You will learn essential tools of legal reasoning and argument. Through in-class discussion, cases, and reading on environmental history and ethics, we will cover a range of environmental issues, including: climate change, water rights, the Keystone XL pipeline, our national parks and monuments, and much more. You will reflect on the tradeoffs, contradictions, and inequities baked into our core environmental laws, and think about ways to apply those laws in more equitable ways. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

POL 111a The American Congress
[ oc ss ]

The structure and behavior of the Congress. Emphasis on the way member incentives for reelection, power on Capitol Hill, and good public policy shape Congress. Usually offered every second year.
Jill Greenlee

POL 161b Good Neighbor or Imperial Power: The Contested Evolution of US-Latin American Relations
[ djw oc ss wi ]

Studies the ambivalent and complex relationship between the U.S. and Latin America, focusing on how the exploitative dimension of this relationship has shaped societies across the region, and on how Latin American development can be beneficial for the U.S. Usually offered every year.
Alejandro Trelles

POL 173a Seminar: U.S. Foreign Economic Policy
[ oc ss wi ]

Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or above.

Presents the history and politics of the foreign economic policy in the United States. Emphasis is on political and economic considerations that influence the domestic actors and institutions involved in the formulation of policy. Usually offered every year.
Kerry Chase

SOC 130a Families, Kinship and Sexuality
[ oc ss ]

Counts toward the completion of the joint MA degree in Sociology & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Investigates changes in the character of American families over the last two centuries. A central concern will be the dynamic interactions among economic, cultural, political, and social forces, and how they shape and are reshaped by families over time. Particular attention is paid to how experiences of men and women vary by class, race, and ethnicity. Usually offered every year.
Karen Hansen

AMST 30b American Environmental History
[ ss wi ]

Provides an overview of the relationship between nature and culture in North America. Covers Native Americans, the European invasion, the development of a market system of resource extraction and consumption, the impact of industrialization, and environmentalist responses. Current environmental issues are placed in historical context. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 100a Foundations of American Culture
[ ss wi ]

This is the core seminar for American studies majors; a text-based course tracing the American experience from the earliest colonizations through the nineteenth century. Usually offered every fall.
Staff

AMST 106b Food and Farming in America
[ ss wi ]

Yields four semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

American food is abundant and cheap. Yet many eat poorly, and some argue that our agriculture may be unhealthy and unsustainable. Explores the history of American farming and diet and the prospects for a healthy food system. Includes extensive fieldwork. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 30b American Environmental History
[ ss wi ]

Provides an overview of the relationship between nature and culture in North America. Covers Native Americans, the European invasion, the development of a market system of resource extraction and consumption, the impact of industrialization, and environmentalist responses. Current environmental issues are placed in historical context. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AMST 35a Hollywood and American Culture
[ ss ]

This is an interdisciplinary course in Hollywood cinema and American culture that aims to do justice to both arenas. Students will learn the terms of filmic grammar, the meanings of visual style, and the contexts of Hollywood cinema from The Birth of a Nation (1915) to last weekend's top box office grosser. They will also master the major economic, social, and political realities that make up the American experience of the dominant medium of our time, the moving image, as purveyed by Hollywood. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 36b Television and American Culture
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 130b in prior years.

An interdisciplinary course with three main lines of discussion and investigation: an aesthetic inquiry into the meaning of television style and genre; a historical consideration of the medium and its role in American life; and a technological study of televisual communication. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 46b American Biography
[ ss ]

Focuses on biography as a method of historical inquiry and literary expression. Students grapple with fundamental questions of the genre: Whose lives get memorialized and why? What can one life say about the period in which it was lived? How much attention should biographers pay to the private lives versus public accomplishments of their subjects? How do biographers wrestle with the fallibility of memory? Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 50b Religion in American Life
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 167b in prior years.

Considers the historical influence of religious belief on various aspects of American political, cultural, legal, and economic life. Topics include the use and effectiveness of religious language in political rhetoric, from the American Revolution to the War in Iraq; the role that religious belief has played in galvanizing and frustrating various reform movements; and the debate over the proper role of religion in the public square. Usually offered every second year.
Maura Farrelly

AMST 66b American Scholars: Public Intellectuals in American Life
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 166b in prior years.

Examines the role and influence of public intellectuals in American society. Students explore the ideas put forth by some of the most influential public intellectuals in American life, and they are challenged to consider how and why those ideas have been rendered relevant to a mass audience. Students are also challenged to consider the impact the modern university has had on public intellectualism; the role the broadcast and Internet media are playing in the making of public intellectuals; and whether and how pundits are different from public intellectuals. Usually offered every second year.
Maura Farrelly

AMST 103b Advertising and the Media
[ ss ]

Combines a historical and contemporary analysis of advertising's role in developing and sustaining consumer culture in America with a practical analysis of the relationship between advertising and the news media in the United States. Usually offered every second year.
Maura Farrelly

AMST 106b Food and Farming in America
[ ss wi ]

Yields four semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

American food is abundant and cheap. Yet many eat poorly, and some argue that our agriculture may be unhealthy and unsustainable. Explores the history of American farming and diet and the prospects for a healthy food system. Includes extensive fieldwork. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST 131b News on Screen
[ ss ]

An interdisciplinary course exploring how journalistic practice is mediated by moving image--cinematic, televisual, and digital. The historical survey will span material from the late-nineteenth-century "actualities" of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers to the viral environment of the World Wide Web, a rich tradition that includes newsreels, expeditionary films, screen magazines, combat reports, government information films, news broadcasts, live telecasts, television documentaries, amateur video, and the myriad blogs, vlogs, and webcasts of the digital age. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 136a Planet Hollywood: American Cinema in Global Perspective
[ hum ss ]

Examines the global reach of Hollywood cinema as an art, business, and purveyor of American values, tracking how Hollywood has absorbed foreign influences and how other nations have adapted and resisted the Hollywood juggernaut. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST 150a The History of Childhood and Youth in America
[ ss ]

Examines history, cultural ideas, and policies about childhood and youth, as well as children's literature, television, and other media for children and youth. Includes an archival-based project on the student movement in the 1960s. Usually offered every second year.
Jonathan Krasner

AMST 177b True Crime and American Culture_
[ ss ]

Explores a series of enduringly fascinating cases from the true crime files of American culture. Our crime scene investigations range from 1692 Salem to 1994 Brentwood; our line-up includes witches, outlaws, kidnappers, gangsters, murderers, and serial killers; and our evidence is drawn from literature, film, and television. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas Doherty

AMST/ED 120a History of Higher Education in the U.S.
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the history of higher education in the United States from the nation's formation to the present. Readings outline the competing purposes Americans envisioned for colleges and universities, as well as student life, institutional access, and visions of the relationship between excellence and equity. The course explores patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender and how universities served as sites where class was produced and contested. Students explore the post-World War II democratization of American higher education, the politics of college admissions, and recent movements to make college more affordable. The course also raises questions about the power universities came to hold as centers of knowledge-making networks and universities as sites of political activism. Usually offered every third year.
Leah Gordon

AMST/ED 121a Education and Equity in Modern American History
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

Focusing on educational inequities related to race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, this course examines twentieth century American efforts to make schools more equal, and in the process to make the social, economic, and racial order more just and fair. The course focuses on the ways Americans have addressed three core questions: What is educational equity? What is the relationship between school desegregation and equalization? Can equal schools create an equal society? By exploring how Americans thought about and sought to institutionalize their answers to these questions, the course investigates the promise and pitfalls of treating schooling as an egalitarian tool. Usually offered every third year.

Leah Gordon

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.

Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/JOUR 109b Reinventing Journalism for the 21st Century
[ dl ss wi ]

Technology has transformed journalism into a genuinely multimedia enterprise. This fast-paced course examines innovation at work, from digital storytelling to data visualization, at both start-up and legacy media outlets. It also explores the political, sociological, legal and ethical issues raised by these new technologies and the impact of business pressures on journalism's watchdog role in our democracy. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. his course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

AMST/JOUR 137b Journalism in Modern America
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AMST 137b in prior years.

Examines what journalists have done, how their enterprise has in fact conformed with their ideals, and what some of the consequences have been for the republic historically. Usually offered every year.

Maura Farrelly

AMST/LGLS 140b Investigating Justice
[ ss ]

Examines methods used by journalists and other investigators in addressing injustices within criminal and civil legal systems. Problems include wrongful convictions, civil rights, privacy protection, and ethical conflicts. Research methods and reporting techniques enhance skills in interviewing, writing, and oral presentation. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST/LGLS 141b Juvenile Justice: From Cradle to Custody
[ deis-us djw ss ]

After an overview of the basics of juvenile justice in the United States, this course examines the realities and remedies for the cradle-to-prison pipeline, analyzing this pattern from the perspectives of law, society, and economics, tracing the child's experience along that path, and exploring creative public solutions. Usually offered every second year.
Rosalind Kabrhel

AMST/LGLS 188b Louis Brandeis: Law, Business and Politics
[ ss ]

Brandeis's legal career serves as model and guide for exploring the ideals and anxieties of American legal culture throughout the twentieth century. Focuses on how legal values evolve in response to new technologies, corporate capitalism, and threats to personal liberty. Usually offered every second year.
Daniel Breen

AMST/MUS 35a Rock, Country, and Hip-Hop: History of American Popular Music
[ ca oc ]

Formerly offered as MUS 35a.

Examines the historical context, stylistic development, and cultural significance of rock and roll and other closely related genres, spanning the 1950s through the present. Close attention is paid to how political and social changes have interacted with technological innovations through commercial music to challenge, affirm and shape ideas of race, gender, class and sexuality in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 38a American Music: From Psalms to Hip Hop
[ ca oc ss ]

Open to music majors and non-majors. Formerly offered as MUS 38a.

Explores the many varieties of folk, popular, and art music in American culture. We will focus on the stylistic development of select repertoires beginning with 18th century New England Psalm singing and African American traditions and continuing on through folk, jazz, art, pop, rock, and hip hop music. Throughout the course, music serves as a lens to examine diverse aspects of American culture and history with an emphasis on America's shifting definition of identity. No musical background is required. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 39b Protest Through Song: Music that Shaped America
[ ca oc ss ]

Open to music majors and non-majors. Does not fulfill the Main Currents in American Studies requirement for the major.

Examines 20th and 21st century protest music to better understand the complex relationships between music and social movements. Through class discussions, reading, writing, and listening assignments, and a final performance students will discover how social, cultural, and economic protest songs helped shape American culture. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 55a Music in Film: Hearing American Cinema
[ ca oc ]

Formerly offered as MUS 55a.

Examines the aesthetics and the history of music in film. Through lecture, class discussions, screenings, and readings, the course teaches students how to critically read image, script, and music as an integrated cultural text, ultimately helping one understand and appreciate the progression of film and sound technology from the 1890s to the present. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss wi ]

An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize African American writing of this century. Examines those influences that have shaped the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of representative writers. Usually offered every second year.
Brandon Callender or Faith Smith

AAAS 156a #BlackLivesMatter
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the evolution of the modern African American civil rights movement through historical readings, primary documents, films and social media. Assesses the legacy and consequences of the movement for contemporary struggles for black equality. Usually offered every second year.
Chad Williams

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Formerly offered as AAAS 136a.

Critical examination of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors that have shaped the lives of African-American women in the United States. Analyzing foundation theoretical texts, fiction, and film over two centuries, this class seeks to understand black women's writing and political activism in the U.S. Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Usually offered every fourth year.
Howie Tam

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AMST/JOUR 109b Reinventing Journalism for the 21st Century
[ dl ss wi ]

Technology has transformed journalism into a genuinely multimedia enterprise. This fast-paced course examines innovation at work, from digital storytelling to data visualization, at both start-up and legacy media outlets. It also explores the political, sociological, legal and ethical issues raised by these new technologies and the impact of business pressures on journalism's watchdog role in our democracy. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

ANTH 61b Language in American Life
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines both language-in-use and ideas about language varieties in the United States from an anthropological perspective. Explores how language-in-use emerges from and builds relationships, social hierarchies, professional authority, religious experience, dimensions of identity such as gender and race, and more. Usually offered every second year.
Janet McIntosh

ANTH 159a Museums and Public Memory
[ oc ss ]

Explores the social and political organization of public memory, including museums, cultural villages, and memorial sites. Who has the right to determine the content and form of such institutions? Working with local community members, students will develop a collaborative exhibition project. Usually offered every second year.
Ellen Schattschneider

ED 161b Religious Education in America
[ hum ]

No principle stands more sacred in American public education than separation of Church and state. Public schools pride themselves as neutral playing fields when it comes to matters of religion. But this position belies a more complicated history. American public schools were initially founded by protestant leaders concerned with an influx of non-protestant immigrants during the middle of the 19th century. Indeed, despite lip service to ideas like separation of Church and state, American educational leaders long saw schools as a vehicle for promoting a Protestant inflected American culture. This course begins from the premise that American education and American religion have always existed in relationship. Religious groups have sometimes tried to use the public schools as vehicles to advance their religion, sometimes, they have created supplemental schools, and sometimes they have created whole parallel school systems. But in all cases, education and religion in American are intertwined. This course asks when education is religious and when religion is educational. It examines a series of case studies drawn from different faith communities including Judaism, Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam. Usually offered every second year.
Ziva Hassenfeld

ED 170a Race, Power, and Urban Education
[ deis-us oc ss wi ]

Examines the nature of urban schools, their links to the social and political context, and the perspectives of the people who inhabit them. Explores the historical development of urban schools; the social, economic, and personal hardships facing urban students; and challenges of urban school reform. Usually offered every year.
Derron Wallace

ENG 6a The American Renaissance
[ hum ]

Explores the transformation of U.S. literary culture before the Civil War: transcendentalism, the romance, the slave narrative, domestic fiction, sensationalism, and their relation to the visual art and architecture of the period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Poe, Ridge, and Crafts. Usually offered every second year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 7a American Literature from 1900 to 2000
[ hum wi ]

Focuses on literature and cultural and historical politics of major authors. Prose and poetry. May include Eliot, Frost, Williams, Moore, Himes, Cather, and Faulkner as well as contemporary authors. Usually offered every second year.
John Burt or Caren Irr

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.
Brandon Callender

ENG 27b Classic Hollywood Cinema
[ hum ]

A critical examination of the history of mainstream U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the present. Focuses on major developments in film content and form, the rise and fall of the studio and star system, the changing nature of spectatorship, and the social context of film production and reception. Usually offered every second year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 50b American Independent Film
[ hum ]

Explores non-studio filmmaking in the United States. Defines an indie aesthetic and alternative methods of financing, producing, and distributing films. Special attention given to adaptations of major film genres, such as noir thrillers, domestic comedy, and horror. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.
Brandon Callender

ENG 128a Race and US Cinema
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the central role film plays in the construction and policing of racialized identities in the US. We will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the Black/white binarism. The course is structured as a survey. US cinema originates in the white depiction of Blacks or in the white deployment of blackface, and racialized bodies continue to serve as a ubiquitous (if frequently unacknowledged) source of fascination and anxiety in contemporary cinema. We will begin with early 'whitewashing' films and D.W. Griffith's foundational epic, The Birth of a Nation, and conclude with new queer Black cinema and contemporary Black filmmakers. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 142a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Cannot be taken by students who previously took ENG 42a.

Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.
Brandon Callender

ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ dl hum ]

Explores the role of emerging literary forms and media in catalyzing, shaping, and remembering the American Revolution. Covers revolutionary pamphlets, oratory, the constitutional ratification debates, seduction novels, poetry, and plays. Includes authors Foster, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Publius, Tyler, and Wheatley. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 147a Film Noir
[ hum ]

A study of classics of the genre (The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil) as well as more recent variations (Chinatown, Bladerunner). Readings include source fiction (Hemingway, Hammett) and essays in criticism and theory. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 154b Spirit Worlds: Religion and Early American Literature
[ hum ]

Explores how the religious imagination shaped literary expression in colonial America and the early United States, and how early American religion is represented in contemporary culture. Authors may include Ann Bradstreet, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, and Nat Turner. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 166b The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
[ hum wi ]

Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

Brandon Callender

ENG 177a Hitchcock's Movies
[ hum ]

A study of thirteen films covering the whole trajectory of Hitchcock's career, as well as interviews and critical responses. Usually offered every second year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 180a The Modern American Short Story
[ hum ]

Close study of American short-fiction masterworks. Students read as writers write, discussing solutions to narrative obstacles, examining the consequences of alternate points of view. Studies words and syntax to understand and articulate how technical decisions have moral and emotional weight. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENVS 108b Land Conservation in the United States: History and Practice
[ ss ]

Explores land conservation in the context of broader environmental movements, focusing on the U.S., but extending to international conservation work. It examines and critiques today's techniques and practice of conservation by non-profit land trusts and by government. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

FA 56a American Art
[ ca deis-us ]

A survey of American painting from the colonial period to the early twentieth-century. Usually offered every third year.
Peter Kalb

HIST 50b Race and America: Perspectives on United States History, Origins to the Present
[ dl ss ]

Investigates U.S. history in a wider world, from its origins to the present, starting with the premise that American History itself is a construct of modern empire. Only by investigating the roots of power and resistance can we understand the forces that deeply influence our world as we live it today. Usually offered every second year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 153b Slavery and the American Civil War: #1619 Project
[ deis-us dl ss ]

A hard look at American slavery from the Middle Passage to Mass Incarceration, plus an investigation into the Civil War through the lens of Black self-emancipation. Uses the tools and insights from #1619 Project. Usually offered every second year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 158b Social History of the Confederate States of America
[ deis-us dl ss ]

An examination of the brief life of the southern Confederacy, emphasizing regional, racial, class, and gender conflicts within the would-be new nation. Usually offered every third year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 160a American Legal History I
[ deis-us ss ]

Surveys American legal development from colonial settlement to the Civil War. Major issues include law as an instrument of revolution, capitalism and contract, invention of the police, family law, slavery law, and the Civil War as a constitutional crisis. Usually offered every third year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 160b American Legal History II
[ deis-us ss ]

Survey of American legal development from 1865 to the present. Major topics include constitutionalism and racial inequality, the legal response to industrialization, progressivism and the transformation of liberalism, the rise of the administrative state, and rights-based movements for social justice. Usually offered every year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 161b American Political History
[ deis-us ss ]
Development of American party politics, the legal system, and government. Special attention paid to the social and cultural determinants of party politics, and economic and social policymaking. Usually offered every second year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 164a Recent American History since 1945
[ ss ]

American politics, economics, and culture underwent profound transformations in the late twentieth century. Examines the period's turmoil, looking especially at origins and legacies. Readings include novels, memoirs, key political and social documents, and film and music excerpts. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

HIST 168b America in the Progressive Era: 1890-1920
[ deis-us ss ]

Surveys social and political history during the pivotal decades when America became a "modern" society and nation-state. Topics include populism, racial segregation, social science and public policy, the Roosevelt and Wilson administrations, environmental conservation, and the domestic impact of World War I. Usually offered every fourth year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 195a American Political Thought: From the Revolution to the Civil War
[ ss ]

Antebellum America as seen in the writings of Paine, Jefferson, Adams, the Federalists and Antifederalists, the Federalists and Republicans, the Whigs and the Jacksonians, the advocates and opponents of slavery, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

HIST 196a American Political Thought: From the 1950s to the Present
[ ss ]

Covers the New Left of the 1960s, its rejection of the outlook of the 1950s, the efforts of liberals to save the New Left agenda in the New Politics of the 1970s, and the reaction against the New Left in the neoconservative movement. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

HS 104b American Health Care
[ ss ]

Examines and critically analyzes the United States healthcare system, emphasizing the major trends and issues that have led to the current sense of "crisis." In addition to providing a historical perspective, this course will establish a context for analyzing the current, varied approaches to health care reform. Usually offered every year.
Stuart Altman

HS 110a Wealth and Poverty
[ ss ]

Examines why the gap between richer and poorer citizens appears to be widening in the United States and elsewhere, what could be done to reverse this trend, and how the widening disparity affects major issues of public policy. Usually offered every year.
Staff

JOUR 45a Sports Journalism and Innovation
[ ss wi ]

Innovative journalists have found new, impactful ways to cover sports. In this course, students will practice the skills needed to craft meaningful stories across platforms, examine the role of the sportswriter in modern culture, and discuss how the sports media industry has evolved to include new niches and business models. Usually offered every second year.
Jacob Feldman

JOUR 104a Political Packaging in America
[ ss ]

Examines the history of political marketing, image making in presidential campaigns, the relationship between news and ads, and the growth of public-policy advertising by special-interest groups to influence legislation. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

JOUR 107b Media and Public Policy
[ ss wi ]

Examines the intersection of the media and politics, the ways in which each influences the other, and the consequences of that intersection for a democracy. Through analytic texts, handouts, and contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles, explores the relationship between policy decisions and public discourse. Usually offered every year.
Staff

JOUR 110b Ethics in Journalism
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Should reporters ever misrepresent themselves? Is it ever acceptable to break the law in pursuit of a story? What kind of news footage is too graphic to share? By wrestling with difficult decisions in journalism, this course is designed to strengthen students’ critical thinking and news judgment. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

JOUR 112b Social Journalism: The Art of Engaging Audiences
[ dl ss wi ]

Students will learn how to use social media storytelling to develop their own voices, sharpen their reporting skills, and reach new communities and platforms. They will also learn the art of tracking and building audiences through engagement tools and will critique the work of professionals and colleagues. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

JOUR 114b Arts Journalism: The Making of a Podcast
[ ss wi ]

How do audio journalists cover culture in a world of ever-expanding media options, and find stories that captivate audiences? In this course students will develop their storytelling skills as they work collectively over the semester to produce a podcast that delivers innovative arts, entertainment, and culture coverage. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

JOUR 120a The Culture of Journalism
[ ss ]

Examines the social, cultural, political and economic influences on the practice of journalism. In particular, the course will explore the generational debates around identity, advocacy, and digital disruption that newsrooms around the country are grappling with today, providing the background and concepts for a critical analysis of the contemporary American press. Counts toward History/Culture requirement for Journalism minor. Usually offered every second year.
Ann Silvio

JOUR 132b Covering the World: International Reporting and Global Affairs
[ ss ]

Explores the evolution of reporting on international affairs and other cultures for an American audience, and how the work of overseas correspondents shapes foreign policy and public opinion. It will examine the challenges facing journalists working in foreign countries and the ethical, cultural, technological, and political factors that influence the U.S. media's coverage of global affairs. Usually offered every second year.
Catherine Elton and Romesh Ratnesar

LGLS 10a Introduction to Law
[ oc ss ]

Surveys the nature, process, and institutions of law: the reasoning of lawyers and judges, the interplay of cases and policies, the impact of history and culture, and the ideals of justice and responsibility in a global context. Usually offered every fall.
Daniel Breen

LGLS 114a American Health Care: Law and Policy
[ ss ]

Closed to first-year students.

Focuses on individual rights, highlights how our laws and policies affect American health care. Traces the evolution of the doctor-patient relationship; explores access issues, including whether health care is or should be a fundamental right; assesses the quality of care and the impact of malpractice; and examines the cost of having (or not having) adequate health insurance. Concludes with options and prospects for meaningful reform. Usually offered every year.
Sarah Curi

LGLS 116b Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: Constitutional Debates
[ ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who successfully completed POL 116b or LGLS/POL 116b previously.

The history and politics of civil liberties and civil rights in the United States, with emphasis on the period from World War I to the present. Emphasis on freedom of speech, religion, abortion, privacy, racial discrimination, and affirmative action. Readings from Supreme Court cases and influential works by historians and political philosophers. Usually offered every year.
Daniel Breen

LGLS 122b Indigenous Rights, Environmental Justice, and Federal Indian Law
[ ss wi ]

Provides a look at the intersection of indigenous rights, environmental justice, and federal Indian law. You will learn essential tools of legal reasoning and argument. Through in-class discussion, cases, and reading you will learn about conflicts over land use, climate change, and sovereignty. The course will be organized into weekly case studies where we will study contemporary and historical conflicts including: the Dakota Access pipeline, relocation due to sea level rise, fishing rights and dam removal, water rights in the face of drought, uranium mining, and Native Nation regulation of oil and gas extraction on reservation lands. Usually offered every second year.

Staff

LGLS 132b Environmental Law and Policy
[ oc ss wi ]

Provides a basic survey of environmental law. You will learn essential tools of legal reasoning and argument. Through in-class discussion, cases, and reading on environmental history and ethics, we will cover a range of environmental issues, including: climate change, water rights, the Keystone XL pipeline, our national parks and monuments, and much more. You will reflect on the tradeoffs, contradictions, and inequities baked into our core environmental laws, and think about ways to apply those laws in more equitable ways. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

LGLS 138b Science on Trial
[ qr ss ]

Surveys the procedures and analytic methods by which scientific data enter into litigation and regulation/policy making. Introduces basic tools of risk analysis and legal rules of evidence. Case studies of tobacco litigation and regulation; use of DNA and other forensic evidence in the criminal justice system; the Woburn ground-water contamination case; and other topics to be selected, such as genetics in the courtroom, court-ordered Cesarean sections, polygraph testing, alternative medicine, and genetically modified foods. Usually offered every second year.
Daniel Breen

MUS 32b Elements of Jazz
[ ca ]

Open to music majors and non-majors.

Examines the development of Jazz styles from the origins of Jazz in the late 1800's through today's Jazz masters. Early Jazz, Swing, Bebop, Cool, the year 1959, and Avant Garde are some of the styles we will be examining through recordings, videos, and in-class performances by local jazz musicians. The emphasis will be on learning how to listen to the various layers of the music and recognize specific stylistic techniques. Usually offered every third year.
Bob Nieske

NEJS 162a American Judaism
[ hum ss wi ]

American Judaism from the earliest settlement to the present, with particular emphasis on the various streams of American Judaism. Judaism's place in American religion and comparisons to Judaism in other countries. Usually offered every year.
Jonathan Sarna

NEJS 162b It Couldn't Happen Here: American Antisemitism in Historical Perspective
[ hum ]

A close examination of three American anti-Semitic episodes: U.S. Grant's expulsion of the Jews during the Civil War, the Leo Frank case, and the publication of Henry Ford's The International Jew. What do these episodes teach us about anti-semitic prejudice, about Jews, and about America as a whole? Usually offered every second year.
Jonathan Sarna

NEJS 164a Judaism Confronts America
[ hum wi ]

Examines, through a close reading of selected primary sources, central issues and tensions in American Jewish life, paying attention to their historical background and to issues of Jewish law. Usually offered every second year.
Jonathan Sarna

NEJS 169b From Sunday Schools to Birthright: History of American Jewish Education
[ hum ]

Empowers students to articulate a reality-based, transformative vision of Jewish education that is grounded in an appreciation for the history and sociology of American Jewish education. It will familiarize students with and contextualize the present Jewish educational landscape, through the use of historical case studies and current research, encouraging students to view the field from an evolutionary perspective. The seminar will address Jewish education in all its forms, including formal and informal settings (e.g., schools, camps, youth groups, educational tourism). Usually offered every third year
Jonathan Krasner

NEJS 181a Jews on Screen: From "Cohen's Fire Sale" to the Coen Brothers
[ hum ]

Open to all students.

Survey course focusing on moving images of Jews and Jewish life in fiction and factual films. Includes early Russian and American silents, home movies of European Jews, Yiddish feature films, Israeli cinema, independent films, and Hollywood classics. Usually offered every second year.
Sharon Rivo

POL 14b Introduction to American Government
[ ss ]

Open to first-year students.

Analysis of American political institutions: Congress, the presidency, Supreme Court, bureaucracy, political parties, pressure groups, and problems of governmental decision making in relation to specific areas of public policy. Usually offered every semester.
Jill Greenlee or Daniel Kryder

POL 101a Political Parties and Interest Groups
[ ss ]

Role and organization of political parties, interest groups, and public opinion in the American political system. Emphasis on historical development and current political behavior in the United States in relation to American democratic theory. Comparison with other countries to illuminate U.S. practice. Usually offered every second year.

Zachary Albert

POL 105a Elections in America
[ ss ]

Examines modern campaigns and elections to the United States presidency and Congress. Topics include the influence of partisanship, policy differences, and candidate images on the vote; the impact of money on campaigns; the role of the mass media; and the differences among presidential, Senate, and House elections. Usually offered every third year.
Zachary Albert

POL 108a Seminar: The Police and Social Movements in American Politics
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Analyses American mass political movements, their interaction with police, and their influences on American politics. Topics include the relationship between social movements and various political institutions. Explore various theories with case studies of specific political movements. Usually offered every third year.
Daniel Kryder

POL 111a The American Congress
[ oc ss ]

The structure and behavior of the Congress. Emphasis on the way member incentives for reelection, power on Capitol Hill, and good public policy shape Congress. Usually offered every second year.
Jill Greenlee

POL 113b The American Presidency
[ ss ]

Philosophical and historical origins of the presidency, examining the constitutional role of the chief executive. Historical development of the presidency, particularly the emergence of the modern presidency during the twentieth century. Contemporary relationships between the presidency and the electorate, as well as the other branches of government. Usually offered every second year.
Daniel Kryder

POL 116b Civil Liberties in America
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who successfully completed LGLS 116b or LGLS/POL 116b previously.

The history and politics of civil liberties and civil rights in the United States, with emphasis on the period from World War I to the present. Emphasis on freedom of speech, religion, abortion, privacy, racial discrimination, and affirmative action. Readings from Supreme Court cases and influential works by historians and political philosophers. Usually offered every year.
Jeffrey Lenowitz

POL 120b Seminar: The Politics of Policymaking
[ ss ]

Examines the connection between politics and policymaking to identify the political determinants of public policy since the 1970's. By paying close attention to what policy makers say about what they are doing, the course connects the world of ideas to the world of actions. The course examines concrete cases from specific time periods across a wide range of policy areas such as health care, tax policy, Social Security, education reform, immigration, tort reform,and deregulation. Usually offered every year.

Zachary Albert

POL 161b Good Neighbor or Imperial Power: The Contested Evolution of US-Latin American Relations
[ djw oc ss wi ]

Studies the ambivalent and complex relationship between the U.S. and Latin America, focusing on how the exploitative dimension of this relationship has shaped societies across the region, and on how Latin American development can be beneficial for the U.S. Usually offered every year.
Alejandro Trelles

POL 168b American Foreign Policy
[ ss ]

Overview of America's foreign policy since 1945. Topics include the Cold War era, the economic competitiveness of the United States, the role of the United States in selected world regions, the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. participation in the United Nations, post-Cold War foreign policy, and the making and implementing of foreign policy. Usually offered every year.
Staff

POL 173a Seminar: U.S. Foreign Economic Policy
[ oc ss wi ]

Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or above.

Presents the history and politics of the foreign economic policy in the United States. Emphasis is on political and economic considerations that influence the domestic actors and institutions involved in the formulation of policy. Usually offered every year.
Kerry Chase

POL/WGS 125a Seminar: Gender in American Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took POL 125a in prior years.

Addresses three major dimensions of women's political participation: social reform and women-identified issues; women's organizations and institutions; and women politicians, electoral politics, and party identification. Covers historical context and contemporary developments in women's political activity. Usually offered every second year.
Jill Greenlee

SOC 122a The Sociology of American Immigration
[ ss ]

Most of us descend from immigrants. Focusing on the United States but in a global perspective, we address the following questions: Why do people migrate? How does this affect immigrants' occupations, gendered households, rights, identities, youth, and race relations with other groups? Usually offered every second year.
Kristen Lucken

SOC 130a Families, Kinship and Sexuality
[ oc ss ]

Counts toward the completion of the joint MA degree in Sociology & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Investigates changes in the character of American families over the last two centuries. A central concern will be the dynamic interactions among economic, cultural, political, and social forces, and how they shape and are reshaped by families over time. Particular attention is paid to how experiences of men and women vary by class, race, and ethnicity. Usually offered every year.
Karen Hansen

THA 66a The American Drama since 1945
[ ca ]

Examines the major plays and playwrights representing styles from social realism to avant-garde performance groups and the theater of images. Usually offered every second year.
Arthur Holmberg

THA 123a American Musical Theater
[ ca ]

Analyzes American musicals in their historical contexts: students learn how to analyze the structure and score of musicals, and develop a vocabulary for examining the visual dimensions of productions. Attention will be given to production histories. Usually offered every year.
Ryan McKittrick

THA 155a Icons of Masculinity: Media Images of Men
[ ca ]

Using icons from movies, fiction, theater, and television who represent manhood, this course explores how American men have defined and performed their masculinity. Various archetypes, including the cowboy, the gangster, the rogue cop, the athlete, the buddy, the lover, and Woody Allen are examined. Usually offered every second year.
Arthur Holmberg