ENROLL

Christopher Elias

This overview of the "interdisciplinary discipline" of American Studies will focus on the ways American Studies engages with and departs from other scholarly fields of inquiry. A particular emphasis will be placed on the stories of individuals who have been marginalized in the social, political, cultural, and economic life of the United States due to their class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, and level of ability. Students will engage with a variety of media, including academic scholarship, works of fiction, journalism, film, poetry, art, material culture, advertising, and music as they practice reading and writing about cultural artifacts from a critical perspective. Texts will include work by Diane Arbus, James Baldwin, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Kendrick Lamar, Spike Lee, Jackson Pollock, Mae Ngai, and Bruce Springsteen.

Sophomore Priority.

Paul Petzschmann

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, America often served as a canvass for projecting European anxieties about economic, social and political modernization. Admiration of technological progress and political stability was combined with a pervasive anti-Americanism, which was, according to political scientist Andrei Markovits, the "lingua franca" of modern Europe. These often contradictory perceptions of the United States were crucial in the process of forming national histories and mythologies as well as a common European identity. Accordingly, this course will explore the many and often contradictory views expressed by Europe's emerging mass publics and intellectual and political elites about the United States during this period.

Held for new first year students