AMST 1050: Slavery and Its Legacies        

This course examines the history of slavery and its legacy at UVA and in the central Virginia region. The course aims to recover the experiences of enslaved individuals and their roles in building and maintaining the university, and to contextualize those experiences within Southern history.

AMST 1060: The Aftermath of Slavery at UVA and in Virginia        

This course examines the post-1865 history at UVA and in the region, recovering the experiences of African Americans in building community in the face of racism, and also contextualizing those experiences within U.S. history. The course situates that local history in political and cultural context, tracing the advent of emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, desegregation, civil rights change, and even twenty-first century racism and inequality.

AMST 2001: Introduction to American Studies    

This course introduces students to American Studies, the interdisciplinary study of US culture.  Students will be exposed to the three main categories of American Studies methods, historical analysis, close analysis, and fieldwork and to a broad variety of cultural forms, including films, photographs, music, sermons, journalism, fiction, speeches, court decisions, government documents, and web-based materials including social media sites.

AMST 2155: Whiteness & Religion: Religious Foundations of a Racial Category     

This class examines the role religion plays in defining a racial category known as whiteness. By reading cultural histories and ethnographies of the religious practices of various communities, we will examine how groups now classified as white (Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, etc.) and religious images (depictions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary) "became white" and the role that religious practice played in this shift in racial classification.

AMST 2210: Arts of the Harlem Renaissance        

Studies the literature, painting, photography and prints produced by New York artists based in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and examines their relation to concurrent social, cultural, and aesthetic issues.

AMST 2231: Native Americans in Popular Culture              

This course interrogates American Indian people in pop culture. Students historicize and analyze the representation of American Indians across such media as print, photography, cinema, music, and more recently in the twenty-first century, social media. This course asks students to think about the ways American Indian people have not only contributed to pop culture, but the desire for American Indians as cultural objects.

AMST 2233: Contemporary Native American Literature

In this course we use contemporary Native American literature, authored by individuals from diverse tribal backgrounds, as an accessible avenue to better understand the history of federal Indian policy, its complexity, legal construct, and the ways federal Indian policy influences the lives of American Indian people.

AMST 2321: Latinx Fiction and Film          

This course explores the diverse and also converging experiences of Latinos in the US. We will read contemporary novels and poetry by Latinx authors from different Latinx groups (Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American and South American). We will discuss reasons for migration, concepts of the "border" and the impact of bilingualism on group identity. We will view films that depict the Latinx experience in the US.

AMST 2420: Cultural Landscapes of the United States      

This course introduces the study of everyday landscapes as cultural spaces that illuminate the history of social and political developments in the U.S. It encourages a broad understanding of landscape across genres-painting, photography, fiction, journalism.  Particular focus will be paid to the political economy of landscapes to explore the connections between landscape and public policy from multiple vantage points.

AMST 2422: Point of View Journalism     

This course analyzes 'point-of-view' journalism as a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of ''objectivity' in the U.S. news media. It will survey point-of-view journalists from Benjamin Franklin to the modern blog.

AMST 2460: Language in the U.S.             

Through diverse academic/theoretical readings and spoken, written, and visual material, students will learn to analyze, evaluate, and construct arguments as related to critical linguistic and cultural analysis of primary and secondary source material. This course examines complex relationships among American language and cultural practices, American history, race, gender, and class ideologies, and social identities.

AMST 2470: Disney        

This discussion course examines the cultural role of Disney and its effects on the visual arts in the 20th and 21st centuries. It considers a range of material to interrogate how Disney as both a corporation and a cultural icon promotes and reinforces national ideals. Presented both chronologically and thematically, students engage with aesthetic, ideological and theoretical concerns regarding history, identity, space/place, and popular culture.

AMST 2500: Major Works for American Studies (multiple topics)

American Apocalypses

American Cultural Studies

American Photography Since 1945

American Studies in the Digital Age

Chinese American Language, Culture & Identity

Christian America? Diversity and Am. Rel. Identity

Culture and Society in 19th Century America

Cultures of Hip-Hop

Digital American Studies

Harlem Stories: Modern Literature and Culture

Intro Transnational American Studies

Introduction to Asian American Pacific Studies

Language and New Media

Language in the US

Latino/a Confidential: Detective Fiction and Race

Racial Borders and American Cinema

Religion and American Popular Cultures

Religious Diversity in the U.S

The Big House: (Re)Inventing the South

Visions of Apocalypse in American Culture

Women in the Civil Rights Movement

AMST 2660: Spiritual But Not Religious: Spirituality in America    

What does "spiritual but not religious" mean, and why has it become such a pervasive self-description in contemporary America? This interdisciplinary course surveys spirituality in America, with a particular eye for the relationship between spirituality and formal religion, on the one hand, and secular modes of understanding the self, such as psychology, on the other.

AMST 2753: Arts and Cultures of the Slave South              

This interdisciplinary course covers the American South to the Civil War. While the course centers on the visual arts- architecture, material culture, decorative arts, painting, and sculpture- it is not designed as a regional history of art, but an exploration of the interrelations between history, material and visual cultures, foodways, music and literature in the formation of Southern identities.

AMST 3001: Theories and Methods of American Studies

This seminar course will introduce majors to various theories and methods for the practice of American Studies. The three goals of the seminars are (1) to make students aware of their own interpretive practices; (2) to equip them with information and conceptual tools they will need for advanced work in American Studies; and (3) to provide them with comparative approaches to the study of various aspects of the United States.  Prerequisites: American Studies Major

AMST 3050: Critical Ethnic Studies           

This core seminar is an introduction to key issues and methods in the comparative and critical study of ethnicity and race. The course highlights an interdisciplinary approach to the studies of systematic oppression in the United States, and the global implication of these structures. We will consider how Ethnic Studies presents a progressive intellectual challenge to global and local configurations of power in the name of global justice.

AMST 3180: Introduction to Asian American Studies        

An interdisciplinary introduction to the culture and history of Asians and Pacific Islanders in America. Examines ethnic communities such as Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, and Native Hawaiian, through themes such as immigration, labor, cultural production, war, assimilation, and politics. Texts are drawn from genres such as legal cases, short fiction, musicals, documentaries, visual art, and drama.

AMST 3200: African American Political Thought 

This course explores the critical and the constructive dimensions of African American political thought from slavery to the present. We will assess the claims that black Americans have made upon the polity, how they have defined themselves, and how they have sought to redefine key terms of political life such as citizenship, equality, freedom, and power.

AMST 3221: Hands-On Public History: Slavery and Reconstruction             

"Public history" is delivered to a non-academic audience, often at historic sites, museums,  archives, and on digital platforms. Some films, podcasts, fiction, and poetry might also be considered public history. This course uses all of those formats to investigate how the history of slavery and Reconstruction are presented to the public. Collaboration with local community groups and field trips to historic sites are key components of this class.

AMST 3222: Hands-On Public History: Slavery and Reconstruction, Part II

Hands-On Public History is designed as a year-long course. This course continues the curriculum of AMST 3221.

AMST 3280: Introduction to Native American Studies: (Mis)Representations         

An intro to the broad field of Native Studies, this class focuses on themes of representation and erasure. We read Indigenous scholars and draw from current events, pop culture, and historical narrative to explore complex relationships between historical and contemporary issues that Indigenous peoples face in the US. We examine the foundations of Native representations and their connections to critical issues in Native communities.

AMST 3300: Introduction to Latinx Studies           

AMST 3300 offers students close study of significant texts and other cultural forms representing the perspective and contributions of the main Latinx populations in the United States--including those of Puerto Rican, Chicano, Dominican, Central American and Cuban American origin--in historical context and within a theoretical, analytical framework.

AMST 3321: Race and Ethnicity in Latinx Literature           

This course examines the construction of race and ethnicity in Latinx literature by examining key texts by individuals from varying Latinx groups in the US. We will examine how US-American identity shapes Latinx notions of race and how the authors' connections with Latin America and the Caribbean do the same. We will explore from a hemispheric perspective how race and ethnicity are depicted in Latinx literature and culture.

AMST 3322: Latinx Feminisms    

In this course we will read contemporary novels by self-identified Latina writers. From Barrio to Chica Lit, we will ask ourselves how the models of womanhood and female liberation and autonomy presented in these texts align themselves and/or challenge U.S. American, Latin American, European and Latina feminist theory to date.

AMST 3323: Hemispheric Latinx Literature and Culture   

This course offers a survey of Latinx literature and film from a hemispheric perspective. Engaging texts from colonial times to the present day, we explore how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, essays and films that are now referred to as distinctly Latinx.

AMST 3354: Race and Media      

We explore issues related to white supremacy, anti-blackness, mixed-race, settler colonialism, immigrant and transqueer phobia, and the production of racial difference. We examine these topics within their historical context and explore representations across all forms of visual culture, predominantly television but with reference to advertising, film, music, and digital media.

AMST 3355: Border Media           

In this course we consider the depiction of the U.S.-Mexico border from the perspective of popular and mass media cultures. We examine the border as a site of cultural exchanges, resistance and critical negotiation; interchanges that impact the construction of race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender from both sides of the border.

AMST 3407: Racial Borders and American Cinema             

This class explores how re-occurring images of racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans and Latino/as are represented  in film and shows visual images of racial interactions and boundaries of human relations that tackle topics such as immigration, inter-racial relationships and racial passing.

AMST 3425: American Material Culture 

This course will introduce you to the study of material culture, the physical stuff that is part of human life. Material culture includes everything we make and use, from food and clothing to art and buildings. This course is organized into six sections, the first introducing the idea of material culture, and the other five following the life cycle of an object: material, making, designing, selling, using.

AMST 3427: Gender, Things, and Difference         

This class explores how material culture, the physical stuff that is part of human life, is used to help to construct and express gendered and other forms of difference. We will look at how bodies and clothes shape our understanding of our own and others' identities, how we imbue objects with gender, how the food we cook and eat carries cultural meanings, and how the design of buildings and spaces structures gender.

AMST 3460: Reading America at Home and Abroad          

This course explores ideas of America, as they are constructed both at "home" in the United States, and "abroad," in and through a number of global locales.  It considers a range of representations, in literature, art, film and music, and also the everyday life of American culture.  In asking how America has seen itself and how others have seen America, we will effectively theorize the concepts of both nation and globality.

AMST 3463: Language and New Media   

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of how language both shapes and is shaped by American society with a focus on New Media. Draws on critical and analytical tools and socio-cultural theories to examine this dynamic relationship in Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, texting, Instagram, YouTube, and more.

AMST 3465: America and the Global South in Literature and Film

Students in this course will examine and interpret conceptions of America from the point of view of novelists, filmmakers, journalists, and scholars in the Global South. American and Global South landscapes will be a focus of the class, as will images, artifacts, and material culture that reveal Global South views of the United States.

AMST 3470: Race, Gender, and Empire: Cultures of US Imperialism            

In this course we emphasize how U.S. power has been exercised in the world with focus on intersections of cultural, political, and economic power. We analyze how power is produced and contested through language and media, and how hegemonic discourses -- the dominant and most powerful blocs defining U.S. society and empire -- are produced. We are equally concerned with cracks and contradictions in these discourses, and people who challenge them.

AMST 3471: American Cinema   

This course provides an introduction to film studies through an examination of American film throughout the 20th & 21st centuries. We will learn basic film techniques for visual analysis, and consider the social, economic, and historical forces that have shaped the production, distribution & reception of film in the US Examples will be drawn from various genres: melodrama, horror, sci-fi, musical, Westerns, war films, documentary, animation, etc.

AMST 3491: Rural Poverty in Our Time   

This course will use an interdisciplinary format and document based approach to explore the history of non-urban poverty in the US South from the 1930s to the present.  Weaving together the social histories of poor people, the political history of poverty policies, and the history of representations of poverty, the course follows historical cycles of attention and neglect during the Great Depression, the War on Poverty, and the present.

AMST 3500 – Topics in American Studies (multiple topics)

Asian American Media Cultures

AMST 3610: Asian Americans & Popular Culture 

Asian Americans and Popular Culture surveys a history of Asian American racialization, experiences, and subject formation in the United States through film, comics, TV, theatre, music, public protest, sports, and social media. Students will learn how to analyze and develop creative work to respond to and re/frame debates on the politics of representation, exoticization, cultural appropriation, transnationalism, hybridity, and US immigration laws.

AMST 3630: Vietnam War in Literature and Film 

In the US, Vietnam signifies not a country but a lasting syndrome that haunts American politics and society, from foreign policy to popular culture. But what of the millions of Southeast Asian refugees the War created? What are the lasting legacies of the Vietnam War for Southeast Asian diasporic communities? We will examine literature and film (fictional and documentary) made by and about Americans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong.

AMST 3641: Native America        

This course will introduce students to deep history of Native North America.  Using primary and secondary sources, we will cover such topics as mutually beneficial trade and diplomatic relations between Natives and newcomers; the politics of empire; U.S. expansion; treaties and land dispossession; ecological, demographic, and social change; pan-Indian movements; legal and political activism; and many, many others.

AMST 3740: Cultures of Hip-Hop              

This course explores the origins and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form in the last forty years, and maps the ways that a local subculture born of an urban underclass has risen to become arguably the dominant form of 21st-century global popular culture. While primarily focused on music, we will also explore how forms such as dance, visual art, film, and literature have influenced and been influenced by hip-hop style and culture.

AMST 3790: Moving On: Migration in/to the US 

This class examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S., tracing the paths of migrating groups and their impact on urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. We'll dig for cultural clues to changing attitudes about migration over time. Photographs, videos, books, movies, government records, poems, podcasts, paintings, comic strips, museums, manifestos: you name it, we'll analyze it for this class.

AMST 3880: Literature of the South         

Analyzes selected works of literature by major Southern writers. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

AMST 4470: American Film Noir

This seminar examines the phenomenon of American Film Noir produced during the 1940s and 50s.  Using urban culture to frame debates about films noir, it explores the ways in which "the city" is represented as a problematic subject and a frequent resource immediately before and after World War II.  The course also discusses the influences of early twentieth-century photography, American Scene art, and Abstract Expressionist painting.

AMST 4351: Aural Histories: Edison to Auto-Tune              

This is a course about the role of technology and technological innovation in the production and consumption of 20th and 21st century music. We will begin with the invention of the phonograph and the birth of the recording industry and continue up through the present day.

AMST 4321: Caribbean Latinx: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the DR        

In this course we will read texts by Latinx writers from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how their works speak to issues of race, colonialism and imperialism based on their individual and shared histories. We will discuss their different political histories and migration experiences and how these in turn impact their literary and artistic productions in the US.

AMST 4410: Censorship

This course examines the social, legal, aesthetic, and theoretical issues raised by censorship of art, mass media, literature, film, and music in the U.S. While censorship is usually associated with explicit sexuality, we will also look at cases involving racial stereotyping, violence, social disorder, and religion. Our cases will center around novels, art, film, music, mass media, and other cultural phenomena.

AMST 4430: Documentary Film and the South    

This course explores how documentary filmmakers have represented the US South from the 1930s through the end of the twentieth century and the place of films made in and about the region in the history of documentary film.  Students will conduct original research, shape their findings into paper, and make their own documentary short about a topic of their choosing.

AMST 4462: Harlem Stories         

Harlem has been many things to many people - capital of a global African diaspora, an early instance of Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, home to an important "el barrio," a representative site of contemporary gentrification and, above all, a place for racial and ethnic minoritization. This course will explore many of those lived and symbolic Harlems from the early twentieth century to the present.

AMST 4472: Hollywood Cinema's Golden Age: The 1930s              

This course examines American cinema produced in Hollywood during the 1930s. While the Great Depression serves as an important backdrop to our investigation, we will interrogate how issues such as ethnic/racial representation, shifting gender roles, sexuality, and urbanity are mediated in popular cinema in this decade. The course also considers the studio system, the Hayes Code, stardom, and changes within narrative and film techniques.

AMST 4500 – Fourth Year Seminar in American Studies (multiple topics)

Age of the Haitian Revolution

American Natures

American Religion, Citizenship, and Race

Autobiography and Nationalism

Cold War Memory and Nostalgia

Criminality and American Film: Tarantino

Critical Race Theory

Cultural History of Hollywood

Cultures of Surveillance and US Empire

Digital Archives and Social Justice

Documentary and the US Civil Rights Movement

Does Technology Mean Progress?

Dramas of Sexuality

Early American Literature

Encounters of the Modern Caribbean

Freedom, Empire, and Sovereignty

History of Black Resistance in the United States

James Baldwin

Land and Health in Native America

Latina/o Film and Social Narrative

Multiculturalism and its Discontents

Navigating Black Atlantic Worlds

Politics of Reproduction in the U.S.

Post 9/11 American Literature and Culture

Race and Criminalization

Race and Ethnicity

Race and Sound in American Culture

Race in American Places

Race in the Americas

Race, Inequality, and the American City

Race, Space, and Culture

Racial Geographies

Reading the Black College Campus

Sexual Politics

Shantytown, USA

Social Science Theory of Race

Space and Time in Twentieth Century Harlem

Sports & Transnational Culture

The Gig Economy

The Global City

The Religious Left in America: Progressive Faith

Theories of American Space

Transnational American Studies before 1900

US Latino Film and Visual Culture

Visual Culture in Literature, Drama and Film

W. E. B. Du Bois

Wilderness, Resource, and Real Estate

AMST 4893: Independent Study in Asian Pacific American Studies              

An elective course for students in the Asian Pacific American Studies minor. Students will work with an APAS core faculty member to support the student's own research. Topics vary, and must be approved by the APAS Director. 

AMST 4401: Literature of the Americas  

This course explores a wide range of (broadly defined) fictions from and about the Americas, from writings by Columbus and the conquistadors through modern and contemporary novels, novellas, and short stories. Students consider the intersection of fiction and history through topics that include New world "discovery" and conquest; borderlands and contact zones; slavery and revolution; and the haunting of the global present by the colonial past.

AMST 4474: Stardom and American Cinema        

This course examines the role of stardom and star performance in American cinema from the silent era to the present.  Using social history, cultural studies and film criticism theory, we will explore topics such as the cultural patterns of stardom, constructions and subversions of star identity, and the ways in which issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality affect the star image both inside and outside cinema.

AMST 4403: Transamerican Encounters 

This comparative, interdisciplinary course focuses on the encounter between the U.S. and the wider Americas as represented in literature, history, and film. Working across a range of historical periods, it explores the varied international contexts underpinning narratives of U.S. national identity and history. It also considers how cultural forms access histories and perspectives outside of official accounts of the past and present.

AMST 4440: Visions of Apocalypse in American Culture  

This course examines how Americans have envisioned the end of the world. Through religious and cultural history and contemporary cultural studies, it considers the ways social, political, and economic tensions are reflected in visions of the apocalypse.  It explores the impact of imagined futures on previous generations, and how religious and secular ideologies of apocalypticism have shaped social movements, politics, and popular culture.

AMST 4993: Independent Study

An elective course for American Studies majors who have completed AMST 3001-3002. Students will work with an American Studies faculty member to support the student's own research. Topics vary, and must be approved by the Program Director.  Prerequisite: AMST 3001, 3002, Instructor Consent.

AMST 4998: Distinguished Majors Program Thesis Research          

Students spend the fall semester of their 4th years working closely with a faculty advisor to conduct research and begin writing their Distinguished Majors Program (DMP) thesis.

AMST 4999: Distinguished Majors Thesis Seminar             

This workshop is for American Studies majors who have been admitted to the DMP program.  Students will discuss the progress of their own and each other's papers, with particular attention to the research and writing processes.  At the instructor's discretion, students will also read key works in the field of American Studies.  Prerequisites: admission to DMP.

AMST 5232: Oral History Workshop: A Hands-On Approach to Researching the Past           

The course is run as a workshop, a space for students to learn oral history methodologies in a hands-on manner. In partnership with local/regional organizations, students will learn to conduct interviews and related research, which may include completing historical surveys, doing genealogical work, & completing archival or database research. Students will learn new skills while helping expand historical archives and knowledge of regional history.

AMST 8001: Approaches to American Studies     

This course introduces graduate students to the field of American Studies, the interdisciplinary study of US culture.  Students will be exposed to a variety of influential theoretical and methodological interventions that have occurred over the field's history, and will also be introduced to some of the principal intellectual, political, and professional issues they will face while pursuing a career in the field.