Fall 2026 Courses

Expand the course offerings below to learn more about the class schedule, theme, cross listing, and major requirements.

Required AMST Courses

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AMST 2001 – Introduction to American Studies

Lecture: MW 1:00PM-1:50PM

Tapia, Ruby; Ngo, Fiona

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.

Requirements Designation: Historical Studies

Class Attributes: Artistic, Interpretive, & Philosophical Inquiry Historical Perspectives

Fourth Year Seminars

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AMST 4559 – 001 – New Course: American Studies: Fashion, Aesthetics, and Movements

T 3:30PM – 6:00PM

Nguyen, Patricia

"Fashion, Aesthetics, and Movements" traverses across subcultures, popular culture, and social movements to explore distinguished symbols, iconography, ideologies, and messaging that have been created to mobilize political platforms, quotidian forms of resistance, and social media trends. Drawing on American studies, performance studies, art history, Indigenous studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and women of color theories and methods students will engage with a range of materials including artwork, performances, documentary film, music videos, and social media to study the main themes of the course. The course delves into how fashion and aesthetics shape movements and vis versa, particularly in historical contexts where there is censorship, state surveillance, and systemic oppression of marginalized identities to explore how political imaginaries and possibilities can arise from these modes of cultural production.

Traditional Curriculum: Humanities & Historical Studies

Course Disciplines: Artistic, Interpretation & Critical Thinking

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AMST 4559 – 002 – New Course: American Studies: Law's Limits, Imagining Justice

TR 2:00PM – 3:15PM

Coyoca, Wilfred David

This course examines the limits of law as a framework for justice and asks what becomes possible when we look elsewhere. Drawing on critical legal and political theory alongside films, music, and literature, we explore the possibilities for justice that legal frameworks cannot imagine.

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AMST 4999 – 001 – DMP Thesis Seminar

R 4:00PM – 6:30PM

Coyoca, Wilfred David

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 Electives

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AMST 2130 – 001 – Narratives of Girlhood

MW 3:30PM-4:45PM

Tapia, Ruby C.

This course treats a range of contemporary English language literatures about girlhood. Our comparative analyses of texts will pay particular attention to their play with genre and their use of literary devices -- e.g., structure, voice, point of view, dialogue, temporality, language -- to render narratives about girlhood in contexts of (im)migration, loss, displacement, violence, revolution, war, and trauma.

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AMST 2130 – 002 – Narratives of Girlhood

TR 12:30PM-1:45PM

Tapia, Ruby C.

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AMST 2421 – 001 – Borderlands and Food Culture

TR 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Azua, Anneleise

This course examines foodways through an interdisciplinary American Studies framework, with attention to borderlands as sites of cultural creativity. Students study how food relates to migration, empire, class, and labor through ethnography, history, literature, and visual culture, applying these perspectives to research-based analytical or creative final projects. The course emphasizes analysis of food, land, taste, and power.

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AMST 2500 – 001 – Abolition & Transform Justice

W 3:30PM – 6:00PM

Nguyen, Patricia

"Transformative Justice" focuses on decades of contemporary abolitionist movements to fight against state violence and dismantle the prison industrial complex. Drawing on a performance studies, critical ethnic studies, Black feminist and woman of color feminist studies, and disability justice approach to abolition, students will engage with a range of materials including film, artwork, manifestos, and community engagement projects. Readings include Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, Shira Hassan, Andrea Ritchie, Liat Ben-Moshe, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and Critical Resistance. This course explores how abolition and transformative justice as theoretical and methodological frameworks offers experiments to combatting state violence and cultural disease to imagine and manifest more sustainable futures.

Traditional Curriculum: Humanities & Historical Studies

Course Disciplines: Social and Economic & Critical Thinking

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AMST 2500 – 002 – Visions of Apocalypse in American Culture

TR 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Hedstrom, Matthew

Apocalypses reveal. The premise of this class is that the study of societal ruptures, real and imagined, often uncover what had previously been obscured. The act of "reading the ruins" is a critical skill of social and cultural analysis. The course begins with a broad introduction to apocalypticism in Western religious traditions, but will soon narrow to the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Our explorations will take us from slave revolts to UFO cults to disaster movies, from the violence of settler colonialism to billionaires in space, and from the Great Disappointment of the 1840s to the very real dangers of climate change, war, technological disruption, and political instability in the present. We will meet a host of Americans—black, white, and indigenous; religious and secular—and ask: what can the imagined futures of yesterday teach us about the hopes and fears of previous generations? In what ways are social, political, and economic tensions revealed in moments of apocalypse?

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AMST 2559 – 001 – Contemporary Issues in Latino America

TR 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Cacho, Lisa

In this class we will explore and research current issues that affect Latina/o/x populations in the United States.

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AMST 2559 – 003 – The Broadway Musical

TR 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Goff, Lisa

Do you love musicals? In this class we're going to watch musicals, talk about musicals, maybe even burst into songs from musicals. We'll also study the history of American musicals, from the birth of Broadway to their starring role in American popular culture in the 20th century and their re-imagining and rebirth in the 21st. Our focus will be on the cultural history and meaning of musicals as opposed to their musical form and techniques—although we'll explore that a bit as well. We'll examine musicals for clues to shifting definitions of "America" and "American," and probe the ways they both upheld and challenged shifting beliefs about race, class, and gender. Syllabus is still under construction, but candidates include Wicked, Showboat, Oklahoma, West Side Story, Rent, Dear Evan Hansen, Hamilton, something by Stephen Sondheim, and, if I can find a copy, A Strange Loop.

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AMST 3001 – 001 – Theories & Methods of American Studies

TR 9:30 – 10:45AM

Shukla, Sandhya

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AMST 3250 – 001 – Black Protest Narrative

TR 9:30AM – 10:45AM

Ross, Marlon

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be "Negro" and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? How do intersectional subjectivities like gender, sexuality, religion, class, immigrant status, and color factor into ideologies and strategies of protest? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright's Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, Alice Walker, Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, and William Melvin Kelley. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz's No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, and Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied.

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AMST 3326 – Latinx and Indigenous Environmentalisms

TR 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Azua, Anneleise

This course examines the relationship between Latinx and Indigenous communities and the environment from a sociocultural, anthropological and historical perspective. Texts encompass the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, and often require thinking and analysis that questions understandings of land, development, race, science, health, and wellness on a state, local, and international level.

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AMST 3422 – 001 – Point of View Journalism

TR 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Goff, Lisa

This course examines the history and practice of "point-of-view" journalism, a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of "objectivity" on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with "fake news," point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation's, from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and "New Journalism" practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network) and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino, and Roxane Gay. We will also consider the work of comedians such as Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and John Oliver, who pillory the news (and newsmakers) in order to interpret them.

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AMST 3471 – 001 – American Cinema

TR 9:30 – 10:45AM

Chong, Sylvia

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.

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AMST 3481 – 001 – US Popular Music

MW 2:00PM – 3:15PM

Miller, Karl

This course offers a fast-paced history of popular music in the United States since 1970. Instead of following a chronological time-line of a half a century, the course is organized around the sounds and stories of seven major genres: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip hop, dance music, and pop. We will pay particular attention to the shifting meanings of these genres over time, to how they change, collude, collide, and create continuity in both sound and community.

Class Attributes: Artistic, Interpretive, & Philosophical Inquiry

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AMST 3500 – 001 – Topics in American Studies: Visual Cultures of the Americas

MW 2:00PM – 3:15PM

Rizki, Cole

This course focuses on the theories, histories, and practices of visual culture with particular emphasis on photography as a contested and central site of knowledge-production. Moving across the 19th century to the present, we pay particular attention to "captive imagery" or the ways that photography—and practices of photographic interpretation, display, collecting, and exchange—has functioned as a mode of capture and, at the same time, as a powerful site for visual resistance. Throughout the course, we will examine how communities have made creative use of visual culture to cultivate alternate lifeworlds and visioning practices, to contest state violence, to forge collective and political identities, and to create counter-archives of resistance. We will primarily analyze vernacular photography—from studio portraiture to family albums, cartes de visite, identification photographs, real photograph postcards, and mugshots among other forms—drawing inspiration from these "minor forms" and their everyday sensibilities to study how our world is collectively shaped and remade anew through visual cultures.

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AMST 3500 – 002 – Topics in American Studies: Jim Crow America

TR 2:00PM – 3:15PM

Grandison, Kenrick I & Ross, Marlon B

When and how does Jim Crow begin? Has Jim Crow come to an end? If so, how was it defeated? If not, to what extent and in what ways has it lingered after the multiple Supreme Court decisions appearing to outlaw it and multiple acts of federal legislation devoted to its ostensible demise? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the early republic, how it was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has fared into the present in the face of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow in law and law enforcement, education, planning, public health, employment, housing, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have African Americans used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, disinheritance, and economic exclusion? Taking a place-specific approach to understanding the material practices and consequences of the Jim Crow regime, we'll examine in depth the overlapping dimensions of everyday life where Jim Crow has been especially prominent, including: 1) personal and collective mobility; 2) access to public facilities across the color-line; 3) the struggle over public education; 4) violent disinheritance through planning, housing, and employment; and 5) the justice (or injustice) system. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, Washington, D.C., and southside Chicago as case studies. In line with this full-sensory critical landscape approach, the course culminates in a mandatory field trip to downtown Charlottesville. In addition to graded team presentations, there are three graded individual assignments: a two-part midterm, a final exam, a field trip exercise, and a four-page field trip reflection paper.

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AMST 3500 – 003 – Topics in American Studies: US Cultures of Disability

MW 3:30 – 4:45PM

Ngo, Fiona

This class explores legal, political, representational, and resistive modes of disability, debility, and body politics. We will consider laws governing public space, the effects of war on thinking about bodies and capacity, popular representations of disability, and theoretical thinking about disability as a category. The course is taught intersectionally, meaning we will deal with issues of race, gender, sexuality, labor, and national identity.

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AMST 3559 – 001 – New Course in American Studies: The Simpsons and Amer. Life

MW 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Hamilton, Jack

This is an interdisciplinary course that explores the peak era and the enduring influence of the animated series The Simpsons on American life and culture. We will primarily focus on the show's first ten seasons, when it became first a groundbreaking, unexpected hit, then a cultural institution that helped define the American 1990s. We will also examine the show's legacy from those years up until the present day, and the ways that its first decade continues to impact American comedy and popular culture.

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AMST 3559 – 002 – New Course in American Studies: The Stakes of Play: Sports, Power, and Politics in the United States

TR 11:00AM – 12:15PM

Coyoca, Wilfred David

This course examines US sports as a form of popular culture and a site where meanings about power, identity, and belonging are produced, circulated, and contested. Through close analysis of sporting events, media, and athlete activism, students explore how nationalist narratives are constructed through and against ideas of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality — and how sports operate simultaneously as a site of entertainment, commodity, and community.

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AMST 3880 – 001 – Literature of the South

TR 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Greeson, Jennifer

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AMST 5559 – 001 – New Course: New Directions in American Studies

W 3:30PM – 6:00PM

Rizki, Cole

A graduate-level course focusing on contemporary topics in American Studies.

Distinguished Majors Course

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AMST 4999 – 001 – DMP Thesis Seminar

R 04:00PM – 06:30PM

Coyoca, Wilfred David

Prerequisites: admission to DMP.