Spring 2022

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM | MON 110

Kirt Von Daacke & Ashley Schmidt

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.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM | WIL 238

Carmen Lamas

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.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM | CAB 309

Lisa Goff

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.

Cross listed with ENGL 2910-001

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM | SHN 109

Guy Aiken

Has nonviolence worked in America? How did African Americans come to embrace nonviolence in their quest for justice during the civil rights movement? Is nonviolence entirely peaceful, or does it necessarily rely on some sort of force? What are the diverse religious roots of American nonviolence? How does nonviolence in America differ from nonviolence in other contexts? We will pursue these questions (and more) by tracing the development of overtly political nonviolence in the United States, culminating in the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.

We will start by finding the roots of modern American nonviolence in the New Testament and in the abolition and anti-slavery movements of the Civil War Era. We will see women before, during, and after World War I make the first major trial of nonviolence in the United States in their successful campaign for the right to vote. With the goal of understanding how Christianity and Hinduism acted on each other to shape American nonviolence, we will see how Jesus (and Thoreau) influenced Gandhi, who in turn was to inspire and inform the Christian nonviolence of King and other civil rights leaders. After watching it sink to its nadir during World War II, we will watch (literally, on film, as well as figuratively, in print) nonviolence again rise to national and international prominence after 1955, when African Americans in the South used it to help wrest their civil and political rights from the grip of white supremacy and segregation. We will close with a look at nonviolence “today” (including recent history).

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM | MRY 113

Matthew Frierdich

This course considers how activists and scholars construct memory as essential to politics, either as a medium for public healing, re-activating identities, or demanding structural change. By reflecting on memory in social movements, public memorialization and art, and institution-building, the class will explore how invocations of the past offer new perspectives on political struggles for freedom and equality

MW 02:00PM-02:50PM | MRY 209

Matthew Hedstrom

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.

Cross listed with RELG 2660-100

MW 10:00AM-10:50AM | MON 134

Sylvia Chong

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.

Cross listed with ENGL 3740-100 and EAST 5180-001

T 03:30PM-06:00PM | BRN 235

Lisa Goff

This course investigates how the history of slavery and Reconstruction in central Virginia are presented to the public at historic sites, museums, archives, and on digital platforms. In the fall semester, we collaborated with our community partner, One Shared Story, to critique historic sites of enslavement in the Charlottesville area and to produce digital “story maps” that filled in some of the gaps in the public history of slavery in Fluvanna County, Virginia—contributing, in some small way, to a more just and comprehensive public history. This spring we will continue our study of white supremacy by focusing on Reconstruction. In addition to the brutal realities of that historical period we will also focus on three areas of Black achievement and empowerment during that era: politics, religion, and media. We will continue our work with One Shared Story, contributing specifically to two of their initiatives: georeferencing and documenting African American cemeteries at Black churches in central Virginia; and assisting community members conducting genealogical research. This is designed as a year-long course, but you are welcome to join us in the spring as long as you're willing to do a little catching up re: using Ancestry.com, and StoryMaps. You can see the work students have done in previous classes here: https://hoph-2020-f-oss.hub.arcgis.com/.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM | Online Synchronous

Maurice Adkins

The seminar will introduce the history of education for Black Americans and unpack various events and perspectives in the community to show not only how education influenced their lives, but how they used their institutions as workshops for economic, political and social equity.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM | CAB 594

Christina Proenza-Coles

TR 03:30PM-04:20PM | CLK 107

Jack Hamilton

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.

Cross listed with MDST 3740-001

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

001 - MW 02:00PM-03:15PM | CAB 415
Penny Von Eschen

002 - TR 09:30AM-10:45AM | BRN 235
David Singerman

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM | CAB 415

Kasey Jernigan

R 05:00PM-07:30PM | CAB 036

Ian Grandison

Cross listed with ENGL 4580-001

T 05:00PM-07:30PM | CAB 036

Marlon Ross

Cross listed with ENGL 4570-001

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM | CAB 395

Janet Kong-Chow

This research seminar explores the significance of American race and ethnicity within environmental humanities, crisis, and activism.  Beginning in the mid-20th century, we will consider the emergence of contemporary U.S. environmentalism, and relationships between space, landscape, built environments, and identity formation, belonging, as well as public health, legislation, and sustainability.

Cross listed with ENGL 4570

R 04:00PM-06:30PM | BRN 235

David Coyoca

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.

T 03:30PM-06:00PM | CAB 066

Sandhya Shukla

This course explores the theory and practice of American cultural studies, a set of intellectual formations that contemplates the contours of interdisciplinarity.  It conceives of culture in the broadest way, capturing a more anthropological understanding of the quotidian (rituals, customs, conversations, worldviews), as well as more aesthetic projects of the creative imagination (literature, film, music).  Culture’s deep stratification by class, race, gender and sexuality is a special focus as we consider seemingly coherent expressions of the United States. 

Any number of materials could be considered under the expansive rubric of American cultural studies, but this particular inquiry begins in the twentieth century to develop a conversation about how the nation has been imagined as bounded within but also overlapping with global modernity.  Here we necessarily cast “America” as provisional, contingent, and potentially opening of continental and hemispheric horizons.  We will pay attention to how academic fields (Americanist and other) have formed in relation to questions about spatiality, politics, language, canons, social movements, and more.  Above all this class seeks to inspire an interpretive practice that can be mobilized for a range of inter/disciplinary projects across the humanities and social sciences.  If we consider the meaning of a text to be derived from relationships among production, consumption and circulation, we must closely read historical, social, aesthetic and formalistic aspects together.  In so doing, we hope to develop new ways to organize knowledge and get closer to how people live in and express the world. 

Readings for the class will range from primary works by W.E.B. DuBois, James Agee and Walker Evans, Jose Martí, and Randolph Bourne, to critical-theoretical texts by Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, Kathleen Stewart, Lisa Lowe, George Lipsitz and others.  Students will be required to workshop and complete a 15-20 page paper.

Cross listed with ENGL 8570-003

M 03:30PM-06:00PM | BRN 334

Grace Hale & Jennifer Greeson

Cross listed with ENGL 8570-001