American Studies (AMS)

The course introduces students to current theories in American Studies research and public practice. The course focuses on key concepts, theories, objects of analysis, and current research in American Studies.

Offered Fall

This course examines true crime narrative in American by exploring the American Fascination with violent crime and analyzes how race, gender, class and sexuality are meditated in these narratives. By doing so, it allows us to examine the complex role of criminally in defining American culture. A-C/NC grading.

Offered Fall, Spring

This interdisciplinary course on comics and graphic novels examines how comics.graphic novels combine the visual and the textual with movements and discusses the ways this makes it distincts from other literacy and visual forms.

Offered Fall, Spring

This course looks at the history, literature, adn film of the American West and, by analyzing these sources, attempts to distinguish between the mythic West and some version of a western " reality". In response to the New Western HIstory, we first examine the core question of contemporary western history studies: is the west a process, as Frederick Jackson Turner contends, or a place? We then consider the established icons of western literature and film and move to revised this limited vista by examining the presence and efforts of woman, people of color and others marginalized by the dominants culture's narrow focus. This allows us to determine the myth and the reality of the American West. A-C/NC grading.

Offered All terms

Prerequisite(s): Students must complete Areas 1 & 2 before enrolling in upper division GE courses. The long 1980's as historical and cultural watershed, examining such themes such is deregulation, rise of new technology, hip hop, civil rights, MTV, Japanese American redness, the AIDS crisis, rise of conservatism, growing social inequity, the end of the Cold War, and cultural products such as music, film, and art; and the era's conflicted legacies. A-C/NC grading.

Offered Fall, Spring

Examines a variety of ways of being religious in the North American context, asking such questions as what role religion played in the shaping of our diverse culture, and how geography, politics, and culture transformed the beliefs of American people. A-C/NC grading.

Offered As needed

This course exploration the Americanization of online space and the digitization of United States politics and society by examining how culture and community are created and fostered online. We will consider different types of internet communities,and the role that digital writing and artwork plays in constructing these types of spaces.

Offered As needed