American Studies Courses - Fall 2008
Electives
Seminars
Approved Electives
AMS101: Introduction to American Studies
AMS120: History of Film Silent Era (Satisfies Fine Arts Core Req)
AMS220: Catholic Imagination of 4 American Filmmakers (Satisfies Fine Arts Core Req)
AMS226: Music in the US (Satisfies Fine Arts Core Req)
AMS301: Dev of North American Architecture (Satisfies Fine Arts Core Req)
AMS318: Globalization and Social Justice
AMS321: Social Change
AMS331: American Philosophy (Satisfies PHL core req)
BLS/SOC305: Race and Ethnic Relations
BLS/SWK: Ethnicity/Social Diversity in America
BLS/HIS346: African-American History to 1877
ENG320: Colonial and Federal Writing
ENG356: American Lit, 1865-1914
ENG364: Modern American Fiction
ENG365: 20th Century Black American Literature
ENG367: Modern British and American Poetry
EMG481: Seminar: New York Avant Garde
ENG481: Seminar: Whitman and Dickinson
HIS301: Vietnam
HIS317: Gilded Age: 1877-1897
HIS438: Early Constitutional History
PSC201: American Government & Politics
PSC311: American Constitutional Law (Prereq PSC201)
PSP301: Community Service in American Culture (Prereq PSP101)
THL341: American Religious Experience (Satisfies Group II THL core)
PSP301: Community Service in American Culture
TDF120: History of Film: The Silent Era (Satisfies Fine Arts requirement for Core)
THL342: American Religious Experience (Satisfies THLII Core requirement)
Seminars
Violence/Non-Violence in American Culture (K. Morton)
Nonviolence, Gandhi argued, "is an experiment with truth." While it is often portrayed as utopian, idealistic, radical or ridiculous, nonviolence has a continuing and influential presence in the history of the United States , from efforts to end slavery through labor agitation to civil rights and several antiwar efforts. This course will explore violence in American culture as it is brought into sharp relief by the ideas, efforts and history of nonviolent "experiments." We will ground our exploration in relevant events, documents and artifacts and will try to answer (with little hope of consensus) two central questions: What are violence and nonviolence? Is the culture of the United States violent?
Seminar: Hurricane Katrina (E. Hirsch)
Hurricane Katrina which hit the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines on August 29, 2005, was one of the most devastating natural disasters ever to hit the United States . This course will focus on the social and political aspects of the hurricane, particularly on its effect on the city of New Orleans
Seminar: American Between the Wars 1919-1941 (R. McCarthy)
This seminar will look at American during the turbulent, anxious, and exciting period. Students will examine America in the “Roaring Twenties,” in all its business, political, and cultural aspects. The collapse of the capitalist system in the Great Depression and the efforts of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt to alleviate its effects will be examined
Seminar: American Autobiographies (J. Alexander, OP)
Students will consider American history be reading the autobiographies of the famous and not-so-famous from pre-colonial times 2000.
Seminar: Terrorism in America (Brophy-Baermann)
This course will survey terrorism and the American experience: the actors, the actions, the reactions and the cultural relevance. This survey will look at terrorism from the typical political perspective, but we will also study terrorism through the lenses of economics, sociology, history, literature, philosophy, psychology, gender, ethnic studies and media studies. The underlying theme of the course is this: how do the rhetorical and symbolic elements of terrorism come to take on more meaning than the violence itself?
Seminar: Ethnicity and American Fiction (M. Reid)
To consider one’s own identity is to realize that identity—no matter how the term is conceived—is never pure or single, but always made up of overlapping, often competing claims made by such varied influences as social roles, family histories, individual experiences, and ethnic ties. In turn, each of these influences is multi-faceted, and to understand the “ethnicity” of one’s self or another is far more complicated than it seems. So, this course starts from the premise that, while we are each unique individuals, there are large categorical claims made on our identities at all times; some of these we wish to resist, and others we embrace. This course will examine the case of modern America as a particularly potent context for the production of a literature and culture that gains its strength from the diversity of voices within it—a diversity made up of the perspectives and experiences of individuals as well as of the multiple groups to which each of us belongs. We will combine readings in ethnic theory with ethnic American literature, and as we do so, we will work to understand what ethnicity means, how its meanings have evolved over the last century. The literary readings assigned for the course will be primarily prose fiction (with some non-fiction prose) and will be drawn from the works of African American, Native American, and immigrant American writers.