Catalog of Courses for American Studies
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.
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.
New Course in the subject of 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.
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.
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.
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.
This course examines foodways (the ideas, practices, and material realities surrounding food) through the interdisciplinary lens of American Studies. Focusing on borderlands as sites of cultural exchange, conflict, and creativity, we will explore how food shapes and is shaped by histories of migration, empire, race, class, gender, and labor.
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.
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.
Topics vary according to instructor. The goal of the course is to introduce students to interdisciplinary work in American Studies by juxtaposing works across disciplinary boundaries and from different methodological perspectives.
New Course in subject of American Studies.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
Hands-On Public History is designed as a year-long course. This course continues the curriculum of AMST 3221.
This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright's Native Son. Then we examine other narratives including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This class explores the political connections between race, gender, and music. The course considers questions of representation, the practice and politics of listening, the political and economic modes of production, and racial formation. In order to explore these topics, this version of the course is broken into three thematic sections: Sound, Score, and Structure. The course is taught intersectionally, meaning we will deal with issues of race, gender, sexuality, labor, and national identity.
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.
In the 1930s, many people employed in the German film industry whose lives were threatened by Nazism took refuge in Hollywood. This course examines the contributions exiled directors, writers, actors, and others made in genres ranging from comedy and melodrama to film noir. In addition to indicting fascism and reflecting on the trauma of forced migration these films often turned a critical eye on the U.S..
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.
Topics vary according to instructor.
New Course in the subject of American Studies
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.
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.
Visual Cultures of the Americas examines photography as a contested site of knowledge, power, and resistance from the 19th century to the present. Through UVA's special collections and Fralin Museum collections alongside other materials, the course explores how photography has enabled capture and state violence while also equipping communities to forge identities, create counter-archives, resist oppression, and envision alternative worlds.
Students will learn to use digital mapping and narratives as tools of reparative history. The class will partner with community organizations documenting Black history in Virginia. Students will do research in historical archives and public records; interview community members; and participate in field work. Readings will address ethical aspects of doing community history and explore approaches to the history of slavery and Reconstruction.
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.
Iconic American sites such as Monticello, Walden Pond, and our network of national parks have inspired generations of Americans. But displacement is just as much a part of our national identity. In this class we will analyze fiction, journalism, film, paintings, photographs and other elements of visual culture that document the stories of Indigenous dispossession, housing discrimination, Japanese internment, redlining, gentrification, and homelessness.
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.
This advanced, interdisciplinary seminar considers how works of fiction enhance our understanding of the terms of democratic life. The theme of the seminar is the life and afterlife of slavery in American political experience. Our core texts will be Moby Dick, Invisible Man, and Beloved. Additionally, we will read related work by writers from the antebellum, Jim Crow, and post-civil rights eras.
Refugee Aesthetics is a survey course that examines histories of racialization, war, forced migration, nation-state formation, humanitarian aid, and resettlement alongside questions of the politics of aesthetics, ethics of representation, and social justice. Students will explore how refugee aesthetics is broadly defined, performed, and contested through maps, graphic novels, films, and various mixed media.
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.
Politics of Breath explores the embodied impacts of histories of colonialism, imperialism, war, genocide, racism, and climate change. From the respiratory pandemic of COVID-19 to the Black Lives Matter movement to AI data centers we will explore environmental injustice, air pollution, and the art of living in these times. Throughout the course, students will cultivate a relationship to individual and collective breath as an essential element of life and practice of worldmaking.
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.
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.
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.
This seminar is intended to focus study, research, and discussion on a single period, topic, or issue, such as the Great Awakening, the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, or the 1960s. Topics vary.
New Course in the subject of American Studies.
In this course, we will study the intersection of social scientific and humanistic scholarship, showing how the prison deploys and produces gender and its imbrications with race, class, and sexuality as a tool of control, punishment, and dehumanization. Our materials will highlight the experiences of women as we consider the carceral state that is fundamentally organized by gendered assumptions that shape the experiences of all social groups.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Various topics offered in American Studies at the graduate level
New Course in the subject of American Studies.
Students will hone their digital mapping and digital narrative skills and learn how to use them as tools of reparative history. The class will partner with community organizations documenting Black history. Students will do research in archives and public records; interview community members; and participate in fieldwork. In addition, students will do a focused set of readings by members of the Black Geographers movement.
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.
Topics vary from year to year
A single semester of independent study under faculty supervision for students doing intensive research on a subject not covered in the usual courses. Requires approval by a faculty member who has agreed to supervise a guided course of reading and substantial written exercise, a detailed outline of the research project, and authorization by the Director of the AMST program.