| AMST 101-01 |
Disorderly Women
Instructor: Anna Neumann
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-04.
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09:00 AM-10:15 AM, TR
DENNY 212 |
| AMST 101-02 |
Gender, Sport, and American Society
Instructor: Katie Schweighofer
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 202-01. From children tossing a ball in the backyard, to middle-aged weekend warriors on tennis and basketball courts, to athletes in their prime on quests for Olympic gold, sports affect our understandings of our bodies, relationships, and larger social groups. Gender, Sport, and American Society involves the applications of the interdisciplinary study of gender - the social creation and cultural representation of femininity and masculinity - to the field of sport cultures. Class readings and discussions will consider how sports institutions and cultures operate as interlocking systems of power shaping the shifting significance of bodies, differences, opportunity, and marginalization in the US, particularly along the lines of gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality. No WGSS or AMST experience necessary.
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10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 104 |
| AMST 101-03 |
United States Borderlands
Instructor: Elena Perez-Zetune
Course Description:
Borders and borderlands have long played a pivotal role in defining identity in the United States through conflict, negotiation, and accommodation. The late Gloria Anzalda declared borderlands as a "vague and undetermined place" created because of an "unnatural boundary." We will interrogate conceptualizations and formations of borderlands in three spaces (U.S.-Canadian, U.S.-Mexican, and Native American borderlands) and their transition into borders. Through a range of materials and perspectives, the course will also assess how these spaces inform United States society, culture and politics. Lastly, students will grapple with multiple meanings and locations of borderlands in contemporary society and within identity formation.
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11:30 AM-12:20 PM, MWF
DENNY 212 |
| AMST 101-04 |
Weird
Instructor: Darren Lone Fight
Course Description:
Structures of Strangeness in American Culture - This course investigates how "the weird" shapes American culture, from frontier tales of strange encounters to contemporary political discourse. What makes something "weird" in American society, who gets to decide, and how has "weirdness" been used both to define and challenge the boundaries of American identity and belonging? Drawing on scholars like Mark Fisher and Grace Dillon, we'll explore different ways of understanding strangeness in the American context-from UFO sightings over suburban landscapes to the othering of immigrant cultures. We'll examine how constructions of the weird operate across American cultural and political landscapes, from mainstream media to collaborative digital storytelling platforms like the SCP Foundation. Through analysis of American conspiracy theories, urban legends, experimental media, and other cultural forms, we'll investigate national anxieties about difference, deviance, and the unknown. The course emphasizes how marginalized communities, especially Indigenous cosmologies and ontologies, have historically been categorized as "weird" while simultaneously offering powerful alternative ways of understanding reality and experience. Through engagement with cultural texts ranging from weird fiction and film to video games and digital communities, students will develop tools for analyzing how the weird operates as both a tool of exclusion and a method of reimagining American identity and experience. Students will analyze how "weird" functions in contemporary American discourse, examine strange phenomena in popular culture, and create their own weird encounter narratives that thoughtfully engage our course concepts. Throughout, we'll consider how examining the weird can help us understand and reimagine American cultural boundaries and possibilities.
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10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 211 |
| AMST 200-01 |
Black Horror
Instructor: Nevil Jackson
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 210-02. Horror films disturb our sense of peace. They terrify, shock, and alarm, provoking an unease that haunts the peripheries of our daily lives. Essentially, they tell us what, and whom, to fear. They are expressions of our deepest anxieties, and when examined critically, horror films can reveal societal and political concerns about race, gender, and class. So what happens when we look at the genre through the lens of Blackness in America?
This course examines the history of Black representation in American horror films from the 1900s to the present. From D.W. Griffiths 1915 film Birth of a Nation to Ryan Cooglers 2025 Sinners, well explore the trajectory of the horror genre, how it has reflected Americas anxieties, its role in shaping perceptions of Blackness, and how Black horror films have evolved from representations of oppressive ideology to expressions of Black existential thought.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
DENNY 212 |
| AMST 200-02 |
Latinx Studies
Instructor: Elena Perez-Zetune
Course Description:
Cross-listed with LALC 123-01. Who are Latinxs? At nearly 20% of the population (and growing), Latinxs comprise the largest minority group in the United States. Despite this large number, however, U.S. popular discourse about Latinxs continues to be plagued by assumptions, stereotypes, and misunderstandings. For instance, not all Latinxs speak Spanish, not all Latinxs are immigrants, and not all Latinxs like or would even use the term "Latinx." Through an interdisciplinary approach to Latinx histories, cultures, and politics, this course introduces students to the breadth and diversity of Latinx experiences in the United States as well as to Latinx Studies as a site of scholarly inquiry. While Latinx presence in the United States is a story of im/migration, it is also a story of overlapping histories of colonization, U.S. imperial expansion, and U.S. intervention into Latin America. Major topics in this course may include the politics of labeling; race, racialization, and ethnicity; borders and borderlands, including recent events at the U.S.-Mexico border; cultural change, assimilation, and resilience; gender and sexuality; and popular culture and representation. In addition to helping us better understand the experiences of Latinxs in the United States, this course asks how Latinx experiences and Latinx Studies can help us better understand America.
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09:30 AM-10:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 212 |
| AMST 201-01 |
Introduction to American Studies
Instructor: Anna Neumann
Course Description:
Introduces students to basic theories and methods used for the interdisciplinary analysis of United States and hemispheric cultural materials and to the multiplicity of texts used for cultural analysis (mass media, music, film, fiction and memoir, sports, advertising, and popular rituals and practices). Particular attention is paid to the interplay between systems of representation and social, political, and economic institutions, and to the production, dissemination, and reception of cultural materials. Students will explore the shaping power of culture as well as the possibilities of human agency.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 112 |
| AMST 202-01 |
Workshop in Cultural Analysis
Instructor: Amy Farrell
Course Description:
This intensive writing workshop focuses on theoretical approaches to the interpretation of social and cultural materials. The course provides an early exposure to theories and methods that will be returned to in upper level departmental courses. Intended to develop independent skills in analysis of primary texts and documents.Prerequisite: Any AMST course or permission of instructor.
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
DENNY 212 |
| AMST 303-01 |
Indigenous Theory: Decolonization, Sovereignty, and Survivance
Instructor: Darren Lone Fight
Course Description:
This advanced seminar explores Indigenous theoretical frameworks that challenge and transcend settler-colonial paradigms of knowledge, power, and being. Moving beyond simplified understandings of decolonization as metaphor, we examine how Indigenous intellectuals and communities conceptualize and enact sovereignty across multiple registers: political, cultural, epistemological, and temporal. The course centers pivotal theoretical interventions from Indigenous scholars while emphasizing their active deployment in contemporary contexts. We begin with Eve Tuck (Unangax^) and K. Wayne Yang's critique of decolonization-as-metaphor before exploring Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (Mori: Ngti Awa and Ngti Porou) foundational work on Indigenous methodologies. Vine Deloria Jr.'s (Lakota) incisive analysis of Western thought and Gerald Vizenor's (White Earn Anishinaabe) concept of survivance provide theoretical frameworks for understanding how Indigenous knowledge systems operate beyond the constraints of settler temporalities and categories. Through engagement with LeAnne Howe's (Choctaw) theory of tribalography, we examine how Indigenous narrative traditions serve as technologies of regeneration and futurity rather than mere representations of the past. The course brings these theoretical frameworks into conversation with tribal legal traditions and Indigenous environmental thought, exploring how sovereignty manifests in governance structures and relationships with land. Special attention is paid to how these theoretical frameworks illuminate contemporary challenges around climate change, resource extraction, and competing claims to authority and knowledge. Drawing from American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies methodologies, students will develop sophisticated analytical and theoretical tools for examining how Indigenous critical approaches reframe questions of power, knowledge, representation, and possibility. Through intensive reading, discussion, and research, we'll explore how Indigenous theory offers not just critique but generative possibilities for reimagining relationships between peoples, systems, and worlds.
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12:30 PM-01:20 PM, MWF
DENNY 110 |
| AMST 401-01 |
Research and Methods in American Studies
Instructor: Darren Lone Fight
Course Description:
This integrative seminar focuses on the theory and methods of cultural analysis and interdisciplinary study. Students examine the origins, history, and current state of American studies, discuss relevant questions, and, in research projects, apply techniques of interdisciplinary study to a topic of their choosing.
Prerequisite: 303, Senior American studies major, or permission of the instructor.
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01:30 PM-04:30 PM, W
DENNY 212 |