An interdisciplinary introduction to the historical exploration of American culture.

Examine Jewish American literature in its cultural contexts with an emphasis on skills and methods. Explore texts, drawn from a variety of genres and periods, that indicate the range of Jewish American experiences and how those experiences are influenced by issues such as citizenship, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

Explore the formation of political borders in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, their contestation, and the multiple meanings attached to them.

Discuss utilizing material culture as a method of analysis to highlight histories of oppression, struggles towards liberation, and the politics of everyday Latinx life in the U.S..

Writing, reading, and discussion on an American studies topic, with emphasis on the evaluation of information, analytical reading, and critical writing.

Examine the relationship between race and the sequential aesthetics of comic books and comic strips. Explore comics strips, underground comics, and superhero comics from the colonial period to the present day.

Interdisciplinary exploration of American cultural and intellectual life.

Introduces the interdisciplinary study of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the United States. Explores key concepts, including immigration history, identity and community formation, cultural representation, and the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Analyzes the historical and contemporary significance of issues of race" and "mixing" in a North American context. Subjects include the situation of "mixed race" people throughout United States history; historical policies that have shaped racial formation in the United States; comparative conceptions of "mixed" people transnationally; and racial, ethnic, and cultural identity.

Introduction to family systems in the United States in a post-WWII framework with a central focus on Asian Americans. Students will investigate how gender, race, and ethnicity intersect and inform our understanding of the institution of the family.

Explores instances of religious dominance and religious diversity in United States history. Moving from the pre-colonial period to the present, it examines the changing circumstances of several religious communities, including American Indians and Puritans, Protestant evangelicals, Mormons, Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.

Focuses on over a century of Yiddish-based contributions to American literature, music, and film, including works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Michael Chabon, Woody Allen, and the Marx Brothers.

A comparison of films from various nations about major twentieth century wars to the historical facts of the conflicts as practicums in critical comparative analysis of histories as representations.

Examines the social importance of race and ethnicity both in America and around the world.

Studies Native American literature from different regions and cultures and considers this literary tradition in tribal national and United States national contexts.

Explore Latina/o media and popular culture from 1950 to the present.

Examine the history of Native American societies in North America from the earliest records to the present.

Examines building in American society from the late 1860s to 1980.

Examine the history of Jews in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. Explore the formation of a distinct American Judaism and the involvement of Jews in American cultural and political affairs.

Explore how Latinx communities (traditionally figured as on the wrong side of the "digital divide") have embraced, mobilized, and sometimes usurped emerging digital tools and spaces to forge community and create new forms of culture, memory, and activism.

This course is used to record credit the student earns while enrolled at another institution in a program administered by the University's Study Abroad Office. Credit is recorded as assigned by the study abroad adviser in the Department of American Studies. University credit is awarded for work in an exchange program; it may be counted as coursework taken in residence. Transfer credit is awarded for work in an affiliated studies program.

Explore the cultural history of Jews in the United States, Latin America, and Canada through a representative sample of short literary texts, film clips, and musical recordings.

A study of America through its geography, language, government, or cultures.

Examines women's participation in well-known and lesser-known social movements during the twentieth century.

Introduction to the complex and controversial history of the wars fought in Vietnam from 1941 to the 1980s.

Explores the critical, theoretical and practical analysis of race and new media.

Overview of theories in the sociology of social control, with a focus on risk, power, ethics, and surveillance. Examines historical transformations in social control and the distributions of power in the United States and global contexts, with attention to race, gender, and class. Subjects include: the transatlantic slave trade; prisons and punishment; the gaze, voyeurism, and reality television watching; the Internet; travel and state borders; privacy; and biometrics and the body.

Characteristics of crowds, publics, and social movements; their role in social organization and social change.

Analysis of the roots of urban unrest, exploring a range of origins: joblessness, state violence, white flight, backlash against civil rights gains, new immigration, and interracial strife. Beyond race and class, subjects include exploring unrest as a mode of pushing the normative boundaries of gender and sexuality in public space. Course material will draw from film, literature, history, geography, and anthropology.

Examines United States history in the post-World War II era, including how civil rights and other racial issues helped shape the politics, popular culture, and social life of this period.

Review of West African origins; New World settlement patterns, social life, and culture; discussion of the Atlantic slave trade, the development of capitalism and plantation slavery, and the origins of racism.

Survey of the history of African Americans in the United States from 1860 to the present: Emancipation, Reconstruction politics, migration and urbanization, and the evolution of African American culture; kinds of sources and methods valuable for analyzing African American life and culture.

Studies the history of Native Americans in Texas using concepts and evidence from anthropology, history, archaeology, historical geography, and Native American studies.

Survey research tools and methods used to study the history of Hollywood film industries and the roles that films and film professionals play; based on films and industry careers connected to Central Europe.

Examines the speeches and writings by major theorists and critics of the prophetic tradition of black political thought.

Examine the migration of established European intellectuals into the US, due to the Second World War. Explore how they worked against their persecutors for their own cultural heritage and to influence US intellectual life. Investigate the ethical dilemmas faced in transplanting their lives and projects into new contexts.

Explore innovative European ideas that reshaped United States history and society: Freud and settlement houses, models for education (from Switzerland to Dewey at the University of Chicago), and the labor movement (Marx to Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones)

Examine the role that debt has played in the formation of colonial and neocolonial practices in the Caribbean region. Take a broad approach to the concept of debt in order to explore the financial and monetary dynamics of debt, but also the political and cultural implications of debt. Focus in particular on debt as justification in the furtherance of colonialism throughout the Caribbean. Engage in a historical examination of the United States' colonial projects and military interventions in the region throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries.

Examine the role that narratives of the past play in politics and policies in both Germany and the United States, by engaging with key theoretical and empirical debates. Focus on the role of memory in German and US immigration politics.

Explore the public construction and display of traditional American folk culture by studying popular folklife-oriented tourist sites.

Examine the historical development of United States law and its relationship to Asian Americans, and of Asian American jurisprudence as an independent field of legal scholarship.

Explore the diverse Native cultures of the Southwest, focusing on the philosophical underpinnings and the frameworks of meaning and moral responsibility of indigenous peoples of the American Southwest.

Survey of representations of religious beliefs, practices, persons, and institutions in popular film. Examination of film as a vehicle to reflect how a shared religious imagination shaped the way Americans understand themselves.

Consider the ways the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first century are being remembered in Germany and the United States - from poems, novels and films to monuments and the controversial debates about military conflicts that the two countries have been involved in. Utilize theories of social memory, and concepts of individual and social mourning, to analyze how war affects individual lives, how societies mourn, and how remembering war impacts national identity and politics.

Examine the evolution of the United States Constitution from the founding to the present, with a focus on the major forces and fault lines that have made the Constitution today one of the world's most difficult to amend.

Trace the origins and development of Mexican American Studies at the national, regional, and local levels. Collaborate to help preserve and recognize the significance of Mexican American Studies at the University in historical and contemporary contexts.

Study of the American use and perception of drugs, including alcohol, and how they have changed over time. Examines significant shifts in American attitudes toward individualism and social control.

Examine the influence of the Italian poet Dante on American culture from the nineteenth century to the present.

Explores the evolution of American popular culture and its relationship to national consolidation, and at times, disunion, over the last 330 years.

Explore the histories and presence of indigenous Austin.

Examines classic texts and recent and varied writings on LGBT history, focused on experiences, ideas, and conflicts that have shaped modern LGBT identities.

Traces the history of popular music in the United States and its influence on American politics, economics, and culture from the 1880s to present day.

Examine religious music in Christianity and Judaism in relation to communities in religious context of Europe and the United States.

Painting in British colonial North America and the United States prior to the Civil War.

Painting in the United States from the Civil War to the Armory Show.

Examine a wide array of American attitudes towards Russia and Russians. Using a variety of political, social, and cultural events and encounters, analyze the ways in which nationalism, imperialism, and geopolitics informed American narratives about Russia and Russians, assessments that range from enthusiasm and curiosity to condemnation and outright hostility.

Analyze the purpose and philosophy of Thomas Paine's writings in their relation to the political thought and politics of his time.

Examine the intersection of crime and capitalism in black literature, motion pictures and music of late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries.

Examination of religious developments in Native American communities from the precolonial period through the present day. Focus on the changing forms of ritual practice and the relationship between religion and community life.

Examine how Catholicism and national identity work for Catholics in the United States, with an emphasis on Catholic women and Latino/as.

An introduction to the intellectual and social sources of evangelical Protestant traditions in the United States, their varieties of belief and practice, and their role in the wider Christian community and American society.

Examines the social construction and cultural meaning of southern religion using fictional characterizations, philosophical reflections, historical accounts, and theoretical comparisons.

Examine the ways in which individuals, primarily in the United States, have regarded the Bible as relevant or irrelevant to contemporary life. Discuss contemporary controversial issues in which the Bible has played a role and how these relate to earlier controversies, such as the position of the Bible on slavery.

Historical and cross-cultural overview of the constructed concepts of magic, science, and religion through comparative examinations of cultural contexts from the Islamic world, western Europe, the Caribbean, the U.S., and Mozambique.

Explore the city of Austin, the city's importance for Latino communities, and the importance of Latinos for the city.

Explore how the history of land helps explain the society we live in today and ideas about the human-nature relationship.

The history of humanity's influence on the plants, animals, microlife, soils, water, and air of North America, and vice versa, from the arrival of the proto-Indians to the contemporary environmental crisis.

This course is used to record credit the student earns while enrolled at another institution in a program administered by the University's Study Abroad Office. Credit is recorded as assigned by the study abroad adviser in the Department of American Studies. University credit is awarded for work in an exchange program; it may be counted as coursework taken in residence. Transfer credit is awarded for work in an affiliated studies program.

A historical survey of artifacts, buildings, and urban environments, focusing on responses to machine-age civilization.

Examines the intersection of racial ideology and legal culture in the United States.

Examine stereotypes that have come to define Jewishness in American culture by focusing both on the antisemitic tropes perpetuated by non-Jewish representations of 'the Jew' in literary classics and on the archetypes employed as coping mechanisms in cultural representations created by Jews themselves. Analyze how stereotypes become enmeshed in cultural consciousness and investigate ways in which representations of ethnic, religious, and racial minorities are governed by these kinds of one-dimensional archetypes.

Investigate the histories of Native American women to reaffirm and reclaim their place and role in the histories of Native Americans, indigenous peoples, women, Chican@/xs, Greater Mexico, and the United States. Contemplate how many understandings that center colonization, settler colonialism, genocide, race, and environmentalism are essential to examining Native American women's history. Explore the stories, struggles, and ideas of community-building, sovereignty, and liberation as integral to their genders and sexualities as Native American, Indian, First Nations, indigenous, and red and brown women.

Explore the history of black policing in America and representations of black police officers in popular literature and film of late Twentieth Century America.

Explore issues related to the acquisition, stewardship, and repatriation of the art of the African Diaspora in the face of an increasingly virtual and market-driven art world.

Examine the legal, political, and philosophical intersection of blackness, whiteness, and drugs in the late twentieth century through film, music, and literature.

Explore how Hegel's philosophy contributed to the founding of the modern social sciences and led to innovations in the study of religion, psychology, education, social organizations, and social reform.

Explore the ways Africana religion practitioners disrupt and reframe dominant western discourses of gender and sexuality. Examine concepts of temporality, spirit manifestation, subjectivity, corporeality, and Africana religious epistemologies.

A brief introduction to Islam. Defines the role of Islam and views of Muslims in the early history of the United States, and introduces students to major issues concerning contemporary American Muslims.

Surveys the changing material culture of the western hemisphere from pre-Columbian times to the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Focuses on African American and Mexican American struggles for civil rights. Asian American and Native American movements will also be addressed. Using a comparative approach the student will consider the distinctiveness of each of these struggles while also viewing them in relation to each other.

Examine Latinx sexualities from a historical perspective to comprehend the social, cultural, political, and economic factors, which have shaped these experiences.

Survey of major movements from 1958 to 1985, from pop art to graffiti art and new expressionism.

Examine major social and political trends, events, and debates that have informed the works of artists living and working both at the margins of Parisian society as well as in its most celebrated salons. Interpret texts as artifacts that reflect the historical, social, and cultural circumstances of the environment that inspired their creation and reflect upon their role in the cultural symbiosis between America and France.

Examine the history of slavery in the Atlantic from 1450 to 1865.

Focus on ways Eastern Europe is depicted on American television screen. Use anthropological framework to study multiple types of television shows, including reality tv, network dramas, and miniseries. Analyze ethnic, racial, national, and gender representation and what these constructions tell us about the ways that Eastern Europe is imagined.

Explore narrative folklore from diverse traditions across the United States based Latinx diaspora. Focus on supernatural legends and the creation of the female "monster".

Examine the material relationships between religion and food, by comparing the ritual functions of food in religious traditions and the collective constructions of religious identities in traditional foodways.

Examine the history of migration within and from the Mediterranean area.

Study the histories of ethnic (and gender) studies in both higher education and K-12 institutions, and the rhetoric of attacks on, and defenses of, ethnic and gender studies through an examination of primary and secondary source materials.

Traces the development of American culture and society from the colonial era until the end of the Civil War. Major themes include racial conflict, religion, slavery, the development of democracy, and cultural reform.

Traces the development of American culture and society from the end of the Civil War to the present. Major themes include racial conflict, pluralism, religion, urban development and reform, modernism, government centralization, cultural radicalism, and the rebirth of conservatism.

A history of political, economic, diplomatic, military, social, and cultural developments in the United States between the two world wars.

Explore German immigration to the United States from the colonial era to the present. Examine the motivations for migration; settlement patterns; construction of identity through traditions and festivals; German American's economic, social, and cultural contributions to the United States; and challenges to assimilation.

Examine the literature of Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors and their artistic successors. Engage novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and even song lyrics with questions of memory and of place.

Explore and compare German and American memory cultures, analyzing the Holocaust, slavery, and colonialism. Analyze the diversity and complexity of (inter)national, local, and indigenous memory cultures while also discussing how Germany and the United States might "learn from each other.

Examine the history of Black women and mass incarceration in America. Explore how race, class, and gender have historically influenced the production of crime and unfair criminal justice policies. Investigate why mass incarceration matters, what its historical legacy is, and how it impacts Black women today.

Explore how slavery has evolved in the United States since the end of the Civil War.

Interdisciplinary seminar on themes in American life.

Examines the social, geographical, and cultural evolution of the United States from a rural and small-town society to an urban and suburban nation. Subjects may include the segregation of public and private space; the formation of urban subcultures organized by gender, work, race, religion, and sexuality; social and spatial divisions between rich and poor and native-born and immigrant; and the increasing importance of cultural capital" in reshaping urban politics and in conflicts over revitalization and gentrification.

Postmodernity considered as a means of understanding major cultural transformations since 1945 in areas such as architecture, art, criticism, film, journalism, literature, music, philosophy, photography, and political thought.

Examines writers such as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs during the immediate post-World War II era. Considers their historical origins, their representations of society and culture, and their influence from the 1960s through the 1980s on writers and artists in a variety of fields.

Uses childhood as a focus for studying the cultural and political climate of the post-World War II era.

Examines changes in American childhood using children's literature that covers several different time periods.

Various social and cultural movements of the 1960s, including civil rights, the New Left, black power and other ethnic nationalisms, the peace movement, the black arts movement, guerrilla theater, psychedelic arts and the counterculture, women's liberation, gay liberation, the environmental movement, and the conservative movement.

Explores how cultural memory is produced in its various forms, from memorials, public art, and commodities to popular culture, rituals, and museums, and how public remembering is inevitably anchored in specific geographic places.

Studies diverse American food cultures from a humanities perspective, exploring connections between global, national, and local communities. Uses scholarship in the field of food studies as well as cookbooks, novels, poetry, photographs, songs, documentaries, and oral histories to investigate the past and present of American food communities.

Study of the connections between nature and gender in American national narratives. Explores how Americans of differing classes, races, genders, sexual orientations, and ages have shaped and experienced changing ideas of America, wilderness, domestication, and society over time and in different regions of the country.

Explores the role of animals in American history, culture, and society.

Traces traditions of women's radical activism and reform beginning with the Enlightenment and the American Revolution and continuing to the present, with concentration on the twentieth century.

Uses nonfictional and fictional narrative accounts of slavery in the United States to examine the political, social, cultural, economic, and psychological aspects of the institution of slavery at different historical moments. Sources may include authors such as Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edward P. Jones; graphic novels; conceptual art; court records; and bills of sale.

Charts a history of Atlantic slavery by focusing on primary sources detailing crucial events and contexts such as the Zong Massacre, the Haitian Revolution, and Dred Scott vs. Sandford, among others. Considers how historians, memoirists, fiction writers, visual and performance artists and filmmakers have come to terms with that history and its implications.

Examines natural and human-made disasters as key turning points in American history. Engages with the politics of disasters, analyzing environmental contexts, grassroots activism, legislative policies, and approaches toward commemoration.

Explores the ways in which foreign experiences formed and re-formed individuals' perspectives on the United States, the nature of their social critiques of the U.S., and Americans' experiences of other nations.

Interdisciplinary investigation of artists in American society and of the intersection of art and politics.

Examines the social positioning and history of Latinas/os in the United States. Analyzes the histories of Latinas/os who have gone against mainstream expectations, or who have challenged or critiqued the status quo in provocative and unexpected ways.

Investigation of multiple, fluid, and diverse southern cultures through topics such as NASCAR, biscuits and cornbread, mega-churches, beauty pageants, jazz, country music, southern hip hop, migrant farm cultures, matzo ball soup with collards, the Trail of Tears, Gullah, Tara, Graceland, and more. Includes discussion of stereotypes and the individual truths about women, men, and southern in the context of this discussion.

Examines the ways in which cultural memory has shaped, and continues to shape, urban life in Vienna, Austria.

Exploration of black social and political thinkers, writers, and reformers, and how their works influence the legacies of slavery, empire, and patriarchy within the United States.

Examines the novels, plays, and critical essays of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison as works of democratic political theorizing and political engagement.

Provides an in-depth understanding of the social, economic, and spatial transformations of the United States/Mexico borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The evolution of the culture and language of German immigrants to Texas from the 1840s through the present and how they have influenced other ethnic groups in Texas.

Examines the ways that Americans have created and maintained hierarchies of power by casting certain people and sexual behaviors as unnatural and immoral since the turn of the twentieth century.

Examines representations of sexual and gender non-conformity in popular culture since the mid-twentieth century in the United States.

Charts the historical development of various struggles for sexual and reproductive justice in the United States since the nineteenth century.

Examines individual songs as a means to understand larger trends in U.S. cultural history (including various Civil Rights movements, de-industrialization and economic dislocation, cultural polarization, anti-war movements and the backlash, etc.) with an emphasis on rock, pop, punk, rap, disco, and country music in the U.S. since 1945. Explores popular song through the lens of cultural studies, sociology, and history.

Examines how the context of the Cold War influenced American culture and politics, particularly with regard to race, gender, and sexuality. Focuses on the first two decades after the end of World War II.

Examines urban slavery in the Americas.

Analyze the categories of "wealth" and "poverty." Investigate both how wealth has historically been created, and also how wealth and poverty have been depicted in American history.

Engage with the history of the global city at various levels, using text from disciplines including history, geography, anthropology, and sociology, as well as primary sources, images, readings, and films. Define the global city in the past and present and explore questions of race, class, gender, the politics of space, the culture of empire, and the changing shape of U.S. capitalism.

Explore the intersecting histories of capitalism and energy in the U.S. in the twentieth century. Examine scholarly secondary literature as well as primary documents, literature, film, and photographs.

Investigate what shapes data and bodies take in digital environments. Ask how computing cultures and networks have been shaped by data and bodies.

Investigate the history of Tejanas to reaffirm and reclaim their place and role in the histories of Native Americans, women, Chican@/Chicanxs, Greater Mexico, and the United States. Explore how transborderism and transregionalism complicate this history. Contemplate how Tejanas' stories are fundamental to illuminating the struggles, resistance, and liberation of Chicanas, mestizas, and afromexicanas from precontact to decolonization.

Explore Austin's queer history since World War II and write on the practice of oral history and LGBTQ oral history in particular. Build the foundation for an ongoing Austin LGBTQ Oral History Project to be housed at the Briscoe Center for American History.

Trace the continuities and transformations in constructions of populations as more or less human, from settler-colonial conquest to the post-Trump era. Examine what logics mark racialized populations as disposable during the colonization of the Americas, and which systematically condition racialized subjects to a state of enduring siege.

Contextualize and analyze diverse forms of Latina/o/x artistic expression, including visual art, music, dance, theatre, and film, or Latinidades".

Investigate the various technologies that the United States has used to maintain imperial geographies at "home" and abroad. Focus on imperial entanglements of global capital, liberalism, and technological systems.

Explore the intersection of race, horror aesthetics, and psychoanalytic theory.

Examine issues raised at the intersection of Blackness and photography in contemporary art of the United States.

Examine how popular culture and artistic practices facilitate or challenge social constructions of "Blackness" in the United States.

Use science fiction literature, film, and other cultural artifacts as a platform to launch an examination into the central concept of urban imaginaries. Discuss the politics (and potential) of urban representation as well as understand how urban imaginaries influence everyday urban life and the ongoing production of urban space and place.

Explore technologies of displacement, as well as tactics, digital media work, mapping projects, and activism that communities engage with to resist dispossession. Examine, locally and globally, the displacement and resistance effects of various events including infrastructure projects and gentrification.

Explore a variety of issues related to producing, accessing, and consuming food in city spaces in the context of racial inequities. Investigate and question constructs such as "food" and "city" as means of exploring different points of view and approaches to studying not only food and cities but also various approaches to food justice.

Explore the relationship between Blackness and the production of space and place. Examine the tensions and possibilities that emerge when Black people are rendered un-geographic as a fundamental component of racial capitalism while they are simultaneously creating spaces of freedom under constant threats to Black life.

Supervised individual study of selected subjects in American studies.

Use an intersectional feminist framework to examine the construction and maintenance of normative categories of race, gender, sex, and sexuality within United States religious discourse.

Explore contemporary visual and performance art by Latinx artists working since the 1970's to the present. Examine artists who began to engage with and in civil rights discourse to intervene through their art-making practices; and to align with contemporary trends in the art world that began to expand in the 1970's, such as performance art, installation art, video art, and, later, digital art.

Individual readings and conferences in connection with an original research paper.

An interdisciplinary cultural history survey of the United States.

An interdisciplinary cultural history survey of the United States.

Research on selected topics in American studies.

Reading or research seminar on topics relevant to American studies.

Individual directed readings and conferences on selected problems or topics in American studies.

Seminar designed to acquaint the graduate student with the nature and extent of materials for interdisciplinary research on American culture.

Seminar designed to acquaint the graduate student with key sources and methodologies for interdisciplinary research on American culture.

Practical working involvement with participating nonprofit and research agencies.

Preparation of a report to fulfill the requirement for the master's degree under the report option.

Seminar in the methods of interdisciplinary teaching and professional work in American studies.