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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.