AMST 570 - Topics in American Studies

The Museum in America. (3) Braddock.
This seminar explores the American museum in its multiple overlapping guises – collection, institution, representation, spectacle, nexus, space, edifice, pawn – since around 1800, with emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course will not provide utilitarian instruction in museum administration, management, or connoisseurship. Instead, it will approach the museum critically as a site where history, theory, and geopolitics have been imagined, constructed, and contested.
 

Race: History & Methodology (3) Rosen.
This seminar explores historical and theoretical approaches to analyzing race, focusing on scholarship on slavery, emancipation, segregation, and immigration in the US.
 

Sexuality in America. (3) Meyer.
The course will introduce students to the study of American culture through history, popular culture, multiple media, and scientific literature concerned with sexualities in America. The course will also show how normative sexualities are articulated distinctly depending on race, class, ethnicity, immigrant status, and other factors related to specific American communities.