Graduate Courses 2009-2010
AMST 600a, American Scholars Jean-Christophe Agnew
“What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar, 1837
A half-century ago American studies was a movement; now it is an institution. But it remains an anomaly in the academy, with neither method nor discipline: a modest program, not a department, that immodestly claims the space between disciplines, beyond disciplines, and perhaps encompassing disciplines.
In the early days, American studies was imagined as a home for Emerson’s American scholar; these days Emerson’s scholar is apt to be eyed more skeptically. Nevertheless the philosophy of the street and the meaning of household life continue to be the topics of the time, and American studies remains an oddly Emersonian place for nurturing intellectuals.
To explore the various kinds of American scholars and American studies, the American Scholars colloquium meets weekly. Each week, we ask a member of the American Studies faculty: What are the key works that shape your intellectual project? What works pose the crucial issues? What works engage what you would really know the meaning of? Each speaks briefly and leads a discussion of the works chosen. There is no writing assignment, and students receive a credit for participating. This course is mandatory for first-year American Studies graduate students. W 9:25–11:15
AMST 622a and 623b, Working Group on Globalization and Culture, Michael Denning
A continuing collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory,” that has been running since the fall of 2003. The group is made up of graduate students and faculty from several disciplines. The working group meets regularly to discuss common readings, to develop collective and individual research projects, and to present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. There are a small number of openings for second-year graduate students. Students interested in participating should contact michael.denning@yale.edu. M 1:30–3:20
AMST 641a/AFAM 596a, African American Poets of the Modern Era, Robert Stepto
The African American practice of poetry between 1900 and the present, especially of sonnets, ballads, sermonic and blues poems. Poets studied include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. M 1:30–3:20
AMST 643a/AFAM 505a, Theorizing Racial Formations,Jonathan Holloway
A designated core course for students in the joint Ph.D. program; also open to students in American Studies and History. This interdisciplinary reading seminar focuses on new work that is challenging the temporal, theoretical, and spatial boundaries of the field. TH 9:25–11:15
AMST 644a/AFAM 632a, Race and Memory, Alicia Schmidt Camacho
A seminar in critical theory and methods for studying social movements and popular, vernacular cultures. The seminar addresses issues of modernity and “development,” racialization, class formation, sexual and gender difference in the Americas through readings in subaltern studies, postcolonial theory, and ethnic studies. The course pairs primary texts with secondary, critical texts. We address the evocations of collective, popular memory by communities to recall or contest the condition of subaltern status. The course focuses on the Americas and U.S. imperial projects dating from the nineteenth century up to the current moment. T 9:25–11:15
AMST 645a/AFAM 723a, Caribbean Diasporic Intellectuals, Hazel Carby
This course examines work by writers of Caribbean descent from different regions of the transatlantic world. In response to contemporary interest in issues of globalization, the premise of the course is that in the world maps of these black intellectuals we can see the intertwined and interdependent histories and relations of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Thinking globally is not a new experience for black peoples and we need to understand the ways in which what we have come to understand and represent as “Caribbeanness” is a condition of movement. Literature is most frequently taught within the boundaries of a particular nation, but this course focuses on the work of writers who shape the Caribbean identities of their characters as traveling black subjects and refuse to restrain their fiction within the limits of any one national identity. We practice a new and global type of cognitive mapping as we read and explore the meanings of terms like black transnationalism, migrancy, globalization, and empire. Diasporic writing embraces and represents the geopolitical realities of the modern, modernizing, and postmodern worlds in which multiple racialized histories are inscribed on modern bodies. M 2:30–4:20
AMST 648b/AFAM 749b/WGSS 735b, Transnational Imaginaries, Hazel Carby
We traverse the boundaries of conceptual, disciplinary, historical, and theoretical imaginings of the transnational. How the transnational has been imagined is posed as a series of questions rather than as a fixed definition: for example, what constitutes the transnational; how do we think the transnational; why should we think in terms of the transnational; and what is the relation or difference among the transnational, the cosmopolitan, and globalization? We consider creative responses to the consequences of the unquenchable, demonic thirst of European and American powers for the control of trade, land, and resources, attempts to render visible what Amitav Ghosh refers to as “the results of the five hundred years of pure, undistilled violence and terror unleashed in the name of modernity.” We analyze the spatial, temporal, and historical dimensions of the creation of literary and visual narratives which seek to represent the displacement of peoples, the formation of diasporas, the invention and reinvention of subjects and subjectivities, and the politics of knowledge and power. Final paper. M 2:30–4:20
AMST 649b/HIST 763b, Readings in Latina/o History, Stephen Pitti
A reading of the historical works that focus on Latino communities in the United States. We focus particular attention on Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American communities, and we look at topics such as racial identity, border conflict, 1960s activism, patters of residency and migration, transnationality and citizenship, labor struggles and class formation, and gender and sexuality. Readings bring together scholarship from several disciplines and emphasize both the critical importance of this developing field and its contemporary challenges. M 7–8:50
AMST 651au/AFAM 563au, Ralph Ellison in Context, Robert Stepto
This seminar pursues close readings of Ralph Ellison’s essays, short fiction, and novels, Invisible Man and Juneteenth. The “in context” component of the seminar involves working from the Benston and Sundquist volumes on Ellison to discern a portrait of the modernist African America Ellison investigated, with at least Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Romare Bearden also in view. The texts include Ellison, The Collected Essays, Flying Home and Other Stories, Invisible Man, and Juneteenth; K. Benston, Speaking for You; E. Sundquist, Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; A. Nadel, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. M 1:30–3:20
AMST 653a, Recording Vernacular Music, Michael Denning
An introduction to the cultural study of vernacular musics in the era of sound recording. Topics include the rise of the music industry from sheet music to MP3s; the critical debates over vernacular musics associated with figures like Theodor Adorno, Charles Seeger, Alejo Carpentier, and Amiri Baraka; the rise of ethnographic field recording and the twentieth-century revivals of folk musics; the popular urban music cultures of ports and industrial cities; and the global circulation of commercial vernacular musics from jazz, tango, and hula to salsa and hip hop. TTH 1–2:15
AMST 700a/HIST 700a, Introduction to the Historiography of the United States, Stephen Pitti
Readings and discussion of a scholarly work on U.S. history from the settlement era to the present. Members of the department faculty visit the class on a rotating basis. M 9:25-11:15
AMST 705b/HIST 720b/RLST 705b, Readings in Religion and Society, 1600–2000, Harry Stout, Kathryn Lofton
This introductory graduate readings course assesses interrelations between religion and American society from 1600 to 1990. Concentration on religion’s successes and failures in shaping American society from the Puritans to modern neoconservative fundamentalism.Readings in primary and secondary sources; development of bibliographical skills.M 1:30–3:20
AMST 709a/AFAM 709a/HIST 736a/WGSS 736a, Research in Twentieth-Century United States Political and Social History, Glenda Gilmore
Projects chosen from the post-Civil War period, with emphasis on twentieth-century social and political history, broadly defined. Research seminar. TH 3:30–5:20
AMST 710bu/AFAM 588bu/ENGL 948b, Autobiography in America, Robert Stepto
At least a dozen North American autobiographies are studied, mostly from the “American Renaissance” to the present. Discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship. Slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence, relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation. M 1.30–3.20
AMST 714b/AFAM 706b/HIST 735b, Readings in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, Glenda Gilmore
Recent trends in American political history from the 1890s, with an emphasis on the social analysis of mass politics and reform.Th 3:30–5:20
AMST 719b/RLST 703b, Interrogating the Crisis of Islam: Seminar, Zareena Grewal
In official and unofficial discourses in the U.S., diagnoses of Islam’s various “crises” are ubiquitous, and Muslim “hearts and minds” are viewed as the “other” front in the War on Terror. Since 9/11, the U.S. State Department has made the reform of Islam an explicit national interest, pouring billions of dollars into USAID projects in Muslim-majority countries, initiating curriculum development programs for madrasas in South Asia, and establishing the Arabic Radio Sawa and the satellite TV station Al-Hurra to propagate the U.S. administration’s political views as well as what it terms a “liberal” strain of Islam. Muslim Americans are also consumed by debates about the “crisis” of Islam, a crisis of religious authority in which the nature and rapidity of change in the measures of authority are felt to be too difficult to assimilate. This course maps out the various and deeply politically charged contemporary debates about the “crisis of Islam” and the question of Islamic reform through an examination of official U.S. policy, transnational pulp Islamic literature, fatwas and essays authored by internationally renowned Muslim jurists and scholars, and historical and ethnographic works that take up the category of crisis as an interpretive device. T 1:30–3:20
AMST 722b/AFAM 757b/HIST 722b, Research Seminar in Nineteenth-Century American History, David Blight
Some class sessions focus on matters of craft: research techniques, styles of writing narrative and analysis; judging scholarly work; and philosophical dimensions of doing history in the early twenty-first century. Primary focus of the course is for each student to complete his/her own major research paper. Students in any field of American history are welcome. W 3:30–5:20
AMST 724a/HSAR 733a, Abstract Expressionism, Alexander Nemerov
The study of Abstract Expressionism is not what it once was. Previously considered a centerpiece of modernist art history, the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, and other painters has been somewhat subordinated in the last ten years to the study of more recent art. Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction are now arguably two of the many mid-twentieth-century cultural forms that require almost an archaeological approach to excavate. In this seminar we review critical approaches to this art—starting with Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg and moving on to recent scholars such as T. J. Clark, Tom Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Caroline Jones, and Michael Leja—before trying to determine (or, better, develop) new models for understanding these works from ca. 1935 to 1965. T 1:30–3:20
AMST 733b, America in the Transpacific World, Kariann Yokota
This seminar explores the politics of material and cultural exchange in the transpacific world by examining the most significant commodities that drew the U.S. into the region. Readings take a global perspective on the circulation of people, objects, and ideas in the region. The class analyzes how expansion from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century influenced the transpacific world and, conversely, how this involvement shaped the development of American culture. Students study objects that were preserved in cabinets of curiosity, universities, and museums in diverse locations such as Honolulu, London, and Salem. W 1:30–3:20
AMST 738b/HIST 738b, Readings in Western and Frontier History, John Mack Faragher
An introduction to recent work on the history of North American frontiers and the shifting region of the American West. Critical consideration of readings, participation in discussion, and completion of short weekly writing assignments and a term project. W 9:25–11:15
AMST 741b/HIST 752b, Indians and Empires, Ned Blackhawk
This course explores recent scholarship on Indian-imperial relations throughout North American colonial spheres from roughly 1500 to 1900. It examines indigenous responses to Spanish, Dutch, French, English, and lastly American and Canadian colonialisms and interrogates commonplace periodization, geographic, and conceptual approaches to historiography. It concludes with an examination of American Indian political history, contextualizing it within larger assessments of Indian-imperial and Indian-state relations. M 9:25–11:15
AMST 746b, Writing Ethnography: Reprensentations and Relevant Publics,
Kathryn Dudley
What kind of literary project is ethnography? How do ethnographers conceptualize the relationship between their readers and their subjects—and themselves as authors and subjects of their own texts? This seminar moves beyond the “crisis of representation” in anthropology to take stock of what experimental approaches to writing ethnography have contributed to our understanding of the ethnographic encounter and its place in the production of knowledge. In addition to genre-bending examples of recent ethnography, we read works of literary criticism, social theory, and cultural analysis that problematize classic representational conventions. We also consider the unique challenges of writing ethnographically for a public audience. TH 1:30–3:20
AMST 767b/HIST 724b, Research Seminar in U.S. Urban History, Mary Lui
Students conduct archival research to write an original article-length essay on any aspect of U.S. urban history in any century. The first half of the seminar consists of weekly readings discussions while the latter half consists of article workshop meetings focused on student writing. T 9:25–11:15
AMST 770b/HIST 770b/WGSS 750b, Research in Gender and Sexuality, George Chauncey
Students conduct research in primary sources and write original monographic essays on the history of gender and sexuality. Readings include key theoretical works as well as journal articles that might serve as models for student research projects. T 1:30–3:20
AMST 777b/HIST758b U.S. International & Transnational History Seth Fein
M 7:00 - 8:50 PM
AMST 786a/HIST 744a/WGSS 744a, Readings in the History of Gender , Joanne Meyerowitz
Selected topics in women’s and gender history with emphasis on U.S. history. Themes include changing conceptions of sex, gender, womanhood, manhood, femininity, and masculinity; the language of gender as a constitutive part of various social hierarchies; class, racial/ethnic, regional, and national differences; and gendered participation in religion, labor, politics, war, and social reform movements. Readings, writing assignments, and classroom discussions address recent historical methodological approaches. W 2:30–4:20
AMST 798a/HIST 726a, The Culture of the Gilded Age,Cynthia Russett
This course uses fiction and nonfiction to look at some of the major concerns of late nineteenth-century America, including political corruption, wealth and poverty, social reform, and the situation of women and minorities. Authors include Edward Bellamy, William Graham Sumner, Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. W 2:30–4:20
AMST 803a/HIST 703a, Research in Early National America, Joanne Freeman
A research seminar focused on the early national period of American history, broadly defined. Early weeks familiarize students with sources from the period and discuss research and writing strategies. Students produce a publishable article founded on primary materials. T 1:30–3:20
AMST 807b/AFAM 735b, Performance Historiography, Paige McGinley
This course examines methodological issues and research strategies employed by scholars doing historical research on performance. What is the relationship among history, memory, and performance? Where does performance “live” in the archive? How can one study the embodied events of the past? How can we make scholarly claims about performances that seem to disappear? This course looks at the work of scholars who have wrestled with these questions, paying specific attention to studies of African American performance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students also work with Beinecke Library collections in areas of their own interest. Scholars to be examined may include Hartman, Roach, Brooks, Young, and Brody. T 7–8:50
AMST 813au/FILM 724au, Contemporary Documentary Film and Video, Charles Musser
Examination of documentary and related nonfiction forms in the last three decades. Issues include film truth, performance, ethics, race and gender, and the filmmaker as participant-observer. Filmmakers include Frederick Wiseman, William Greaves, Chris Choy, Errol Morris, Lourdes Portillo, Trin T. Minh-Ha, Sue Friedrich, and Marlon Riggs. M 6:30–10:30
AMST 822b/AFAM 835b/CPLT 697b/ENGL 929b, The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans, Joseph Roach
An exploration of the sources of creative inspiration that writers find in NOLA, including its cultural mystique, its colonial history, its troubled assimilation into Anglo-North America, its tortured racial politics, its natural and built environment, its spirit-world practices, its raucous festive life, its eccentric characters, its food, its music, its predisposition to catastrophe, and its capacity for re-invention and survival. T 1:30–3:20
AMST 823b, Visual Controversies: Religion and the Politics of Vision, Sally Promey
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar explores the destruction, censorship, and suppression of pictures and objects, as these acts have been motivated by religious convictions and practices, in the United States from colonization to the present. In such episodes, religion does not operate in a vacuum but draws attention to various other cultural pressure points concerning, for instance, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The course treats iconoclasm as a fundamental constituent in the American myth of national origins. The course focuses most specifically on variations of Protestant Christianity, but also explores case studies within multiple American religious traditions and elsewhere in the world. By permission of instructor.TH 9:25–11:15
AMST 861b/ARCH 914b, Built Environments and the Politics of Place, Dolores Hayden
Call it the built environment, the vernacular, everyday architecture, or the cultural landscape, the material world of built and natural places is intricately bound up with social and political life. This seminar introduces research methods involving the built environment. It includes readings from urban and suburban history, geography, anthropology, and architecture as well as readings on narrative and graphic strategies for representing spaces and places. Participants present papers; chapters from longer projects are welcome. Limited enrollment. M 9:25–11:15
AMST 868b Photography & Memory, Laura Wexler,
TH 1:30-3:20
AMST 879au/HIST 914au/HSHM 634au, Media and Medicine in Modern America, John Harley Warner
An exploration of the relationships among medicine, health, and the media in the United States from 1870 through the present. Focus on newspapers, magazines, professional journals, advertising, exhibitions, radio, film, television, and the Internet; and on interactions among researchers, health professions, medical and public health institutions, journalists, advocacy organizations, the state, industry, and the public. Topics include the changing role of the media in shaping conceptions of the body; creating new diseases; influencing health and health policy; crafting the image of the medical profession; informing expectations of medicine and constructions of citizenship; and the medicalization of American life. TTH 10:30–11:20
AMST 882au/HIST 939au/HSHM 677au, Genetics, Reproduction, and Society, Daniel Kevles
A history of modern biology, especially evolution, genetics, and molecular biology, within its social, economic, legal, and cultural context. Topics include eugenics and sterilization, the Scopes trial, contraception and abortion, new reproductive technologies, medical genetics, the Human Genome Project, and human cloning. MW 11:35–12:25
AMST 886b/ENGL 851b, American Literature: Fields, Genealogies, Webs, Wai Chee Dimock
A survey of genres and methods, with special attention to these broad areas of inquiry: multiple diasporas; cross-mappings of poetry and prose; movement across words, image, music; memories, adaptations, and rewritings from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first; morphologies of the human, the subhuman, and the nonhuman; and the fate of close reading in a global world. We read Hawthorne in conjunction with Maryse Condé; Poe with Ishmael Reed; Whitman with Allen Ginsberg and Sherman Alexie; Faulkner with Suzan-Lori Parks; Olaudah Equiano with Dave Eggers; Emily Dickinson with Richard Powers. W 1:30–3:20
AMST 899b Research Seminar 20th C Poetry
Langdon Hammer F 9:25-11:15
AMST 900, Independent Research
AMST 901, Directed Reading
AMST 902a and b, Prospectus Workshop, Joanne Meyerowitz
Upon completion of course work, students are required to participate in at least one term of the prospectus workshop, ideally the semester before the prospectus colloquium is held. Open to all students in the program and joint departments, the workshop serves as a forum for discussing the selection of a dissertation topic, refining a project’s scope, organizing research materials, and evaluating work in progress. The workshop meets once a month. M 12–1:30
AMST 903a/HIST 746a, Public Humanities, Laura Wexler
What is the relationship between knowledge produced in the university and the circulation of ideas among a broader public, between academic expertise on the one hand and non-professionalized ways of knowing and thinking on the other? What is possible? This seminar provides an introduction to various institutional relations and to the modes of inquiry, interpretation, and presentation by which practitioners in the humanities seek to invigorate the flow of information and ideas among a public more broadly conceived than the academy, its classrooms, and its exclusive readership of specialists. Topics may include public history, museum studies, oral and community history, public art, documentary film and photography, public writing and educational outreach, and the socially conscious performing arts. In addition to core readings and discussions, the seminar includes presentations by several practitioners who are currently engaged in different aspects of the Public Humanities. A highly flexible term project—including possibilities for an internship with a regional museum, archive, gallery, or media outlet—allows students to explore the substantive and logistical challenges of public intellectual work in the genre or form that most interests them. Participants also collaborate in developing and beginning to organize a Public Humanities program of installations and events to be held during the following academic year. Required for the Master’s Degree in Public Humanities. M 3:30-5:20
AMST 904, Practicum in Public Humanities
AMST 905, Master’s Project in Public Humanities
