American Studies (AMST)
AMST 1101 - Introduction to American Studies (4 Credits)
This course is an introduction to interdisciplinary considerations of American culture. Specific topics may change from year to year and may include questions of national consensus versus native, immigrant and racial subcultures and countercultures; industrialization and the struggles over labor; the rise of leisure; the transformation of (the frequently gendered) public and private spheres; the relationship between politics and culture; the development and distinctions among consumer culture, mass culture and popular culture. These themes will be examined through a variety of media, such as literature, historical writing, music, art, film, architecture, etc. The course will also give attention to the many methods through which scholars have, over time, developed the discipline of American Studies.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
AMST 1104 - Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Social Constructs, Real World Consequences (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SOC 1104
This course will examine race and ethnic relations between Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in the United States. The goal of this course is for students to understand how the history of race and ethnicity in the U.S. affects opportunity structures in, for example, education, employment, housing, and health. Through this course students will gain a better understanding of how race and ethnicity stratifies the lives of individuals in the U.S.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY); (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022, Summer 2021 AMST 1115 - Introduction to American Government and Politics (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 1111
A policy-centered approach to the study of government in the American experience. Considers the American Founding and how it influenced the structure of government; how national institutions operate in shaping law and public policy; who has a voice in American politics and why some are more influential than others; and how existing public policies themselves influence social, economic, and political power. Students will gain an introductory knowledge of the founding principles and structure of American government, political institutions, political processes, political behavior, and public policy.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Summer 2022
AMST 1139 - FWS: Topics in American Studies (3 Credits)
The American Studies Program offers an interdisciplinary engagement with what America means in the United States and in a global context. Faculty encourage students to look at the histories and cultures of the changing United States as a question still in need of answering and as an experiment still in process, not as a dream fully realized. We use multiple perspectives and methodologies and require that students synthesize knowledge in ways that develop the skills needed for rigorous, complex analysis. Topics vary by section.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022
AMST 1290 - American Society through Film (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SOC 1290
Introduces students to the sociological analysis of American society through the lens of film. Major themes involve race, class, and gender; upward and downward mobility; incorporation and exclusion; small town vs the big city; and cultural conflicts over individualism, achievement, and community. We match a range of movies like American Graffiti (Lucas), Ace in the Hole (Wilder), The Asphalt Jungle (Houston), Do the Right Thing (Lee), The Heiress (Wyler), High Noon (Zinnemann), Mean Streets (Scorsese), Nashville (Altman), The Philadelphia Story (Cukor), and A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan). Each film is paired with social scientific research that examines parallel topics, such as analyses of who goes to college, the production of news, deviant careers, urban riots, the gendered presentation of self, and the prisoner's dilemma.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2019 AMST 1312 - History of Rock Music (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 1312
This course examines the development and cultural significance of rock music from its origins in blues, gospel, and Tin Pan Alley up to alternative rock and hip hop. The course concludes with the year 2000.
Enrollment Information: No previous training in music required.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021 AMST 1332 - (Intro) To Black Music: Listening, Sounding, and Studying Black Radical Possibility (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 1332, ASRC 1932
(Intro) To Black Music will introduce students to a multitude of Black musical artists across a range of styles and genres - from the blues of Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson to the contemporary stylistic experimentation of Doechii, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé - as well as to writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Ralph Ellison who help us better understand the sound and significance of their performances. Students will be expected to engage the dynamic innovation, cultural development, and deep attunements ever-active in the rhythms and melodies of Black social life through critical listening and analysis. In doing so this class will broaden students’ musical and cultural horizons and help students situate Black diasporic music making in the 20th and 21st centuries within a broader context of racial capitalism, commodification, global networks of exchange, and the artistic pathways forged from legacies of joy, sorrow, pleasure, and resistance.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)
AMST 1350 - Introduction to Cultural Analytics: Data, Computation, and Culture (3 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020
AMST 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies (4 Credits)
At the inception of this department at Cornell University in 1969, the Africana Studies and Research Center became the birthplace of the field Africana studies. Africana studies emphasizes comparative and interdisciplinary studies of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas. In this course, we will look at the diverse contours of the discipline. We will explore contexts ranging from modernity and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation complex in the New World to processes of decolonization and globalization in the contemporary digital age. This course offers an introduction to the study of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas. This course will examine, through a range of disciplines, among them literature, history, politics, philosophy, the themes - including race/racism, the Middle Passage, sexuality, colonialism, and culture - that have dominated Africana Studies since its inception in the late-1960s. We will explore these issues in an attempt to understand how black lives have been shaped in a historical sense; and, of course, the effects of these issues in the contemporary moment. This course seeks to introduce these themes, investigate through one or more of the disciplines relevant to the question, and provide a broad understanding of the themes so as to enable the kind of intellectual reflection critical to Africana Studies.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, SBA-AG), (GLC-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
AMST 1540 - American Capitalism (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 1540, ILRGL 1845
This course studies the history of American capitalism. It helps you to answer these questions: What is capitalism? Is the U.S. more capitalist than other countries? How has capitalism shaped the history of the United States? Has it been a force for freedom, or is it a system of exploitation? What is its future? Through lectures, readings, and discussions, we'll give you the tools to win all your future arguments about capitalism, pro and con. And we won't even charge you the full market price.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS), (ICE-IL, LH-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
AMST 1576 - War in U.S. History: From the Frontier to the Wars on Terror (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 1576
Is war a way of life for Americans, as some historians have suggested? In recent years, many Americans have come to think about war as something that happens over there, away from our own shores, but war - the act of fighting itself, as well as the political, economic and social demands of mobilisation, and the foreign and domestic consequences of military violence - has shaped the United States in countless ways. This course explores both the shadow of war - the seen and unseen effects it has on people and societies - and the substance - the wars themselves - to explore America's relationships with the rest of the world, from the revolutionary period to the present day. At the same time, we we'll also examine non-military and quasi-military encounters between Americans and peoples abroad, including tourism, romantic entanglements, business relationships, and religious proselytising, asking what is war?, and even whether the United States has ever been at peace. Through this multi-layered focus we will discover some of the many ways in which Americans have thought about, engaged with, impacted, and been impacted by, the world beyond the country's borders, and the extent to which war and violence have played a prominent role in those interactions.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023
AMST 1585 - Sports and Politics in American History (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 1585
This course will explore the relationship between sports and politics over the course of American history since the 19th century. Sports and politics have come together surprisingly frequently in the last two centuries and this course will take a case study method to examine particular episodes of politicized sports. In the course of our investigations, we will the following questions: How do we define politics? How have sports acted as a place for subversion and resistance? Conversely, how have sports reflected the power structure? No background knowledge is necessary. Course materials will include memoirs, articles, and a variety of visual sources, including film and photography. Course requirements will include a research paper.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018
AMST 1595 - African American History from 1865 (3 Credits)
Focusing on political and social history, this course surveys African-American history from Emancipation to the present. The class examines the post-Reconstruction Nadir of black life; the mass black insurgency against structural racism before and after World War II; and the Post-Reform Age that arose in the wake of the dismantling of legal segregation. The course will familiarize students with the basic themes of African-American life and experience and equip them to grasp concepts of political economy; class formation; and the intersection of race, class and gender.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS), (LH-IL, OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2018
AMST 1600 - Indigenous North America (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with AIIS 1100, ANTHR 1700
This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the diverse cultures, histories and contemporary situations of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Students will also be introduced to important themes in the post-1492 engagement between Indigenous and settler populations in North America and will consider the various and complex ways in which that history affected - and continues to affect - American Indian peoples and societies. Course materials draw on the humanities, social sciences, and expressive arts.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
AMST 1601 - Indigenous Issues in Global Perspectives (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with AIIS 1110
This course attends to the contemporary issues, contexts and experiences of Indigenous peoples. Students will develop a substantive understanding of colonialism and engage in the parallels and differences of its histories, forms, and effects on Indigenous peoples globally. Contemporary Indigenous theorists, novelists, visual artists and historians have a prominent place in the course, highlighting sociocultural and environmental philosophies, critical responses to and forms of resistance toward neocolonial political and economic agendas and the fundamental concern for Indigenous self-determination, among other topics. We will not only examine the history of victimization of indigenous peoples through colonial oppression, but we will also study their response as agents of change in providing alternative paradigms and insights to humanity in the third millennium.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 Learning Outcomes:
- To gain perspective of contemporary issues in Indigenous Studies with a historical sense that not only conveys the pastness of the past but its presence and relevance for the future.
- To examine current issues in Indigenous Studies that are important to communities.
- To apply an interdisciplinary lens in understanding indigenous sociocultural and ecological issues.
- To appreciate the complex interconnectivity between the ecological and the sociocultural.
- To comprehend that policy actions informed by cultural systems manifest themselves in social structures that rely on ecological foundations.
- To situate Indigenous Studies within a humanistic framework of knowledge generation.
- To illustrate the relevance and contribution of Indigenous Studies to broader issues of humanity in the 21st Century.
- To discern a methodology of hope based on indigenous experience.
AMST 1640 - U.S. History since the Great Depression (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 1640
An introductory survey to United States history since the Great Depression, this course explores the dramatic social, economic, and political transformations of the last century. It emphasizes domestic political developments, particularly the evolving notions of government responsibility for various social problems. Therefore, the course is especially concerned with the interactions between the state, popular movements, and people's daily lives.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2019, Fall 2015, Fall 2012
AMST 1770 - U.S. History through Literature (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 1770
This lecture course combines historical and literary approaches to explore the inner life of Americans over the last two hundred years. No prior knowledge of US history is assumed. We'll examine the ways in which historical context can shape literary works and the ways in which literature, in turn, can shape history. How have Americans imagined themselves and their nation? Has there ever been a stable American identity? The focus will be on literary works that pose questions about race, gender, individualism, and belonging, allowing us to see how writers have both reinforced and resisted cultural pressures. My hope is that tracing US history through works of the imagination will help in the collective (and perpetual) effort to reimagine American life.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
AMST 1800 - Immigration in U.S. History (4 Credits)
This course examines immigration to the United States since the early national period. The course will examine the root causes of migration and its role in settler colonialism, nation-building, and empire. We will also examine popular and political responses to immigration, as reflected in legislation and policy, and film and the print media.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2012
AMST 1802 - Introduction to Latinos in U.S. History (3 Credits)
This course seeks a fuller recounting of U.S. history by remapping what we understand as America. We will examine traditional themes in the teaching of U.S. history-territorial expansion and empire, migration and nation building, industrialization and labor, war and revolution, and citizenship and transnationalism-but we will examine this American experience in a broader hemispheric context and include as actors americanos of Spanish, Mexican, Caribbean, and Central/South American ancestries.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS), (LH-IL, OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
AMST 1820 - U.S. Borders, North and South (3 Credits)
The borders that separate the United States from Canada and Mexico are among the longest in the world. The southern border with Mexico receives a disproportionate amount of attention from policymakers, journalists, and artists, while our northern border is largely unfamiliar to most Americans. This course offers a necessary corrective: a comparative examination of these two North American borderlands, from their 16th-to-18th century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to commerce, environmentalism, indigenous rights, immigration, border fence construction, drug smuggling, and pandemic-related travel restrictions. The course demonstrates that both the US-Mexico and US-Canada border zones have been, and remain, sites of conflict and cooperation, nationalism and globalization, sovereignty and subordination.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 1850 - Thinking about History with the Manson Murders (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 1850
On August 9-10, 1969, ex-convict, aspiring rock star, and charismatic leader Charles Manson ordered his so-called Family to brutally murder a few of LA's rich, white, beautiful people and leave clues implicating black radicals. The idea was to trigger an apocalyptic race war he called Helter Skelter (after a song by The Beatles). Today, these murders stand as the most infamous in twentieth-century U.S. criminal history and as synecdoche for the end of the Sixties. They have also spawned a veritable Manson Industry in the popular realm: there are now Manson books, movies, TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, websites, music, comics, t-shirts, and even a tourist attraction (the Hollywood Helter Skelter tour). This course analyzes the history of the Manson murders as well as their incredible resonance in American culture over the past half century. Who was Charles Manson and who were the members of the Family? What was the Family's relation to the counterculture, to Hollywood, Vietnam, the Black Panther Party, and environmentalism? How might we fit the Manson murders into the long history of apocalyptic violence and terror? And what does it mean that the Manson murders have occupied our collective imagination for fifty years? To answer these and other questions, we will analyze a variety of sources including television and newspaper reports, trial transcripts, true crime writing, memoirs, interviews, novels, films and documentaries, podcasts and pop songs.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
AMST 1951 - Foreign Policy as Subversion (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 1951, LATA 1951, ASIAN 2951
To what extent does the ideal of the US as a vanguard for democracy and freedom in the world match up with other aspects-military, economic, and humanitarian-of US foreign policy? This same question about the degree to which discourses and practices correspond might be asked of other countries, like the Soviet Union, China, and Britain, but this course examines the ways in which US foreign policy has been deployed over the course of the twentieth century and the ways those policies have been perceived and received by people living in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Particular case studies will be addressed stemming from the faculty's specializations (for example, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, and Chile) and the emphasis is on the role of the United States in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Prominent themes will include forms of subversion, from military muscle to economic coercion, and how and why they have changed over time; meanings of liberty, democracy, freedom, and sovereignty in different places and times; popular responses to policies and actions of foreign administrations; the relationships between sovereign states and transnational corporations; the uses and abuses of History in the formulation and justification of policy initiatives and in local responses to them; and the complexities involved in discerning internal and external forces in an increasingly transnational world.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2018 AMST 1985 - American History from 1500 to 1800 (3 Credits)
On the eve of the American Revolution Britain administered 26 colonies-not just the 13 that would become the United States. British North America's dramatic struggle for independence has led many history textbooks to read the revolution back into colonial history, focusing on those 13 North American colonies that would become the United States, often at the expense of global connections that defined the colonial and revolutionary periods. As this class will explore, key elements of early American history can only be understood through a broader perspective, from the economic growth of New England as a result of the African slave trade and exchange in the Caribbean, to the use of citizenship as a category of exclusion in response to the myriad inhabitants-European, Indigenous, and African-who neighbored or lived within the original 13 colonies. In this course, we will explore the history of early America from the 1490s through the 1800s from a global perspective. Voices usually peripheral to the narrative of American development, from enslaved African mariners to Spanish American nuns, will become central to processes of cultural encounter, labor exploitation, revolutionary upheavals, and state formation that shaped the making and unmaking early America.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021
AMST 1986 - Disasters! A History of Colonial Failures in the Atlantic World, 1450-1750 (4 Credits)
This course provides an overview of disastrous attempts at colonization in the Americas from ca. 1500 through ca. 1760. Over thirteen weeks, we will engage with the question of why some attempts at colonization failed and why some succeeded. We will also explore other early modern failures, from bankrupt monopoly trade companies to ill-fated buccaneer communities and entire cities destroyed by earthquakes and hurricanes. Exploring failures, rather than successes, will help students understand the contingent process of colonial expansion as well as the roles of Indigenous dispossession, African slavery, and inter-imperial trade networks to the success or failure of early modern colonies. Over the course of the semester, my lectures will cover broad themes in failed enterprises, while students will read several monographs and primary-source collections on specific disasters. Some central questions include: Why did some colonies fail and other thrived? What role did social factors like gender, race, and class play in colonial failures? What can we learn about colonialism and imperialism through a focus on when those processes ended in disasters?
Distribution Requirements: (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2021
AMST 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with VISST 2000, COML 2000, ARTH 2000
This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies-photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS), (CA-AG, KCM-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 AMST 2001 - The First American University (1 Credit)
Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University the first American university, referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where any person can find instruction in any study. The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
AMST 2006 - Punk Culture: The Art and Politics of Refusal (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 2006, ENGL 2906, COML 2006, SHUM 2006
Punk Culture-comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts-represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2018, Fall 2016
AMST 2012 - September 11 and the Politics of Memory (3 Credits)
As a country, we are what we remember. But who decides what facts and stories about the past are important enough to memorialize? What does that decision tell us about power and truth? This class will discuss how the attacks of September 11 are remembered in the United States and the rest of the world.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
AMST 2016 - Understanding Global Capitalism Through Service Learning (4 Credits)
This course is a seminar focused on a service-learning approach to understanding the history of neoliberal transformations of the global economy through the lens of an island (Jamaica) and a community (Petersfield). Building on the success of previous year's global service-learning course and trip to Petersfield, and now bringing the course under the auspices of both the Engaged Cornell and Cornell Abroad administrative and funding capabilities. Students will attend class each week and will also take a one-week service trip over spring break to work with the local community partner (AOC) in Petersfield. We will also work with Amizade, a non-profit based in Pittsburgh, who is the well-established partner of the AOC and which works with numerous universities on global service learning projects. They have a close relationship with CU Engaged Learning and Research.
Course Fee: Course Fee, $1350. Fee amount approximate; (will be charged to each students' bursar bill).
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL, CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2020, Spring 2017, Spring 2016 AMST 2023 - Fighting for Our Lives: Black Women's Reproductive Health and Activism in Historical Perspective (3-4 Credits)
This course centers Black women who have often described their reproductive health experiences as fighting for our lives. While grounded in an exploration of Black women 's experiences in the US, this course also looks across the diaspora to issues of access, rights, and equity in reproductive health. Deeply inspired by the field of Black Feminist Health Science Studies, a field that advocates for the centrality of activism in healthcare and its importance for Black women's overall health and well-being, this course examines how issues of gender, race, class, ability, and power intersect to inform how reproductive health is conceptualized, practiced, and experienced. Ultimately, this course will yield a deeper understanding of how Black women have transformed existential and literal threats on their lives into a robust terrain of community-based activism and a movement for reproductive justice. We will read across a range of texts and genres from the historical and theoretical, to memoir and documentary. With what we learn together, we will craft contributions to public debates around healthcare issues impacting Black women.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG, SBA-AG), (HST-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 2043 - Asian American Oral History (4 Credits)
This seminar will explore Asian American history through the methodology of oral history. Students will read Asian American historical scholarship that has relied on oral history methods, but they will also engage with theoretical and methodological work around the use of oral sources. Students will develop, research, and present oral history projects. Themes include power and knowledge production, the role of oral history in documenting the Asian American past, and local and family histories as avenues through which to explore oral history methods.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023
AMST 2060 - The Great American Cornell Novel (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 1102
Some of the best novels of the last 75 years were written by people who were students or professors at Cornell. Reading a selection of these great Cornell novels, we will also be tracing the history and development of post-WWII American fiction. Readings will include classic works by V. Nabokov, K. Vonnegut, J. Russ, T. Morrison, T. Pynchon, and W. Gass, as well as several more recent (some very recent) works by your fellow Cornellians. Perhaps in a few years your work will be on the list.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
AMST 2070 - Social Problems in the United States (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 2250, SOC 2070
Social Problems in the U.S. teaches students how to think like a social scientist when encountering claims about major contemporary issues. Through readings and assignments, students develop an analytical toolkit for evaluating the scope, causes, consequences, and proposed solutions to a wide range of complicated social problems, such as: childhood poverty, racial segregation and discrimination, job insecurity, family instability, discrimination by sexual identity, unequal pay for women's work, gender imbalances in family life, health disparities, food insecurity, drug abuse, and educational inequality. Rather than cover all of these (and other) social problems in depth, the course emphasizes a conceptual framework that can be applied broadly. The semester culminates with a written proposal examining a social problem and developing an approach to address it with public policy.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG, SBA-AG), (CA-HE, D-HE, SBA-HE), (OCE-IL), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
Learning Outcomes:
- Develop a strategy for discussing controversial social issues with others who hold competing perspectives.
- Demonstrate an understanding of core concepts from Sociology and Policy Analysis as they relate to topics in education, health, and social welfare.
- Distinguish between normative, descriptive, and causal claims about social problems as they emerge in public debate.
- Evaluate the validity of claims about social problems by drawing on evidence from empirical research.
- Analyze trade-offs and unintended consequences implicated in the design and implementation of social policies.
AMST 2092 - A History of Human Trafficking in the Atlantic World, ca. 1400-1800 (4 Credits)
According to the 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report released by the U.S. State Department, 24.9 million people worldwide are currently the victims of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. This upper-division course explores the roots of this modern crisis, focusing on human trafficking and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world, a region that encompasses Western Europe, the Americas, and Western Africa. Slavery and human trafficking in this region involved the interactions of three cultural groups, European, African, and American Indian, but within those broad categories were hundreds of different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups. Through readings focused on the conditions and cultures of slavery in the western hemisphere from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the course will explore how slavery was defined, who was vulnerable to enslavement, what slavery meant socially and legally in different times and places across the Atlantic world, and why human trafficking and forced labor continued well past the legal abolition of transatlantic slavery. The course is divided into five parts: an introductory section on definitions of slavery and human trafficking, followed by sections on American Indian slavery, African slavery in West Africa and the Americas, servitude and captivity in the Atlantic world, and concluding with an analysis of the legacies of early modern slavery today.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 2105 - The American Musical (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 2650, ENGL 2150, MUSIC 2250
The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musical-and how in turn musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2015, Spring 2011, Fall 2008
AMST 2106 - Introduction to Latinx Studies (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with LSP 2100
This course is an introduction to Latina/o Studies, an interdisciplinary field of knowledge production that focuses on historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic experiences of Latinx peoples in the United States-both as a nation and as a geopolitical location in a larger world. We will survey and analyze the arts, histories, cultures, politics, and sociological landscapes of Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, as well as other Latinx peoples who have made communities within the United States for centuries, and who are part of Latinx diasporas. Intersections of U.S. Latinx identities are also explored in this course by asking questions related to the fields housed within Latina/o Studies: How is Latina/o/x identity defined and performed? What does the use of an 'x' in Latinx mean or do? How do histories of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. impact one's Latina/o/x identity? Many of these questions will be answered by using scholarship produced by the Latina/o Studies Program faculty at Cornell, familiarizing students with the breadth of research and expertise of program.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
AMST 2145 - Food in America (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2145
This course examines the history and culture of food in the United States over the last hundred years. Looking closely at contemporary food culture, we will ask questions such as: What are the origins of convenience foods? Who were America's most influential cooks? What is American cuisine? What is the cultural meaning of a proper diet? Thematically organized, course topics include food and technology, food art, labor and tipping practices, food activism, consumerism, taste and eating behavior, fusion cuisine, and the celebrity chef. Creative assignments include a writing a restaurant review, conducting a food observation and interview, and innovating a new food invention.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2017
AMST 2152 - (Im)migration and (Im)migrants: Then and Now (3 Credits)
How are migration dynamics produced? How do states and communities respond to and shape complex migration processes? This course will draw on the United States as a case study, focusing on Latino immigrants. Latinos are by far the largest immigrant group in the U.S., representing about 50% of all immigrants. Additionally, the U.S. has historically received the largest number of immigrants in the world. The class will examine the main debates around migration in fields such as Latino studies, migration studies, and political science. We begin with a historical and contemporary survey of global and regional migration trends. Next, we will review theories explaining why people migrate and how countries manage migration processes. We then focus on the U.S. immigration apparatus, examining past and present changes, including migration public policies. Central to this class is the exploration of multiple systems of marginalization that shape the opportunities, material conditions, and lived experiences of immigrants in the U.S. We conclude with an exploration of historical and contemporary migrant-led forms of resistance, such as the Immigrant Rights Movement, and its linkages to other transnational struggles for social justice.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (ICL-IL, OCE-IL), (SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Fall 2020
AMST 2160 - Television (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 2660, ENGL 2160, FGSS 2160, VISST 2160
In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2016
AMST 2212 - The U.S. Empire (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2212
What is the American empire? Is empire even the right word to describe U.S. power in the world today or in the past? If so, is the American empire formal or informal, and is the United States a reluctant superpower or a belligerent hegemon? When did the empire begin? And is it in decline today? In addressing these questions, this seminar will offer an in-depth look at key moments in the history of the United States and its foreign relations, ranging from the American revolutionary war and historians' debates about the founders' thinking in relation to empire; the imperial moment of 1898, when the United States acquired overseas colonies for the first time; the beginnings of the national security state in 1917 with the entry of the United States into the First World War; the American Century, or the post-World War II years when the United States was the most powerful nation in the world; and the era of unipolarity after the end of the Cold War and which culminated in the Wars on Terror. Throughout, we will draw upon primary and secondary sources to examine the ideas and practices which have shaped U.S. foreign relations, including continental expansion, the frontier, imperial anticolonialism, the open door, covert operations, extraordinary rendition, police action, and more. Taking both a chronological and thematic approach, this class offers an examination of the past in order to understand some of the key issues facing the United States, and the world, today.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
AMST 2220 - From the New Deal to the Age of Reagan (4 Credits)
This seminar will explore some of the major political and cultural trends in the United States, from the era of the Democratic New Dealer, Franklin D. Roosevelt, through the era of the conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan? This seminar will explore through primary source research and secondary readings the key economic, political, and cultural characteristics and transformations of the period from 1930 though the turn of the century. The course will examine the rise, persistence, and breakdown of the so-called New Deal Order and the crucial political shifts that we call the Reagan Revolution. A key theme in this course will be the transformations and critiques of American liberalism and conservatism.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020
AMST 2225 - Controversies About Inequality (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with SOC 2220, GOVT 2225, PHIL 1950, ILROB 2220, PUBPOL 2220
In recent years, poverty and inequality have become increasingly common topics of public debate, as academics, journalists, and politicians attempt to come to terms with growing income inequality, with the increasing visibility of inter-country differences in wealth and income, and with the persistence of racial, ethnic, and gender stratification. This course introduces students to ongoing social scientific debates about the sources and consequences of inequality, as well as the types of public policy that might appropriately be pursued to reduce (or increase) inequality. These topics will be addressed in related units, some of which include guest lectures by faculty from other universities (funded by the Center for the Study of Inequality). Each unit culminates with a highly spirited class discussion and debate.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (ICE-IL), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY); (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 AMST 2232 - Queer Pop from the Stonewall Uprising to the Millennium (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 2232, FGSS 2232, LGBT 2232
This course will survey the history and US political contexts of LGBTQ+ identities in popular music over three critical decades. We will cover the 1970s era of gay liberation and visibility with glam rock, first-wave punk, women’s music, and disco; the mainstreaming of queer sensibility in dance pop, new wave, and voguing in the neoliberal 1980s; and 1990s rise of queer theory, AIDS epidemic, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and queer activism reflected in queercore, crypto-queer alternative rock, and coded music videos. We will also consider how these past expressive strategies are referenced and extended in later and current queer pop.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)
AMST 2251 - U.S. Immigration Narratives (3 Credits)
Americans are conflicted about immigration. We celebrate and commercialize our immigrant heritage in museums, folklife festivals, parades, pageants, and historical monuments. We also build fences and detention centers and pass more and more laws to bar access to the United States. Polls tell us that Americans are concerned about the capacity of the United States to absorb so many immigrants from around the world. How often have we heard the laments “Today’s immigrants are too different. They don’t want to assimilate” or “My grandparents learned English quickly, why can’t they?” The assumption is that the immigrant ancestors adapted quickly but that today’s immigrants do not want to assimilate. Did 19th century immigrants really migrate to the United States to “become Americans”? Did they really assimilate quickly? Are today’s immigrants really all that different from the immigrants who arrived earlier? Why do these particular narratives have such power and currency? This seminar will explore these issues and help students discern fact from fiction.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2018
AMST 2253 - Diasporas from the Spanish Caribbean (4 Credits)
This seminar examines the Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican diasporas in the United States. We will examine US relations with these three countries; the root causes of this Caribbean migration; their history in particular urban areas of the United States; and the political, social, and cultural issues that have attracted attention.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023
AMST 2255 - Ecocriticism and Visual Culture (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ARTH 2255
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)
AMST 2256 - Schooling and Society (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SOC 2250
The primary goal of this course is to understand the relationship between education and society, with an emphasis on exploring educational inequality. To accomplish this, we will ask questions such as: What is the purpose and product of schools? How do schools reproduce social class, racial, and gender inequality? What is the relationship between education and future success? How are schools structured? What factors increase educational success? To answer these, and related questions, we will use classical and contemporary sociological theory and research. The course culminates in a research project of each student's own choosing.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2019, Spring 2018 AMST 2260 - Music of the 1960's (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 2260, ASRC 2260, SHUM 2260
Last Four Terms Offered: Winter 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2018, Spring 2015
AMST 2297 - Public History Lab: The History of People Setting Themselves Free From Slavery in the US (4 Credits)
In this course, we will study the history of Black resistance to slavery in the US. Then we will help to build an exhibit about that topic at one of the foremost museum sites that interprets the history of US slavery. Students will learn about the history of slavery and emancipation, and how the attempt to memory-hole the history of Black resistance to slavery has shaped public memory and politics. We will also study how institutions like the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana are working to produce a more accurate understanding of the American past. In the second half of the course we will shift to working on the research, development, and production of the exhibit. The course will run parallel with a sibling course being taught in the University of New Orleans' MA program in Public History.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 2315 - The Occupation of Japan (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2315, ASIAN 2258, SHUM 2315
In August 1945, Japan was a devastated country; its cities burned, its people starving, its military and government in surrender. World War II was over. The occupation had begun. What sort of society emerged from the cooperation and conflict between occupiers and occupied? Students will examine sources ranging from declassified government documents to excerpts from diaries and bawdy fiction, alongside major scholarly studies, to find out. The first half of the course focuses on key issues in Japanese history, like the fate of the emperor, constitutional revision, and the emancipation of women. The second half zooms out for a wider perspective, for the occupation of Japan was never merely a local event. It was the collapse of Japanese empire and the rise of American empire in Asia. It was decolonization in Korea and the start of the Cold War. Students will further investigate these links in final individual research projects.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
AMST 2330 - Literature and Medicine (3 Credits)
How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019
AMST 2340 - The Beatles (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 2340
The course will focus on the music of the Beatles and their impact on American and British culture in the 1960s to the present day. Topics include considerations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and the media in their rise to fame; the influence of the counterculture, drugs, and other rock musicians, as well as Western and Indian classical music on their music and image; their perceived rivalry with the Rolling Stones; and their experimentation with recording technology.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2019, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
AMST 2350 - Archaeology of Indigenous North America (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2235, ARKEO 2235, AIIS 2350
This introductory course surveys archaeology's contributions to the study of American Indian cultural diversity and change in North America north of Mexico. Lectures and readings will examine topics ranging from the debate over when the continent was first inhabited to present-day conflicts between Native Americans and archaeologists over excavation and the interpretation of the past. We will review important archaeological sites such as Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, Lamoka Lake, and the Little Bighorn battlefield. A principal focus will be on major transformations in lifeways such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of political-economic hierarchies, and the disruptions that accompanied the arrival of Europeans to the continent.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2018, Fall 2017
AMST 2353 - Civil Rights vs. Human Rights in the Black Freedom Struggle (4 Credits)
This course explores the changing meaning of American freedom and citizenship in the context of the long struggle for black liberation. Relying on social and political history, it confronts the promise, possibilities, and limitations of civil rights and human rights in the twentieth century. We examine various “rights” discourses and their role in reconfiguring our legal landscape and cultural mores, molding national and group identity, bestowing social and moral legitimacy, shaping and containing political dissent, reinvigorating and redefining the egalitarian creed, and challenging as well as justifying the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S. We examine the attempts of subjugated groups to transcend narrow social definitions of freedom, and we confront the question of formal political rights versus broader notions of economic justice in a national and international context.
Distribution Requirements: (HST-AS)
AMST 2354 - African American Visions of Africa (4 Credits)
This seminar examines some of the political and cultural visions of Africa and Africans held by African-American intellectuals and activists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emphasis is placed on the philosophies of black nationalism, Pan Africanism and anticolonialism and the themes of emigration, expatriation, repatriation and exile. Awareness of Africa and attitudes toward the continent and its peoples have profoundly shaped African-American identity, culture and political consciousness. Notions of a linked fate between Africans and black Americans have long influenced black life and liberation struggles within the U.S. The motives, purposes and outlooks of African-American theorists who have claimed political, cultural, or spiritual connection to Africa and Africans have varied widely, though they have always powerfully reflected black experiences in America and in the West. The complexity and dynamism of those views belie simplistic assumptions about essential or natural relationships, and invite critical contemplation of the myriad roles that Africa has played in the African-American mind.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2018
AMST 2371 - Planet Rap: Where Hip Hop Came From and Where It's Going (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 2370, ASRC 2370
Since hip hop first emerged in the South Bronx nearly half a century ago, it has grown into a global movement. Youth around the world not only consume hip hop; they also create their own, adapting hip hop music, texts, dance, and visual culture to local realities. This course traces the ongoing connections between hip hop's roots in the cultural expression of marginalized African American and Latinx youth in the postindustrial urban United States, its contemporary relationship to US popular culture, and its routes around the globe, where diverse practitioners mobilize its beats, rhymes, and visual culture to address experiences of oppression and displacement, celebrate life, and agitate for social justice. (HC)
Forbidden Overlaps: AMST 2371, ASRC 2370, MUSIC 2370, MUSIC 3490
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Winter 2025, Summer 2024, Winter 2024
AMST 2372 - Songs of the Summer: Social Histories of U.S. Popular Music (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 2372, FGSS 2372
This course takes a selection of hit songs of the summer from the past fifty years as entry points into pivotal moments in U.S. history. Popular music not only reflects social issues; it also shapes public perception and at can fuel social change, from contexts ranging from the civil rights movement, to US imperialist projects, to the HIV/AIDs crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, movements like BlackLivesMatter and MeToo, and struggles for trans rights. (HC)
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024
AMST 2375 - US Climate Catastrophes: Rethinking US History through the Climate (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2371
How does our understanding of the current climate emergency change when we examine the past with an environmental lens? In this course, we will think of US history through climate catastrophes, human-made and naturally occurring, to consider how humans and the environment have interacted with each other over time and to reconsider how that relationship has changed within a US context. Rather than focus on the traditional turning points of the US, such as wars or presidents, we will look at the California Gold Rush, the use of DDT, the building of the Oahe Dam, the Love Canal, and 21st-century hurricanes.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
AMST 2381 - Corruption, Collusion, and Commerce in Early America and the Caribbean (4 Credits)
Corruption in politics and economics has become a significant issue in the modern world. This course introduces students to the study of corruption and collusion from the perspective of early America and the Caribbean from 1500 through 1800. By examining the historical evolution of corruption, the course addresses questions such as: What is corruption and, by contrast, what is good governance? Who creates law and when is it enforced? Can societies be corrupt or only institutions? And, does economic corruption help or hurt financial development? Our readings and discussion will examine the intersection of politics, culture, gender, and economics. We will reflect on how early Americans understood corruption and collusion and what that can tell us about similar modern issues. In the end, the course focuses on the concept of corruption as a complex social function through the lens of bribery, piracy, sex crimes, and other forms of social deviancy.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
AMST 2391 - From Terra Incognita to Territories of Nation-States: Early American History in Two Dozen Maps (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2391
This course engages the rich cartographic record of colonial North America via an in-depth analysis of two dozen iconic maps. Integrating visual and textual analysis, students will assess human representations of space across cultural boundaries, explore change over time in the mapmaking practices of indigenous peoples and various European intruders, and study the evolving relationship between cartography and power, attending particularly to the process by which mapping promoted a revolutionary new understanding of American geography as composed of the bounded territories of nation-states.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
AMST 2392 - Where Fire Meets Ice: Histories of the U.S.-Canada Border Across Four Centuries (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2392
The international boundary between Canada and the United is the longest, straightest border in the world. Although frequently cast as boring in juxtaposition to its southern counterpart, this viewpoint overlooks the U.S.-Canada border's longstanding history as a site and engine of trans-national tensions and controversies. This course addresses the complex histories of the 3,500 mile boundary separating the United States from Canada from its eighteenth century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to drug smuggling, border fence construction, pandemic-related travel restrictions, immigration, commerce, environmental issues, Indigenous peoples' rights, and national identity construction. The instructor, a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, brings not only life experience of border-crossing, but also a recent background in legal testimony on border-related issues.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2021
AMST 2401 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature (3 Credits)
Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2019
AMST 2460 - Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers (3 Credits)
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers. We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chavez, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021 AMST 2505 - Playing out Difference: History and Identity in Sports Film (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 2501, FGSS 2501, VISST 2502
The importance of sports to American society and popular culture cannot be denied, and this seminar will study sports films' vital significance in representing the intersection of sports, history, and social identities. This seminar explores how the role of competition between individuals and teams in sports films relate to the competing discourses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in society at large. Additionally, we will examine how social issues are understood in sporting terms and concepts, such as: the hero and the underdog; urban and rural; natural talent versus hard work; and the individual versus team identity.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Winter 2025, Winter 2024, Winter 2023, Fall 2018
AMST 2555 - Introduction to Latin American Art (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ARTH 2550, LATA 2050, VISST 2550, SHUM 2550
This course is designed to introduce students to Latin American art from the pre-Columbian period to the present. It will cover the arts of ancient civilizations including the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, and Inca, as well as the colonial, modern, and contemporary arts of Latin America and the Latino/a diaspora. Major themes include the relationship between art and religion, innovations and transformations in Latin American art across time, art and identity, as well as Indigenous and Afro-Latin American contributions to the visual arts. This course examines the societal relevance of images across Latin American cultures by paying close attention to the historical and political contexts in which they were created. Course readings are drawn from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and history, along with theoretical perspectives on colonialism, postcolonialism, identity, race, and ethnicity.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Spring 2017
AMST 2562 - Black Queer Writing and Media (4 Credits)
This course will introduce students to Black Queer literatures and media. Since these materials decenter whiteness and patriarchal heterosexism, they often seem illegible to those approaching them from the perspective of the dominant culture. We will start with foundational texts that outline the parameters of our dominant culture. We will then discuss Black Queer contemporary novels, films, essays, and visual art in order to understand the ways that these works move past the limitations of those parameters. By engaging these literatures and media, this course investigates the exciting possibilities that emerge from understanding alternative ways of being and living in our world. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023
AMST 2581 - Environmental History (4 Credits)
This lecture course serves as an introduction to the historical study of humanity's interrelationship with the natural world. Environmental history is a quickly evolving field, taking on increasing importance as the environment itself becomes increasingly important in world affairs. During this semester, we'll examine the sometimes unexpected ways in which natural forces have shaped human history (the role of germs, for instance, in the colonization of North America); the ways in which human beings have shaped the natural world (through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization, as well as the formation of things like wildlife preserves); and the ways in which cultural, scientific, political, and philosophical attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. This is designed as an intensely interdisciplinary course: we'll view history through the lenses of ecology, literature, art, film, law, anthropology, and geography. Our focus will be on the United States, but, just as environmental pollutants cross borders, so too will this class, especially toward the end, when we attempt to put U.S. environmental history into a geopolitical context. This course is meant to be open to all, including non-majors and first-year students.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG, SCH-AG), (HST-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 AMST 2585 - Millennial Jewish Stars: Race, Gender and Sexuality (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021
AMST 2600 - Introduction to Native American Literature (3 Credits)
The production of North American Indigenous literatures began long before European colonization, and persists in a variety of printed, sung, carved, painted, written, spoken, and digital media. From oral traditions transmitted through memory and mnemonics to contemporary genres and media, Native North American authors offer Indigenous perspectives on social, political, and environmental experience, through deft artistry and place-specific aesthetics. Our attention will focus on the contexts from which particular Native American literatures emerge, the ethics to consider when entering Indigenous intellectual territory, and close attention to common themes and techniques that frequently appear in contemporary Native American literature. Readings will feature a range of novels, poetry, short fiction, graphic novel/comics, and film.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2019 AMST 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature (3 Credits)
This course will introduce both a variety of writings and media by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working with a variety of genres, we will be asking questions about the relation between literary forms and the socio-historical context within which they take on their meanings, and about the historical formation of Asian American identities.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EAAREA, SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 AMST 2622 - Introduction to Asian American Performance and Media (3-4 Credits)
An introduction to Asian American performance, this course will consider both historical and contemporary examples and forms through the analytics of Asian American studies, theatre studies, and performance studies. Throughout the semester, we will pay equal attention to various forms of performance - plays and other staged performances, performance art, as well as everyday performances - as well as both primary sources and theoretical/critical readings. Students will be introduced to key concepts of Asian American performance studies, such as Orientalism, yellow face, radicalized accents, and the performing body, and will begin to not only map a history of Asian American performance but also situate contemporary examples within this tradition.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2019
AMST 2630 - Brazil to Brooklyn: Jewish Cultures of the Americas (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 2630, JWST 2630, COML 2630, RELST 2620
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Summer 2010, Fall 2009 AMST 2635 - A Haunted House Divided: The American Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Literature (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 2635
This course looks at the American Gothic tradition as showing us the fissures in early American political life specifically around the issues of slavery and Native American land rights. While Gothic literature is often relegated to the role of entertainment, it also reveals the ways in which American culture was, as Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, shaped by the presence of the racial other. The Gothic also offers a space through which to offer not just clever observations but scathing critiques by augmenting the sense of the monstrous underlying grand sentiments of American Exceptionalism.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023
AMST 2640 - Introduction to Asian American History (4 Credits)
An introductory history of Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, and Koreans in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1990s. Major themes include racism and resistance, labor migration, community formation, imperialism, and struggles for equality.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS), (LH-IL, OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2020
AMST 2645 - Race and Modern US History (3 Credits)
This course surveys modern U.S. history, from Reconstruction to the contemporary period. It will examine how race has been the terrain on which competing ideas of the American nation have been contested. From struggles over citizenship rights to broader meanings of national belonging, we will explore how practices, ideas, and representations have shaped political, cultural, and social power. A key concern for this course is examining how groups and individuals have pursued racial justice from the late-nineteenth century to the present.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
AMST 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature (3 Credits)
This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (D-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 AMST 2660 - Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong: Unlearning Native American History (3 Credits)
One thing many Americans think they know is their Indians: Pocahontas, the First Thanksgiving, fighting cowboys, reservation poverty, and casino riches. Under our very noses, however, Native American history has evolved into one of the most exciting, dynamic, and contentious fields of inquiry into America's past. It is now safer to assume, as Comanche historian Paul Chaat Smith has pointed out, that everything you know about Indians is in fact wrong. Most people have much to unlearn about Native American history before true learning can take place. This course aims to achieve that end by (re)introducing students to key themes and trends in the history of North America's indigenous nations. Employing an issues-oriented approach, the course stresses the ongoing complexity of Native American societies' engagements with varieties of settler colonialism since 1492 and dedicates itself to a concerted program of myth-busting. As such, the course will provide numerous opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking and reading skills.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
AMST 2665 - The American Revolutionary Era (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2665
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the origins, character, and results of the American Revolution, as well as engaging the enduring significance of its memory in contemporary American life - why do we choose to remember the American Revolution in ways that occlude its divisive and bloody events? This course explores many of the key themes of this critical period of American history: the rise of colonial opposition to Great Britain, the nature of the Revolutionary Wars, and the domestic republican experiment that followed the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The course emphasizes student interpretations with an eye toward analyzing the comparative experiences of women and men, everyday people and famous leaders, Native Americans, African-Americans, and those who opposed the Revolution.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2018
AMST 2667 - Octavia Butler (3 Credits)
MacArthur Genius grant winner Octavia Butler is famously known as a science fiction writer, but her novels, short stories and essays both adhere to and disrupt expectations in the genre. Throughout her writing career, Butler explored themes of space travel, time travel, African indigeneity, gender, race, spirituality, and ecological degradation. This class, will introduce students to Octavia Butler's work and the creative fields she helped spawn. Additionally, we will investigate and contextualize these themes alongside the scholarly fields of Black feminist studies, the environmental humanities, Black speculation fiction, Afrofuturism, disability studies and more!
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 2669 - American Political Thought (4 Credits)
This course offers a survey of American political thought from the colonial period to the present. We will read Puritan sermons, revolutionary pamphlets, philosophical treatises, presidential orations, slave narratives, prison writings, and other classic texts, in order to understand the ideas and debates that have shaped American politics. Topics to be discussed will include the meaning of freedom, the relationship between natural rights and constitutional authority, the idea of popular sovereignty, theories of representation and state power, race and national identity, problems of inequality, and the place of religion in public life. Lectures will be organized around both historical context and close reading of primary texts.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
AMST 2675 - Cultures of the Cold War (3 Credits)
This class aims to approach the literature and culture of the Cold War as the birth of the present Age of Information, as well as the origin of modern notions of privacy that are now being superseded. We will begin with Hiroshima and the several forms of American anti-communism, and proceed from containment culture to the beginning of the counterculture, and from atomic weapons to the start of the environmental movement. Units of study will include intelligence (espionage), advertising (publicity), civil rights, and the public questioning of gender roles. We will also view a few films and discuss music and painting of the period. Authors include James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Marshall McLuhan, John Okada, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith, and Rachel Carson.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Fall 2014, Spring 2012 AMST 2682 - Sex, Drugs, and Experimenting with Democracy in 1960s and 1970s America (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2680
Roots of the United States' most vexing problems can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. This class explores the struggles to explain these turbulent decades in both popular memory and historical scholarship and the consequences of our interpretations for understanding today. Students will use movies and oral history to investigate the role of perspective, framing, and agency in historical analysis. We will examine the era's struggles over issues such as racial hierarchy, gender roles, abortion, climate change, economic inequality, war, drugs, crime, and democracy.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Fall 2018
AMST 2690 - American Poetry Since 1850 (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 2690
This course introduces students to major American poets from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is designed for anyone wanting to deepen their knowledge of and appreciation for poetry while also addressing its relationship to modern American social and cultural history. It addresses questions about what poetry is for, why it is often difficult, how it is related to language-play as a basic human drive that engages with personal anxieties, bodily rhythms, social and existential tensions, and the riddles of existence. Another through-line of this course is the relationship of poetry to democracy in the United States.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022
AMST 2710 - US Education System: Courts, Data, Law and Politics (3-4 Credits)
This course aims to explore and answer a single question about America's promise-of success if you work hard and do well in school: Why do we have such substantial and long-standing inequality in the U.S.? In answering this central question, we will investigate the goals, roles, and outcomes of formal educational institutions in American society and the legal and policy environment in which they operate. Specifically, we will review historical state and federal policy, trace the $700 million spent, and interrogate the sociological functions of public and private K12 schools, including the successes, failures, and enigmas of school organization and policy at the local, state, and national level.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will recognize and assess the sociological function(s) of American Schools (e.g., socializer, sorter, trainer, and caretaker) as well as its role as a change agent, an equalizer, and reproducer of society's inequalities.
- Students will critique education as a major public policy issue in American society.
- Students will synthesize the legal framework and justification for local, state, and federal roles in public and private schooling.
- Students will explore and interpret social and fiscal data to clarify policy assumptions and critiques.
- Students will integrate and discuss their own schooling and what role they can play in the future of school improvement.
AMST 2721 - Introduction to the Anthropology of Latine Communities (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2721, LSP 2721
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2018, Fall 2010
AMST 2725 - Introduction to Latina-o-x Performance (3 Credits)
This course is an introduction to Latina/o/x Performance investigating the historical and contemporary representations of Latina/o/xs in performance and media. Throughout the semester, students will critically examine central themes and issues that inform the experiences and (re) presentations of Latina/o/xs in the United States. How is latinidad performed? In situating the class around Latina/o/x, as both an umbrella term and an enacted social construction, we will then turn our attention to (re) presentations of latinidad within different genres of cultural expressions.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2019
AMST 2729 - From the Swampy Land: Indigenous People of the Ithaca Area (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2720, ARKEO 2720, AIIS 2720
Who lived in the Ithaca area before American settlers and Cornell arrived? Where do these indigenous peoples reside today? This class explores the history and culture of the Gayogoho:no (Cayuga), which means people from the mucky land. We will read perspectives by indigenous authors, as well as archaeologists and historians, about past and current events, try to understand reasons why that history has been fragmented and distorted by more recent settlers, and delve into primary sources documenting encounters between settlers and the Gayogoho:no. We will also strive to understand the ongoing connections of the Gayogoho:no to this region despite forced dispossession and several centuries of colonialist exclusion from these lands and waters.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022
AMST 2735 - Children's Literature (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 2730
An historical study of children's literature from the 17th century to the present, principally in Europe and America, which will explore changing literary forms in relation to the social history of childhood. Ranging from oral folktale to contemporary novelistic realism (with some glances at film narrative), major figures may include Perrault, Newbery, the Grimms, Andersen, Carroll, Alcott, Stevenson, Burnett, Kipling, the Disney studio, E. B. White, C. S. Lewis, Sendak, Silverstein, Mildred Taylor, and Bette Greene. We'll also encounter a variety of critical models-psychoanalytic, materialist, feminist, structuralist-that scholars have employed to explain the variety and importance of children's literature. Finally, we will consider how the idea of the child has evolved over this period.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Fall 2017, Fall 2015 AMST 2751 - Introduction to Humanities (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SHUM 2750, HIST 2050, ENGL 2950, ARTH 2750, GOVT 2755, COML 2750, CLASS 2750, ASRC 2750, ROMS 2750, VISST 2750, ARKEO 2750
These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment preference given to: students accepted in the Humanities Scholars Program.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2022 AMST 2755 - Race and Slavery in the Early Atlantic World (4 Credits)
The legacies of slavery remain all too obvious in the modern Atlantic World. From demographic imbalances to pervasive social and economic inequality, much of the recent past has involved addressing that destructive early modern heritage. This course traces the roots of slavery and race in the Atlantic World from 1400 to 1800. Through lectures, readings, and class discussion, we will examine how politics, culture, gender, and the law intersected to shape the institution of slavery and the development of conceptions of race. As an Atlantic World course, we will take a comparative perspective and ask how different imperial regimes (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English) fostered different systems of race and slavery in the Americas. We will also ask how the law as a lived experience, gender norms, and imperial politics all worked to shape the production of racial hierarchies.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2020
AMST 2760 - American Cinema (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 2560, VISST 2300, ENGL 2761
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, movies - and in particular Hollywood - have profoundly influenced the ways in which people see, think and talk about the world. Focusing mostly on Hollywood film, this course introduces the study of American cinema from multiple perspectives: as an economy and mode of production; as an art form that produces particular aesthetic styles; as a cultural institution that comments on contemporary issues and allows people to socialize. We will consider the rise of Hollywood in the age of mass production; the star system; the introduction of sound and the function of the soundtrack; Hollywood's rivalry with television; censorship; the rise of independent film, etc. Weekly screenings introduce major American genres (e.g. science fiction, film noir, the musical) and directors (e.g. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2020, Fall 2016, Fall 2013
AMST 2775 - The North American West (4 Credits)
In this course, we will learn about the history of the West. We will deconstruct popular myths about the West, as we engage with the major themes and significant debates that define the historical scholarship. This course will begin with Native origin stories and end with the 20th century. As a class, we will study the west from a multitude of perspectives, such as race, gender, and ethnicity, the environment, labor, politics and culture. This course is designed to increase our knowledge of the social, political and intellectual developments that have shaped our understanding of the West.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
AMST 2790 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with JWST 2790, VISST 2790, PMA 2490
What does it mean to call a film is Jewish? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews-actors, directors, screenwriters, composers-play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class-an average of one per week-and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 AMST 2792 - Monuments, Museums, and Memory: An Introduction to Public History (4 Credits)
In this course we will examine how we have come to narrate social, cultural, and political history in the United States, investigating the ways scholarly, curatorial, archival, and creative practices shape conceptions of the American past, in particular understandings of racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression and resistance. Students will build skills in historical interpretation and archival research and explore possibilities and challenges in preserving and presenting the past in a variety of public contexts-monuments, memorials, museums, historical sites, movies and television, and community-based history projects.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Fall 2019
AMST 2817 - America Confronts the World (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 2817, PUBPOL 2817
Donald Trump and Biden give us two visions of America and of the world: xenophobic nationalism and pragmatic cosmopolitanism. America and the world are thus constituted by great diversity. The first half of the course seeks to understand that diversity in American politics and foreign policy viewed through the prisms of region, ideology, region, race, class and religion. The second half inquires into the U.S. and American engagement of different world regions and civilizations: Europe, Russia, North America, Latin America, China, Japan, India and the Middle East. U.S. hard power and American soft power find expression in far-reaching processes of American-infused globalization and U.S.-centered anti-Americanism reverberating around the world. Advocates of one-size-fits-all solutions to America's and the world's variegated politics are in for great disappointments.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, SBA-AG), (GLC-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
AMST 2885 - Consumer Culture (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 2885
This course will examine consumerism in the United States, first focusing on the rise of advertising, mass-market goods, shop windows, and department stores at the turn of the 20th century. We will examine the built environment, the experience of shopping, and the consequent disease of kleptomania, looking at inequality and activism as a potential political outlet for consumerism. We will also study consumerism as a system of cultural meaning. How do our objects shape and symbolize our identities? What does our constellation of material goods say about our values, our beliefs, and our lives? What stands outside consumer culture? What does it mean to commodify love or bottle nature? Can art or beauty be beyond value?
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2018
AMST 2955 - Socialism in America (3 Credits)
Why no socialism in America? Scholars and activists have long pondered the relative dearth (compared to other industrialized societies) of sustained, popular, anticapitalist activity in the United States. Sure, leftist movements in the U.S. have often looked and operated differently than those in other parts of the world. But many Americans have forged creative and vibrant traditions of anticapitalism under very difficult circumstances. This class examines socialist thought and practice in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present. We trace intersections of race, class, and gender while exploring the freedom dreams of those who have opposed capitalism in the very heart of global power.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2019
AMST 2980 - Inventing an Information Society (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with INFO 2921, ENGRG 2980, HIST 2920, STS 2921
Provides an introduction to the role computing and information technologies played in political public life, from tabulating machines used to calculate the census to Big Tech's impact on democratic procedures, the future of labor, and the environment. Though organized around four thematic units (Recognizing and Representing, Knowing, Working, and Belonging), the course pays attention to the chronological trajectory of technologies and political practices and students will develop the skills necessary for historical analysis. While focusing on the US experience the course also highlights the international flow of labor, materials, and ideas. By studying the development of computing historically, we will grapple with the effects of computing and data sciences on society today, paying special attention to critiques of economic, racial, and gender injustice. The course will meet twice a week, and each meeting will include a lecture followed by a discussion.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
Learning Outcomes:
- Knowledge of ethical issues regarding political representation, workplace compensation, and access to information technology.
- Ability to make sound arguments about major themes in the history of information technology. Ability to discuss these themes orally with the professor and other students.
- Understanding of the complex, mutual relationship between technological changes introduced by engineers and their embeddedness in larger political movements.
- An appreciation of how the ways we tell histories of technological innovation shape political outcomes and the ability to critically evaluate such historical narratives.
AMST 3015 - Sweetness: How Sugar Built the Modern World (3 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2018
AMST 3024 - Being Native in the 21st Century: American Indian and Alaska Native Politics, History, and Policy (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 3020, GOVT 3051
The course examines the historical political landscape of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States and the interplay between tribal interests, politics, and the federal government. The course also looks at contemporary Native issues, federal policy and programs, tribal governance, relations between Tribal Nations and states and between Tribal Nations and the federal government. Finally, the course will explore Indigenous pop-culture and its influence on federal policy.The majority of classes will have a guest lecturer related to that week's topic. Guest lectures will include, but not limited to, political appointees, congressional staff, political advocates, elected tribal leaders, and more.
Prerequisites: Recommended prerequisite: GOVT 1111.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SBA-HE)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
Learning Outcomes:
- This course will teach students the political science of Native American tribes and their interactions with the U.S. government, developing their skill in applying a disciplinary framework (Political Science) and gaining expertise in a specific policy area (Native American Policy).
AMST 3025 - Asian Americans and Popular Culture (4 Credits)
This course examines both mainstream representations of and independent media made by, for, and about Asians and Asian Americans throughout U.S. cultural history. In this course, we will analyze popular cultural genres & forms such as: documentary & narrative films, musical theatre & live performance revues, television, zines & blogs, YouTube/online performances, karaoke & cover performances, stand-up comedy, and popular music. Employing theories of cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies, we will discuss the cultural, discursive, and political impact of these various popular cultural forms and representations from the turn of the 20th century to the present.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(SAAREA, SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2018 AMST 3033 - Politics of Public Policy in the U.S. (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3032, PUBPOL 3032
Public policies are political outcomes determined by processes that are complex, convoluted and often controversial. The aim of this course is to equip students with the conceptual tools necessary to understand these processes. We will begin with a review of popular approaches to studying policy and then move on to explore the various stages of policy development: agenda-setting, policy design, policy implementation, policy feedback and policy change. We will consider the roles played by both institutions (congress, the bureaucracy and interests groups) and everyday people. Finally, we will closely study several specific policy arenas (a few likely candidates include: education policy, health policy, social welfare policy and housing policy). As we engage all of these ideas, students will be consistently challenged to grapple with the paradoxes of policy making in a democratic polity and to envision pathways for substantive political change.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
AMST 3061 - Climate Politics in the US (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3061
Climate policy is one of the most important and contentious areas of politics in the US today. In this course we will consider climate change in the United States, identifying how political institutions, everyday people, and the physical environment come together to affect climate policy. This course will consider climate policy at the local and federal level, as well as examine how the US participates in international climate agreements. Students will critically analyze contemporary US climate policy; develop and addresses pertinent research questions; and learn how to conduct and communicate policy-relevant research.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
AMST 3071 - Enduring Global and American Issues (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 3071, GOVT 3071
The US and the global community face a number of complex, interconnected and enduring issues that pose challenges for our political and policy governance institutions and society at large. Exploring how the US and the world conceive of the challenges and take action on them is fundamental to understanding them. This course investigates such issues, especially ones in the critical areas of sustainability, social justice, technology, public health and globalization, security and conflict. Students will engage with these areas and issues and the challenges they pose, using multiple frameworks and approaches, through weekly class discussions and lectures.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, SBA-AG), (CA-HE, SBA-HE), (OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Spring 2022
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will have identified and analyzed multiple critical issues in America and the world.
- Students will have formulated a number of public-facing analyses of these issues.
- Graduate students will have analyzed the current understanding of each issue at a scholarly level (for grad students).
AMST 3072 - The U.S. Constitution: Crisis, Change and Legitimacy (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020
AMST 3092 - Strategic Advocacy: Lobbying and Interest Group Politics in Washington, D.C. (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 3090, GOVT 3092
How is public policy really formed in the United States today? Who are the key actors and decision makers who shape the laws and regulations that impact us at the local, state and federal levels of government? Most importantly, how do private individuals (lobbyists, trade associations, media and other influencers) sway how laws, rules and regulations impact our daily lives? The goal of this course is to provide a foundation of how private influence impacts our public policy. Building upon this foundation, students will learn who the key policymakers are in the public sector alongside of those in the private sector who seek to influence them. Students will gain knowledge through academic texts looking at the role of interest group politics in America as well as the instructor's 30 years of experience working as a public policy practitioner working at the highest levels of government on Capitol Hill and the White House as well as being a former lobbyist and licensed attorney at law.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SBA-HE)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Summer 2022, Spring 2022
Learning Outcomes:
- Describe how special interest groups seek to influence government policy, and the extent to which they succeed. This relates to outcomes of disciplinary knowledge (political science, law), applying multi-disciplinary perspectives, and policy analysis / public economics.
- Develop written and oral communication skills through several papers, a policy analysis assignment, and required participation in class discussion.
- Develop critical thinking skills. Describe and analyze various readings, and participate in class discussions, and make logical arguments in written assignments.
AMST 3112 - Congress and the Legislative Process (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3112, PUBPOL 3112
The course will be a lecture course on Congress, introducing them to the political science literature on the topic and the major research questions and approaches. We will examine the development of the institution, including formal theories for congressional organization as well as historically and politically oriented accounts of rule changes, committee power, and party influence. We will also look at the determinants of legislative productivity and gridlock, approaches to measuring and analyzing congressional behavior, the changing role of the electoral connection, and the causes and consequences of polarization.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2021
AMST 3121 - Crime and Punishment (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3121
This is a class about the American criminal justice system-from policing to prisons, from arrest to reentry. In many ways, the operation of the modern criminal justice system is taken for granted, which frequently allows it to escape close scrutiny. But we will examine it in great detail, with a focus on how it came about, how it sustains itself, its many roles in society (only some of which involve crime and justice), and how and why it may be changing. In Fall 2022, the class will take a particular look at policing and examine the calls for police reform and abolition. NB: This class is designed to challenge your settled assumptions and dearly held myths about what is right and wrong with the system. Those who have made up their mind about criminal justice in America should not take the course. This class was formerly GOVT 3141, PRISONS, taught by Prof. Margulies. It has been renamed and renumbered as GOVT 3121 to distinguish it from the distance learning course taught by Prof. Katzenstein.
Enrollment Information: Not open to: students who have taken GOVT 3141 with Prof. Margulies.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 AMST 3122 - Democracy (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3122
The United States has been widely associated with democratic ideals, and yet American democracy has been long in the making, even in recent decades retaining hallmarks of an unfinished work. It has evolved over time through an arduous and halting process, and it has not always moved in the direction of progress. How would we know if American democracy today was truly endangered and subject to backsliding? This course engages this question by grappling with what democracy means, how we can measure its attributes, and how we can assess whether they are robust or deteriorating. We focus on four key threats to democracy: political polarization; conflict over membership and status, particularly around race and gender; economic inequality; and the growth of executive power. We will consider the status of of free and fair elections, the rule of law, the legitimacy of the opposition, and the integrity of rights, including voting rights, civil rights, and civil liberties, studying how these features have developed historically and what happened in periods when they were under threat. We will also evaluate the contemporary political context by applying the same analytical tools.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2022
AMST 3131 - The Nature, Functions, and Limits of Law (4 Credits)
A general-education course to acquaint students with how our legal system pursues the goals of society. The course introduces students to various perspectives on the nature of law, what functions it ought to serve in society, and what it can and cannot accomplish. The course proceeds in the belief that such matters constitute a valuable and necessary part of a general education, not only for pre-law students but especially for students in other fields. Assigned readings comprise legal materials and also secondary sources on the legal process and the role of law in society. The classes include discussion and debate about current legal and social issues, including equality, safety, the environment, punishment, and autonomy.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: undergraduate students.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
AMST 3141 - Prisons (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3141
The United States stands alone among Western, industrialized countries with its persistent, high rates of incarceration, long sentences, and continued use of the death penalty. This American exceptionalism -- the turn to mass incarceration -- has been fostered by the use of sharply-delineated categories that define vast numbers of people as outlaws and others as law-abiding. These categories that are based on ideas of personal responsibility and assumptions about race are modified somewhat by a liberal commitment to human rights. Our purpose in this course is to understand how such ideas have taken root and to locate the consequences of these ideas for policy and practice.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Winter 2025, Summer 2024, Winter 2024 AMST 3142 - Incarceration, Policy Response, and Self-Reflection (1-4 Credits)
AMST 3145 - Political Journalism (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 3140, ENGL 3941, GOVT 3221, COMM 3140
This course will explore the traditional dynamic and norms of political press coverage in the United States, and the impact of those patterns on both the government and the nation; some of the ways longstanding norms have recently shifted, and continue to shift; the larger historical forces and long-term trends driving those changes; and the theoretical questions, logistical challenges and ethical dilemmas these changes pose for both political journalists and those they cover. The course will equally cover the practice of political reporting, including weekly analysis and discussion of current press coverage, in-class exercises and simulations, readings from academic and journalistic sources, and visits from leading political reporters and former spokespeople able to offer a firsthand perspective on the topics.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-HE)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Summer 2022
Learning Outcomes:
- Demonstrate the ability to think like a journalist, in particular: to understand and interpret the elements of a variety of political reporting, and the editorial decision-making process.
- Understand, analyze, and contrast how the press and political actors influence each other, and society at large.
- Compose, evaluate, and assess editorial decisions in real time.
- Interpret and utilize the basic facts about how various political news beats and platforms operate, including congressional, White House, campaign, investigative, local, print, digital, and television journalism.
AMST 3161 - The American Presidency (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3161, PUBPOL 3161
This course will explore and seek explanations for the performance of the 20-21st century presidency, focusing on its institutional and political development, recruitment process (nominations and elections), relationships to social groups, economic forces, and political time. We will also analyze the parameters of foreign & domestic policy making.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2016
AMST 3185 - Living in an Uncertain World: Science, Technology, and Risk (4 Credits)
This course explores the history, sociology, and ethics of risk. In particular, we will focus on the complex and often ambiguous relationship between science, technology, and risk. A historical perspective shows how science and technology have generated risks while they have also played key roles in managing and solving those very risks. By examining several case studies, including 19th-century mining, the 1911 Triangle fire, nuclear science, the space shuttle disasters, asbestos litigation, Hurricane Katrina, and the contemporary financial crisis, we will consider how risk and ideas about risk have changed over time. By exploring different historical and cultural responses to risk, we will examine the sociopolitical dimensions of the definitions, perceptions, and management of risk both in the past and the present.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2018 AMST 3200 - Historical Archaeology: Capitalism, Colonialism, Race, Gender (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3210, ARKEO 3210
Distribution Requirements: (HST-AS, SSC-AS)
AMST 3214 - Dance in America: Cultures, Identities, and Fabrication (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3214
This course explores dance across multiple stages-TikTok videos, concert halls, streets-to assess how people create, sustain, and challenge markers of difference (race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class). How is dance appreciation different from appropriation? What are dancing avatars in video games allowed to do that real persons are not? We will examine genres such as k-pop, hip hop, salsa, modern dance, and ballroom as we develop the tools necessary for viewing dance, analyzing it, and understanding its place in larger social, cultural, historical, and political structures. We will explore how markers of difference affect the practice and the reception of dance forms, and, in turn, how dance helps shape representations of identities.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
AMST 3248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3248, ARKEO 3248, AIIS 3248
This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective. Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG, SBA-AG), (HST-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2018, Fall 2013
AMST 3261 - Health Equity, Politics and Policy (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3251, PUBPOL 3251
COVID-19 did not affect everyone equally. In fact, the opposite is true: the pandemic exposed dramatic health inequities by race, class, gender, and other factors. Not only were some groups more likely to catch and die from the virus than others, these same groups disproportionately suffered from its economic and social fallout, too. In the wake of this devastation, this course examines health (in)equities and what we can do about them. We explore what health equity means and how politics, policy, and power shape it -- both over time and across countries. Students will investigate how a wide range of social determinants (in addition to public health and health care systems) configure differences in health status across demographic groups. Three key touchstones of the class will be (1) a series of deep dives into specific policy areas, such as housing and environmental health, maternal and child health, and mental health and well-being (2) a consistent emphasis on politics, markets, and power (3) substantive opportunities for students to actively engage in health equity efforts beyond the classroom.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2023, Fall 2021
AMST 3262 - The US Regime in Comparative and Historical Perspective (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3261
This course approaches the study of the United States' political institutions and social cleavages from the perspective of comparative politics, historical political economy, and historical institutionalism. It is organized around core themes in each of these literatures, using the theories and concepts developed there to better explain particular features of the United States' politics and historical development. Topics covered include democratization, subnational authoritarianism, ethnic conflict, economic development, welfare and labor regimes, and party systems. The historical periods analyzed under these themes include the Founding, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the New Deal and its legacies, the Civil Rights movement, as well as the contemporary era.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG, SBA-AG), (HST-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 3281 - Constitutional Politics (4 Credits)
This course investigates the United States Supreme Court and its role in politics and government. It traces the development of constitutional doctrine, the growth of the Court's institutional power, and the Court's interaction with Congress, the president, and society. Discussed are major constitutional law decisions, their political contexts, and the social and behavioral factors that affect judges, justices, and federal court jurisprudence.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: undergraduates.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
AMST 3330 - Ways of Knowing: Indigenous and Place-Based Ecological Knowledge (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with NTRES 3330, AIIS 3330
Based on indigenous and place-based ways of knowing, this course (1) presents a theoretical and humanistic framework from which to understand generation of ecological knowledge; (2) examines processes by which to engage indigenous and place-based knowledge of natural resources, the nonhuman environment, and human-environment interactions; and (3) reflects upon the relevance of this knowledge to climatic change, resource extraction, food sovereignty, medicinal plant biodiversity, and issues of sustainability and conservation. The fundamental premise of this course is that human beings are embedded in their ecological systems.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: juniors and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG, ETH-AG, KCM-AG, SBA-AG, SCH-AG), (ETM-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL, CU-ITL, CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2020 Learning Outcomes:
- To appreciate natural resource development from a human ecological perspective.
- To apply the interdisciplinary lens of human ecology to understand human and environmental relations.
- To appreciate the complex interconnectivity between the ecological and the cultural.
- To comprehend that individual actions informed by cultural systems manifest themselves in social structures that rely on ecological foundations.
- To extend the notion of transdisciplinary to include indigenous and place-based knowledge.
- To situate indigenous and local knowledge within a humanistic framework of knowledge generation.
- To illustrate the participatory and experiential basis of indigenous and place-based knowledge.
- To propose a method best suited for researching such knowledge processes.
- To value the contributions of indigenous and place-based knowledge in the context of socio-cultural and environmental change and natural resource utilization.
AMST 3334 - Black Body Politics: Histories, Theories, and Debates (3 Credits)
The body has been crucially important to Black liberation politics. Not only has it been a site of contestation and control, but it has also served as a productive site of protest, alliance, and collective action, in ways both real and imagined. This course explores the historical debates and theories surrounding the body with a particular focus on how blackness informs bodily meanings and negotiations across the African diaspora. Weekly topics will allow students to consider the metaphorical and material dimensions of the body while also interrogating the very concept of embodiment, the ways in which individual bodies are constituted and reconstituted over time.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023
AMST 3355 - Beyoncé Nation: The Remix (4 Credits)
The Beyonce Nation course at Cornell, which has been requested regularly over the past several years, is finally back by popular demand! Beyonce's trajectory from Houston, Texas as a member of the group Destiny's Child to international fame and superstardom and a successful career as a solo singer, actress, clothing designer and entrepreneur holds important implications for critical dialogues on the U.S. South and national femininity. One aspect of this course examines themes related to her intersectional identity as a model of black and Southern womanhood that have recurred in her song lyrics, performances and visual representations, which have also been foundational for her development of more recent productions, including Formation and the larger Lemonade album. In this course, we will examine the related film and its adaptation by black queer and trans women in the Glass Wing Group's Lemonade Served Bitter Sweet. Moreover, we will examine the Homecoming documentary, along with Beyonce's newer projects such as The Lion: King: The Gift, Black Is King and Netflix productions. We will also consider Beyonce's early career in Destiny's Child, including the impact of projects such Independent Women, Part I and popular icons such as Farrah Fawcett in shaping her Southern discourse. We will carefully trace Beyonce's journey to global fame and iconicity and the roles of the music business, social media and technology, fashion, and film in her development. We will consider her impact on politics and contemporary activist movements, as well as her engagement of black liberation discourses from the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName and #TakeAKnee. Furthermore, we will consider Beyonce's impact in shaping feminism, including black feminism, along with her impact on constructions of race, gender, sexuality, marriage, family, and motherhood.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2017
AMST 3360 - American Drama and Theatre (3 Credits)
Explores major American playwrights from 1900 to 1960, introducing students to American theatre as a significant part of modern American cultural history. We will consider the ways in which theatre has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of a national identity. Similarly, we will examine the influence of the American Theatre on and in film. We will pay special attention to the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the time period and discuss the shifting popularity of dramatic forms, including melodrama, realism, expressionism, absurdism, and the folk play, in the American theatre canon. Authors include O'Neill, Glaspell, Odets, Rice, Hellman, Hughes, Miller, Williams, and Albee, among others.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2018
AMST 3370 - American Theatre on Stage and Screen II (1960-Present) (3 Credits)
How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond? What role has politics played in the theatre? How has performance been used to examine concepts of identity, community, and nationality? And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present. We will focus on theatre that responds directly to moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movements, Women's and Gender Equality Movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2019
AMST 3378 - Korean American Literature (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ASIAN 3378, AAS 3378, COML 3378
The rapidly growing literature of the Korean diaspora is one of the most significant developments in Korean literature since the 20th century. As Korean literature has circulated as world literature, it has become more widely recognized in the Anglophone world through translation and through narratives written by Korean American authors. This course will explore Korean American literature and creative transpacific exchanges between Korea and the US, addressing issues of identity, language, place, migration, race discrimination, citizenship, and the ways in which storytelling shapes community. We will examine the vibrant dialogue between works of fiction and poetry across the Pacific, reading the work of Korean American authors alongside the writing of Korean authors working in the Korean language. Increasingly, Korean American writers are creating narratives that remember and reconfigure Korean history and Korea’s relationship to the US, and we will explore narratives and poetry that offer new perspectives on the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and American imperialism such as Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered, and Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korea is required.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023
AMST 3380 - Urban Inequality (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SOC 3380
This is an interdisciplinary seminar on inequality in metropolitan American that draws on scholarship from sociology, history, political science, and public policy. The first part of the course is dedicated to understanding the political, historical, and social determinants of inequality in America's cities and their surrounding suburbs. Politically and socially, cities face unique challenges. Municipalities lack much formal authority to resolve issues that arise within their borders and their populations are often highly heterogeneous. In the second part of the course, we investigate several contemporary urban issues, such as schooling, gentrification, immigration, climate change, and downtown development.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG, SBA-AG), (HST-AS, SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2019 AMST 3401 - The Whites are Here to Stay: US-Africa Policy from Nixon to Date (4 Credits)
At the conclusion of World War II, the United States ushered in a new international order based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter, which became the basis for the United Nations Charter: including but not limited to the right to self-determination and global economic cooperation. All this changed when Henry Kissinger proclaimed that The whites are (in Africa) to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them. There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists. This course examines how US Foreign policy toward Africa has been formulated and executed since the Nixon years.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2016
AMST 3404 - A Maritime History of Early America, ca. 1450-1850 (4 Credits)
In the early 1590s, a mysterious cartographer drew a map of the Americas for eager and curious European audiences. The orientation of the map was from the perspective of a ship crossing the Atlantic and arriving in the Caribbean, with Newfoundland marking the northern boundary and the islands of the Caribbean marking its southern boundary. The mapmaker knew what he was doing, an entire literary genre in sixteenth-century Europe was devoted to the islands of the Americas. Sixteenth-century Europeans' obsession with all things maritime and insular point to an important historical fact often overlooked in more land-based histories of colonies and empires: West and West Central Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans encountered one another initially from the bows of canoes, the decks of ships, or sandy beaches. And maritime cultures and technologies continued to influence the development of colonial societies-and resistance to colonization-throughout the colonial period. This course explores the history of Early America from the deck of a ship. Through lectures and readings, we will analyze how the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean created opportunities for some and cataclysmic misfortune for others. Self-liberated African and Afro-descended mariners, women running port towns in the absence of men, Kalinago pilots, and impressed European sailors will serve as some of our guides through a maritime history of early America.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3405, EDUC 3405, LSP 3405
This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 AMST 3409 - Labor and Migration in Asian America (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with AAS 3400, SOC 3400, ILRGL 3400
Distribution Requirements: (ICE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021
AMST 3410 - Recent American History, 1965 to the Present (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 3410
This course examines United States history from the 1960s to the post-Covid-19 world we now inhabit. We will seek to better understand and interpret the meaning of the rapid transformations in American politics, economics, and culture in recent decades that have (at times) produced crises and disruptions in everyday life, as well as great achievements and accomplishments. We will pay particular attention to the social movements that have emerged in recent decades, including the struggle for African-American civil rights and equality, feminism and the changing roles of women, activism related to climate change and political reform, and the agency of ordinary people seeking to engage in meaningful social change. In addition, students will have the opportunity to evaluate a few different theoretical orientations and methodologies historians often use in practicing their craft. At a time when we seem to have limitless access to historical information (and misinformation) at our fingertips, we will examine the profound difference between and historical information and historical knowledge, with the goal of better understanding where the discipline (and our society) is heading in the 21st Century.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Winter 2025, Spring 2015, Spring 2010, Spring 2009
AMST 3418 - Environmental Justice Studio (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3418
Distribution Requirements: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
AMST 3420 - Social Justice: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with FGSS 3400, GOVT 3401, ANTHR 3402
Social Justice highlights refugee-led organizing and its intersections with un/documented and Indigenous beyond borders activism. We will work with and learn from refugee and asylum seekers led organizations that are started by and run by members of formerly displaced groups. These organizations build collectives and coalitions to organize communities across identities and legal categories and advocate for access to mobility and social justice. We will closely collaborate with these organizations and work on joint research projects.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2020, Spring 2019
AMST 3430 - History of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 3430
A survey of the turning point of US. history: The Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath, Reconstruction (1865-1877). We will look at the causes, the coming, and the conduct, of the war, and the way in which it became a war for freedom. We will then follow the cause of freedom through the greatest slave rebellion in American history, and the attempts by formerly enslaved people to make freedom real in Reconstruction. And we will see how Reconstruction's tragic ending left questions open that are still not answered in U.S. society and politics.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
AMST 3434 - Underground Railroad Seminar (3 Credits)
This seminar offers students the unique opportunity to explore the abolition movement of upstate New York and to visit and research some of the Underground Railroad routes in Ithaca and the Central New York region. The course provides an introductory examination of antebellum slavery and its abolition in the United States, including slave narratives and the alliances among free African Americans, Quakers, and other abolitionists in the United States. One of the principal student projects includes writing a brief fictional piece on the experience of being on the Underground Railroad or assisting someone to travel on it. These creative writing exercises will be considered for uploading to the Voices on the Underground Railroad website.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020 AMST 3436 - History of the Cops: Racialized Policing in the US (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 3436
The course will study the history of policing and race in the US. Beginning with the origins of American policing in a settler-colonial society, it will study the way whiteness emerged as an identity that depended on the control of both Indigenous and Black people. We will discuss the role of policing in national identity, the defense of slavery, American empire, the rise of urban industrialization, the emergence of professionalized policing, the control of immigrants, and the undermining of Reconstruction. The emergence of twentieth-century America, the identification of crime as a key political and the further development of racialized policing as a core fiscal and ideological project of the American state will be the main focus of the second half of the course. The course will also cover organization against racialized policing in particular as a major political project, source of identity, and root of both solidarity and estrangement between Black and other working class Americans.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
AMST 3442 - Merchants, Whalers, Pirates, Sailors: Early American Sea-Faring Literature (3 Credits)
This course will look at how literature based at sea helps both shape and challenge concepts of freedom and capital. By looking at the relationship between the sea-faring economy and its relationship to American Expansion and the history of enslavement we will explore how literature based at sea provided both a reflection and an alternate reality to land-based politics. While the main focus of the course will be nineteenth-century literature, we will also be exploring maritime literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its analogues in speculative fiction.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022
AMST 3445 - Inequality in U.S. Higher Education (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ILRLE 3445, ECON 3770
Is the U.S. college system a great equalizer or a cause of growing inequality? Improved access to higher education has brought millions of Americans into the middle class, and yet rising selectivity has meant that a disproportionate share of the economic elite come from a few top colleges. This course will explore the three big parts of the college experience --- (1) admissions and the college-going decision; (2) education while in college; and (3) college completion and labor market entry --- and ask how each part contributes to inequality in economic outcomes. Lectures and readings will focus on simple economic theories of higher education as well as the empirical methods used to test these theories.
Prerequisites: ILRLE 2400 or ECON 3030.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment preference given to: ILRLE 3445: ILR juniors and seniors. ECON 3770: undergraduate sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (ICE-IL, QP-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2020
AMST 3449 - Race and the American Labor Market in Historical Perspective (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ILRLE 3450, ECON 3480, HIST 3480
This class investigates race and class in the American labor market from Colonial America to the present day. We investigate the circumstances and labor institutions that brought labor to the U.S. and how laborers of various classes were received. A primary goal of the class is to understand the degree to which social mobility was historically possible in different time periods in American history. Social mobility is intimately tied to labor market institutions and the ability for workers to get ahead within those institutions. Some of the institutions we study are Indentured Servitude, Slavery, tenant farming, the Great Migration and labor organization in the industrial north. Ultimately we hope to build an understanding of the historical roots of the role of race and class today.
Prerequisites: ECON 3030 or ILRLE 2400.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: ILRLE 3450: ILR juniors and seniors. All other offerings: undergraduate sophomores, juniors and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (ICE-IL, LH-IL, QP-IL), (SBA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
AMST 3452 - Americanish: Identity and Selfhood in US History (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 3452
This course examines the intellectual and cultural life of Americans, over the last two centuries. The emphasis will be on identity, at both the personal and national level (and on how those two types of identity influence each other). We'll explore the ways in which different versions of American Culture have been constructed and contested. Central themes and subjects include individualism, militarism, belonging, technology, philosophy, and art, in addition to race, class, and gender. What cultural baggage are you carrying when you refer to America or Americans? Over the years, has the term American been more unifying or more divisive?
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020
AMST 3461 - Introduction to African American Cinema (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3461, VISST 3461, ASRC 3999
This course explores the rich and diverse history of African American filmmaking. Focusing on films written and/or directed by African Americans, this seminar traces the history of filmmaking from the silent era to the present day. In exploring Black cultural production and creative expression, students will consider the ways in which film is used as a medium of protest, resistance, and cultural affirmation. We will look at films through the critical lenses of race and representation in American cinema while locating our analysis within larger frameworks of Hollywood's representation of African Americans and various cultural and social movements within local and global contexts.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
AMST 3463 - Contemporary Television (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3463, VISST 3463
This course considers issues, approaches, and complexities in the contemporary television landscape. As television has changed drastically over the past fifteen years, this course provides students with a deeper understanding of the changes in narratives, technologies, forms, and platforms that structure/restructure the televisual world. Students will grapple with how new media forms such as web-series and on-demand internet streaming services have changed primetime television. We will balance our look at television shows with nuanced readings about the televisual media industry. By watching, analyzing, and critiquing the powerful medium of television, students will situate their understanding within a broader consideration of the medium's regulation, production, distribution, and reception in the network and post-network era.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2021, Fall 2018
AMST 3464 - Representational Ethics in Film and Television (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3464, FGSS 3464, VISST 3464
This course is designed to explore the varied ways that race and gender intersect with the media industry. While common industrial logic suggests these descriptors of identity are not a factor in terms of its business models and assumptions, the reality is much more complex. Race, as well as gender, class, and sexuality, play large parts in how media industries function and in informing and shaping audience expectations and assumptions. Thus, the time spent in class will largely consist of deconstructing several media industries, including film, television, and new media to show just how race, as well as other modes of identity such as gender, sexuality, and class, operate within it.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023
AMST 3503 - Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (3 Credits)
This course offers an opportunity to read in depth two major writers of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Friends and one-time collaborators in the New York City of the 1920s, each had important careers that extended long after the Harlem Renaissance period in which they achieved early renown. This class will survey the myriad genres in which each writer worked (short stories, poetry, novels, drama, critical writing, folklore and anthropology). And it will also consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which both writers achieved early renown and which their work critically contested. The class concludes by examining the reading works of later major authors (Toni Morrison, Harryette Mullen) who drew directly with Hughes' and Hurston's legacy.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
AMST 3510 - United We Stand - Divided We Fall: The Rise of Polarization and Social Division - and What it Means (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 3510, GOVT 3512
When did bipartisan become a bad word? Should we unfriend and unfollow people who have different opinions than our own? How did we become a country that grows more polarized and divided every year? Most importantly, can we change, or are we destined to continue down this path?
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG, SBA-AG), (HA-HE, SBA-HE)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will identify and describe long term trends, key individuals, and events impacting politics in the U.S.
- Students will analyze the impacts of those key individuals and events and discuss how those impacts are likely to affect future U.S. politics.
- Students will formulate possible strategies to reinforce, or alter, current trends within the U.S.
- Students will research and synthesize the scholarly understanding of specific aspects of polarization (graduate students).
AMST 3525 - Howls and Love Songs: Twentieth Century American Poetry (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 3525
Our focus in this course will be on the vibrantly varied body of poetry produced in the United States during the 20th century. Encompassing strains of worldly celebration and prophetic rage, visionary ecstasy and minute attention to ordinary life, this poetry breaks new ground in every decade, mixing formal and stylistic innovation with a continuously expanding sense of the national landscape in all its demographic and cultural diversity. Poets to be studied include Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and others.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2019, Spring 2015, Fall 2013
AMST 3533 - Screen and Story: Script Analysis (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3533
This course explores the history, theory, and craft of writing for film, television, and other narrative media (including documentary, reality television, interactive media, etc.). We consider the vital elements of storytelling along with structural principles, evolving industrial pressures and practices, and emerging non-linear ideas, with a regular line of up of screenings, guest speakers and practicing writers. This course includes both analytic and creative-writing assignments.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
AMST 3562 - Thinking from a Different Place: Indigenous Philosophies (3 Credits)
The Western nation-state has failed to solve the two most pressing, indeed catastrophic, global problems: poverty and climate change. This failure is due to the inability of national policy to imagine a world beyond a boundary drawn by the formative capitalist ideas of property, production, and profit. The course will begin by discussing the historical origin and continuing force of these ideas while raising questions about their limits. Then it will look at a range of alternative ideas about how the world should work if we want to keep it socially, economically, and ecologically in balance. The alternatives we will query come from a range of Indigenous writers of fiction, poetry, and theory, who locate themselves in Native American (north and south), Aboriginal, and Maori communities.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, LA-AG), (SCD-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021 Learning Outcomes:
- Explain Indigenous theory and practice in dealing with social, economic, and environmental issues.
- Contrast Indigenous theory and practice with Western approaches to these issues at a time of gross income inequality and environmental collapse worldwide.
- Think critically about the most effective ways to deal with these global issues after having considered both approaches to these issues.
AMST 3565 - Black Ecoliterature (3 Credits)
Mainstream media would have us believe that driving a new Toyota Prius, recycling, and shopping clean at Whole Foods would make us all food environmentalists, right? Additionally, climate change and environmental degradation are often discussed as if they are phenomena that affect us all equally. Despite these dynamics, research in recent years tells us that while there might be some general ways that we experience our constantly changing physical environments-race, gender, and location very much affect how we experience Nature. In this course we will use literature from across the African diaspora to investigate how looking at race, gender, and location produces very different ideas about environment, environmentalism, and Nature itself.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023
AMST 3581 - Imagining Migration in Film and Literature (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GERST 3581, COML 3580, PMA 3481, VISST 3581
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2019, Spring 2017, Spring 2015
AMST 3590 - The Black Radical Tradition in the U.S. (3 Credits)
This course provides a critical historical interrogation of what Black Marxism author Cedric Robinson called the Black Radical Tradition. It will introduce students to some of the major currents in the history of black radical thought, action, and organizing, with an emphasis on the United States after World War I. It relies on social, political, and intellectual history to examine the efforts of black people who have sought not merely social reform, but a fundamental restructuring of political, economic, and social relations. We will define and evaluate radicalism in the shifting contexts of liberation struggles. We will explore dissenting visions of social organization and alternative definitions of citizenship, progress, and freedom. We will confront the meaning of the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality in social movements.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS), (LH-IL, OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2020, Spring 2018
AMST 3602 - Cultural History of North America (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 3602
This course examines the history of culture in North America from the pre-contact era to present. We will examine how Native, African, European, Asian, and Latino/a influences, along with colonization, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and consumerization, reshaped the development of American culture, including its architecture, literature, music, visual art, and practices of religion, leisure, and consumption. We will also gain a basic familiarity with the theory and methods of cultural history. Intended for upper-division undergraduate students, the course provides practice in the analysis of historical sources, historiography, and written and oral expression.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
AMST 3616 - Podcast, Radio, Gramophone: Literary Technologies of Sound (3 Credits)
How can we account for the contemporary popularity of podcasts? In what ways do they build on, and break from, earlier forms of writing for the ear? In this class we will study innovative podcast fictions like Welcome to Night Vale, Forest 404, and Homecoming together with pathbreaking aural works of the 20th century, from The War of the Worlds to John Cage's Roaratorio and albums by the Firesign Theatre. We will consider the new opportunities and challenges of the podcasting medium, making our own recordings along the way. And we will look at well-known authors - from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas to Ursula Le Guin and Amiri Baraka - who experimented with then-new technologies like the gramophone, radio, audiotape, LP, headphones, the Walkman, and more.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
AMST 3617 - Cornell Hip-Hop Collective (1 Credit)
Crosslisted with MUSIC 3616
This course is open to experienced rappers, beatmakers, and vocalists interested forging collaborative relationships with other students. Taking as a foundation hip-hop's relationship to social justice, each semester we will work together to plan and record an EP on a theme or keyword chosen as a group. We will construct and analyze playlists of inspirational material, identifying specific hip-hop compositional strategies for creating beats and rhymes on a theme, and will use these tools to create and workshop our own collaborative tracks in weekly meetings. (PL)
Enrollment Information: Please contact the instructor to audition.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
AMST 3621 - Dissent and Protest in U.S. History (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021
AMST 3625 - Frederick Douglass and Frances E.W. Harper (4 Credits)
Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) and France Harper's (1825-1911) careers as activists, orators, writers, and suffragists spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, from the age of enslavement through Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow. We might say that the narrative of the life of Douglass is the narrative of the life of democracy and citizenship in the United States, as told by a man who often found himself characterized as an intruder, a fugitive, and an outlaw. Harper was a poet, lecturer, novelist, orator, and suffragist who challenged her white sisters to face their racism and her black brothers to face their misogyny. How do these two writers expand and challenge our understandings of citizenship and democracy?
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 3629 - After Nature: Art and Environmental Imagination (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ARTH 3620
This course looks at what it means to make art in, of, and after nature, and asks how that art might contribute to shaping the world we live in. Tracing a trajectory from the collection and display of natural history specimens to views of European and American landscapes to contemporary artists who address ecological crises, the course offers both a history of landscape in western art and a study of environmental imagination. We will further explore how nature is represented on Cornell's campus, including in the Johnson Museum, the Lab of Ornithology and the Botanic Gardens. This course includes opportunities to creatively reflect on our personal relationship to nature through hands-on activities. Students from all disciplines are welcome to engage with themes including natural curiosities, parks and gardens, ideas of wilderness, the picturesque, environmental preservation, earth works, and the post-natural.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2021 AMST 3632 - U.S. Literature and the End of the American Century (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 3630
What is (or was) American empire? This course examines U.S. literature from WWII to the early 21st century. This period has been termed the American century because of the U.S.'s dominant role in shaping global politics and culture, a dominance backed by military interventions abroad and the rise of the police state at home. How do the era's writers negotiate and challenge the police, military, and imperial powers of the U.S. state? We will place fiction, poetry, and essays in conversation with historical documents and policies, asking how literature has imagined an end to the American century.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 3637 - Loving Latinx L.A.: Music, Literature, Art, and Stage (3 Credits)
This course will explore the kaleidoscopic experiences of Latinx writers, musicians, and filmmakers who have made Los Angeles their home and the subject of their artistry. Featuring the work of renowned writers such as Helena Maria Viramontes and film makers such as Luis Valdez, the course will explore how Latinx creative thinkers tangle with the city's history, propel significant resistance movements, and bring new visions of creative possibilities to the world. Students will have the chance to research any aspect of LA artistry that they find compelling as part of this course.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
AMST 3661 - Reading the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 3660
The course asks you to think about the role of fiction in producing a sense of history, politics, and culture in the nineteenth-century United States. In particular, we will think about the relations among stylistic concerns in fiction and the construction of identities formed by national, racial, gendered, and sexual allegiances. Authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, and Fanny Fern.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2018, Spring 2017 AMST 3679 - Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries (3 Credits)
Foreign in a domestic sense is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called Insular Cases of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
AMST 3680 - The Art of Telling: Chicanx, Latinx, and AfroLatinx Testimonios (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2017, Fall 2013
AMST 3687 - The US and the Middle East (3 Credits)
This seminar examines the history of the United States' involvement with Middle East beginning with evangelical efforts in the 19th century and President Wilson's engagement with the colonial powers in the early 20th century during and after WWI. The discovery of vast Middle Eastern oil reserves and the retreat of the colonial powers from the region following WWII drew successive US administrations ever deeper into Middle Eastern politics. In due course the US became entrenched in the post-colonial political imagination as heir to the British and the French especially as it challenged the Soviet Union for influence in the region during the Cold War. And that only takes the story to the mid-1950s and the Eisenhower administration. Our discussions will be based on secondary readings and primary sources as we interrogate the tension between realist and idealist policies toward the Middle East and trace how these tensions play out in subsequent developments including the origins and trajectory of the US strategic alliances with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey and conflict with Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the two Gulf Wars.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2015
AMST 3703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3703, AAS 3030
The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(EAAREA, SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Spring 2018 AMST 3707 - Hidden Identities Onscreen (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020
AMST 3715 - Colonialism and Anticolonialism (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 3715
This seminar overviews political theories of colonialism and empire, and in doing so, allows us to pose questions about the constitutive elements of our modernity, such as slavery, racism, dependency, and dispossession. Throughout the semester, we will examine the relationship between former colonies and political and economic configurations (nationalism, internationalism, capitalism, socialism), as well as philosophical and epistemological questions about the relationship between the universal and the particular, and the imperatives of history-writing. The course material will give us an opportunity to conclude with questions about whether or not the process of decolonizing our world and our study of it is complete or an ongoing project.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2020 AMST 3717 - Sitcom Jews: Ethnic Representation on Television, 1948-Present (3 Credits)
Jews have been on TV since the beginning of the medium - over 70 years - and have made decisions about how they are represented. What kind of Jews do we put on screen, and do they actually represent Jews in America? What about the representation of other ethnic and cultural groups? What can we learn from the history of Jewish television that might apply to Black, Latinx, Muslim, LGBTQ, Asian and other communities as they present themselves to the American public? Sitcom Jews uses media analysis, theoretical discussion, and student writing to examine a huge range of TV, starting with classic sitcoms (The Goldbergs (1948), All in the Family, and Bridget Loves Bernie), continuing through current Jewish TV shows (Broad City, Transparent, Curb Your Enthusiasm), and adding a range of ethnic television (The Jeffersons, Black-ish, Insecure, Ramy, Will & Grace, Never Have I Ever).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
AMST 3732 - Africans and African Americans in Literature (3 Credits)
When an African and an African American meet, solidarity is presumed, but often friction is the result. In this course, we will consider how Africans and African Americans see each other through literature. What happens when two peoples suffering from double consciousness meet? We will examine the influence of historical forces including slavery, colonialism and pan-Africanism on the way writers explore the meeting between Africans and African Americans. Specifically we will look at how writers and political figures such as Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
AMST 3734 - Whiteness in Literature and Popular Culture (4 Credits)
After the violent events in Charlottesville in 2017, and especially the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, most people have become aware of the extreme form of white political identities that are now a visible presence in our society. What can we learn about the history of whiteness from literature and popular culture? What alternative conception of whiteness, including a consciously anti-racist white identity, can we glean from novels and plays, movies and TV shows? This introductory course uses works by prominent writers (James Baldwin, Toni Morrison) as well as movies (including Get Out and Blindspotting) plus TV shows (Mad Men, Sopranos) to explore these questions.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 3744 - America Becomes Modern: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 3740
America Becomes Modern offers an upper-level survey of major themes in American history between 1877 and 1917. The course will have a lecture/discussion format; student participation is highly valued and encouraged. The last two decades of the 19th century and the first two of the twentieth marked an abrupt shift in the life experiences of the American people. Daily life changed radically from 1877-1920, as the agrarian republic gave way to an urbanizing consumer society. Debates about progress characterized the period, as new technologies, new peoples, new forms of politics and culture, and new patterns of living transformed the United States. This course will explore the political, economic, diplomatic and cultural history of the Gilded age and Progressive eras, focusing on the ways American tried to make sense of, to order, to moralize and to shape rapid change.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
AMST 3745 - Parody (3 Credits)
In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity. Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of meaning making that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century imitative works in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for recent parody. An emphasis on postmodern or contemporary performances and media that renovate images, ideas, and icons from modernism and modernity will unite our otherwise diverse efforts. Some of these efforts will also highlight what happens when an artist takes up a work made for one platform (for example, theatre, performance art, installation, cinema, television, the Web) and parodies it in another. Creators and works under consideration may range from Christopher Durang, Split Britches, and Pig Iron Theatre Company to The Simpsons, Cookie's Fortune, and Strindberg and Helium.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Fall 2014 AMST 3754 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of Performance (4 Credits)
In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
AMST 3764 - Law and Literature (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 3762
What can lawyers and judges learn from the study of literature? This course explores the relevance of imaginative literature (novels, drama, poetry, and film) to questions of law and social justice from a range of perspectives. We will consider debates about how literature can help to humanize legal decision-making; how storytelling has helped to give voice to oppressed populations over history; how narratives of suffering cultivate popular support for human rights; the role played by storytelling in a trial; and how literature can shed light on the limits of law and public policy.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
AMST 3775 - Latinos and the United States, 1492-1880 (4 Credits)
In this course, we will answer two major questions: What is Latino history? And how should we write Latino History? We will explore these questions without attempting to cover all of Latino history before 1800. We will focus on a variety of experiences to better understand how differences in race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and class have shaped Latino communities over time. We will read academic journal articles and books (secondary sources) and documents from the past, such as diaries, letters, court records, and maps (primary sources). Throughout the semester we will be working in groups toward creating a final project: a Latino history website.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
AMST 3785 - Civil Disobedience (4 Credits)
This course examines controversies in the theory and history of civil disobedience. Do citizens have obligations to obey unjust laws? Can law breaking ever be civil rather than criminal? Do disruptive protests endanger democracy or strengthen the rule of law? How do acts of protest influence public opinion and policy? How is the distinction between violence and nonviolence politically constructed and contested? We will study classical writings and contemporary scholarship in pursuit of answers to these questions and related debates concerning the rule of law, conscientious objection, the uses of civility and incivility, punishment and responsibility, as well as whistleblowing, direct action, strikes, sabotage, hacktivism, and rioting.
Distribution Requirements: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS), (KCM-AG, SBA-AG), (OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020
AMST 3800 - Migration: Histories, Controversies, and Perspectives (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ILRGL 3810, LSP 3810, SOC 3820, PUBPOL 3710
This introductory course introduces students to issues and debates related to international migration and will provide an interdisciplinary foundation to understanding the factors that shape migration flows and migrant experiences. We will start by reviewing theories of the state and historical examples of immigrant racialization and exclusion in the United States and beyond. We will critically examine the notions of borders, citizenship/non-citizenship, and the creation of diasporas. Students will also hear a range of perspectives by exposing them to Cornell guest faculty who do research and teach on migration across different disciplines and methodologies and in different world areas. Examples include demographic researchers concerned with immigrant inequality and family formation, geographic perspectives on the changing landscapes of immigrant metropolises, legal scholarship on the rights of immigrant workers, and the study of immigrant culture from a feminist studies lens. Offered each fall semester.
Enrollment Information: Open to: undergraduate students.
Distribution Requirements: (AWI-IL, ICE-IL), (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
AMST 3808 - Mass Incarceration and Social Inequality in America (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 3810, SOC 3810
In this course we will explore the origins and consequences of mass incarceration- extraordinarily high incarceration rates within particular demographic groups above and beyond historical levels in the United States. We will examine theories of social control and deviance to uncover how institutions and individuals use power to shape societies. This course also engages theories of state power to understand and to analyze how labeling is deployed to control groups of people, and, in doing so, we will conduct a genealogy of a contemporary driver of social inequality: the prison industrial complex. Current policy debates around the movement to reduce the number of men and women in American jails and prisons will also be covered. Contemporary social problems like homelessness and food insecurity will be discussed in detail, as well as how mass incarceration contributes to growing gaps in labor force participation, wealth accumulation, and familial instability.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG, KCM-AG, SBA-AG), (D-HE, HA-HE, KCM-HE)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
Learning Outcomes:
- Recall contemporary debates and recent scholarly advancements on the topic of mass incarceration.
- Explain and apply core theories and findings that demonstrate your comprehension and application of course material.
- Compare and contrast different explanations of mass incarceration and the observed consequences therein.
- Synthesize and evaluate scholarly material that reflects your knowledge and understanding of core course concepts and research findings.
AMST 3812 - Edge Cities: Celluloid New York and Los Angeles (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3441, VISST 3812
Anchoring the East and West coasts, New York and Los Angeles have been celebrated and excoriated in films. On the edge literally and metaphorically, these cities seem to be about competing visions of urban form, culture, and modernity. The iconic forms of New York (tenements and skyscrapers) and of Los Angeles (highways and suburban homes) have fascinated film makers from the nineteenth century to the present day. We will both evoke and complicate the contrasts between New York and Los Angeles by mapping the intersections of each city with cinema. We explore how the urban experience gives rise to particular cinematic forms and how cinematic styles are translated or not into urban design.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)
AMST 3820 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas (3 Credits)
As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021 AMST 3831 - War and Revolution in 20th Century Latino History (3 Credits)
This course examines war and revolution as drivers of migration from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean to the United States and Canada. From the War of 1898 to the wars in Central America, war and revolution have displaced millions of people, prompting internal and cross-border migration. This history underscores how migration is multicausal-that is, produced by a wide and complex range of intersecting drivers. War and revolution disrupt livelihoods, produce scarcity, and create the insecurity that makes it impossible to exercise a basic human right to stay home. The course also examines how Latinos have become actors in U.S. wars and interventions in their countries of ancestry.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
AMST 3854 - Special Topics in Regional Development and Globalization (4 Credits)
This course addresses pertinent issues relative to the subject of regional development and globalization. Topics vary each semester.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
AMST 3885 - Race and War in History: Workers, Soldiers, Prisoners, Activists (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ILRGL 3885, HIST 3884, AAS 3885
Across twentieth-century history, race and war have been dynamic forces in shaping economic organization and everyday livelihoods. This course will approach labor and working-class history, through a focus on global war as well as 'wars at home.' Racial and warfare events often intersect-in the histories of presidents and activists, business leaders and industrial workers, CIA agents and police, soldiers and prisoners, American laborers abroad and non-Americans migrating stateside. In this course, we'll consider how race and war have been linked-from the rise of Jim Crow and U.S. empire in the 1890s, to the WWII 'Greatest Generation' and its diverse workplaces, to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, to the Iraq wars and immigrant workers, to debates about what has been called a 'military-industrial complex' and a 'prison-industrial complex'.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (AWI-IL, ICE-IL, LH-IL), (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
AMST 3911 - Science in American Politics (3 Credits)
This course reviews the changing relations between science, technology, and the state in America, focusing on the period from 1960 to the present. We will explore science-intensive policy controversies. We will also look at how science and technology are used in different institutional settings, such as Congress, the court system, and regulatory agencies. Among other issues, we will examine the tension between the concept of science as an autonomous system for producing knowledge and the concept of science as entangled with interest groups.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SCT-IL), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2019, Spring 2017
AMST 3980 - Independent Research (1-4 Credits)
Affords opportunities for students to carry out independent research under appropriate supervision. Each student is expected to review pertinent literature, prepare a project outline, conduct the research, and prepare a report. Topic and credit hours TBD as arranged between faculty and student.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
AMST 3981 - Latinx Popular Culture Matters (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2014
AMST 3990 - Readings in American Studies (1-4 Credits)
Individualized readings for junior and senior students. Topics, requirements, and credit hours will be determined in consultation between the student and the supervising faculty member.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
AMST 4002 - Diasporic and Indigenous Health (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020
AMST 4021 - American Conservative Thought (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 4021
American conservative thought rests on assumptions that are strikingly different from those made by mainstream American liberals. However, conservative thinkers are themselves committed to principles that are both quite varied and sometimes contradictory. This course examines the assumptions upon which rest the libertarian, market/economic, and cultural/traditional strains of American conservatism and asks whether the tensions between them weaken or strengthen conservative thought as an alternative to mainstream liberalism.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
AMST 4022 - U.S. Cultures of War and Empire (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with AAS 4020, ASIAN 4458, PMA 4020
This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in hot wars as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will reckon with Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 4023 - Black and Indigenous Histories (3 Credits)
What does it mean to be Black and Indigenous? For much of United States history, at least, to be Black and Indigenous was a legal if not social impossibility. Even as societies around the world have embraced the pluralism of multiraciality Black-Indigenous peoples have found themselves largely absent from both historical and contemporary conversations surrounding blackness and indigeneity. This course does the important work of excavating the histories of Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. We will do so by examining case studies alongside the writing and artwork of Black-Indigenous figures in order to understand more about the relationships, politics, and meanings of Black-Indigenous identity.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023
AMST 4030 - Poetry in Process (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 4030
Many distinguished poets have taught at Cornell. In this course we'll focus on three, all of them widely acclaimed: A. R. Ammons, Alice Fulton, Ishion Hutchinson. A. R. Ammons is best known for charting the interplay of scientific and spiritual phenomena, in poems ranging from brief lyrics to book-length epics written on adding machine tape. Alice Fulton, who was Ammons's student, carries on his interests in science and spirituality while bringing to them a distinctively feminist perspective. Born in Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson writes poems that explore the fraught relations between geography and history in the light of colonial violence. We'll survey each poet's work from earliest to most recent phases, paying special attention to their development of new techniques and original visions. Students may write poems as well as critical essays responding to the poets' work.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Spring 2017 AMST 4039 - Reconstruction and the New South (4 Credits)
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2018, Spring 2018 AMST 4040 - Fictions of Dictatorship (4 Credits)
Fictions of dictatorship, as termed by scholar Lucy Burns, denote both the narratives and spectacles produced by authoritarian governments and the performances, events, and cultural objects that work against these states of exception. This course will critically examine histories of dictatorships, through both documentary & creative forms (i.e. novels, memoirs, and performance) and with a geographic focus on Asia and Latin America, in order to understand authoritarian returns in our present historical moment.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020
AMST 4051 - Death Penalty in America (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with LAW 4051
The death penalty has gotten increased media attention due to high profile death row exonerations, and has long been under siege for other reasons, such as racial disparities in its imposition and the prevalence of very poor representation by defense counsel. This course surveys the legal and social issues that arise in the administration of the death penalty. The reading will be largely comprised of reported death penalty cases, but will be augmented by a variety of other sources, including empirical studies of the death penalty and the litigation experience of the professors. Although the focus will be on capital punishment as practiced in the United States, we will also consider international and comparative perspectives. Guest speakers will provide a range of views, and law students with experience working on capital cases will lead discussion sections.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: undergraduates.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
AMST 4052 - Critical Filipino and Filipino American Studies (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with AAS 4050, ASIAN 4452
This course focuses on three major and interrelated themes within Filipino/Filipino American history: war/empire, labor/migration, and culture/imaginaries. How do we account for the overwhelming number of Filipinos in nursing, domestic work, and the U.S. military? How do filmmakers, visual/theatre artists, and writers continue to remember the oft-forgotten history of U.S.-Philippine relations? In what ways have diasporic and immigrant Filipinos as well as Filipino Americans created their own culture as well as engaged with their counterparts in the Philippines? By reading historical and sociological texts alongside popular cultural texts and artistic examples, this course considers the politics of history, memory, and cultural citizenship in Filipino America.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2019
AMST 4066 - Technological Change at Work (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ILRGL 4066
Artificial intelligence (AI), computers, and digital technologies including robotics, machine learning, large language models (LLMs), internet-enabled platforms, and other “high-tech” drivers of automation have revolutionized the nature and organization of work in the U.S., with material implications for workers and their families, among others. This upper-level course begins with a rhetorical inquiry into whether and when the technological change engendered by digitization, information technology, and AI benefits workers. We then consider the broader impact of recent technological advances on manufacturing and fabrication, low- and semi-skilled service work, i.e., restaurant servers and bus drivers, and even on expert and professional work like that to which most of you presumably aspire. Among the central themes is the notion that technology does not unilaterally act upon workers, their employers, or society-at-large. Rather, workers, managers, customers, institutions, and policymakers shape which advances take hold and which do not, the ways that these technologies are deployed in the workplace, and the ways that society can actively mitigate the costs to technological advancement while harnessing its benefits.
Enrollment Information: Priority given to: ILR sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (AWI-IL, ICE-IL, SCT-IL), (SBA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Fall 2020
Learning Outcomes:
- You will be able to direct and redirect workplace technological change strategically to ensure it meets our chosen societal objectives.
- You will be able to identify potential points of conflict and change in workplace hierarchy given information about how a new technology is being used in a contemporary workplace.
- You will be able to prescribe policy responses aimed at mitigating the potentially deleterious impact of workplace technological change, and articulate the potential unintended consequences of these policies.
AMST 4104 - Critical Race Theory: What Is It? What Does It Do? Why Should It Matter? (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ASRC 4304
It is almost a truism that the United States is the world's most litigious society. As a polity founded on an almost sacralized constitutional foundation, it is no surprise that law and the legal system are quite central to life, its conceptions, and its manifestations, as understood and led by most inhabitants of the country. This, in turn, engenders a faith in law and its attendant justice on the part of Americans. This faith encompasses certain attitudes on the part of different segments of the American populace towards legal discourse, the operation of the legal system, the justice promised by law, and so forth. In this class, we shall be exploring these diverse issues from the standpoint of Critical Race Theory. We seek to establish what CRT is and its genesis; what it does and how it does what it does, and what justification we might have or can provide for studying it. At the end of the class, participants should have a fairly robust idea of CRT, its fundamental claims, its applicability, and what insights it provides regarding the nature, function, and aims of law and the legal system in the United States of America.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2018, Fall 2014
AMST 4109 - The Practice and Theory of Public History: Slavery and Self-Emancipation in US History (4 Credits)
This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of American history: racialized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 4111 - The Historical Geography of Black America (4 Credits)
This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other undesirable areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to Black heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 4133 - August Wilson: the Cycle of Black Life (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 4202 - The Politics of Inequality: The History of the U.S. Welfare State (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 4202
This research seminar explores how Americans and their elected leaders struggled to respond to economic and social inequality throughout the twentieth century. It traces the expansions and retractions of the U.S. welfare state with special attention to the influence of average people's organizing and activism. Among other things, students will study the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan Revolution, and Clinton's welfare reforms. Assessment will be on the basis of class discussion, weekly reading responses, and a substantial research paper based in primary sources.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2015, Fall 2012
AMST 4203 - Contesting Votes: Democracy and Citizenship Throughout U.S. History (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 4203
This advanced seminar traces transformations in citizenship and the franchise throughout U.S. history. Through readings, frequent short writings, discussion, and a final paper, the class examines the struggles over who can claim full citizenship and legitimate voice in the political community. It examines the divergent, often clashing, visions of legitimate democratic rule, focusing particularly on the debates over who should vote and on what terms. We examine the dynamics that have shaped the boundaries of citizenship and hierarchies within it, paying attention to changes in the civic status of Native Americans, property-less white men, paupers, women, African Americans, various immigrant groups, residents of U.S. colonies, felons, and people with intellectual disabilities. A significant portion of the class focuses on debates about U.S. democracy in the decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Fall 2018
AMST 4205 - Early American History through Film, ca. 1500-1800 (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with HIST 4204
While the purpose of Hollywood films is to entertain, when those films are set in the past, they offer a critical lens onto how and why we remember and memorialize certain historical events. This course analyzes a series of films set in colonial North America and the Atlantic world in order to ask bigger questions about the meaning of our colonial past to the ways in which we think about the present. During the course, we will read and discuss articles and books in order to learn about the time periods and contexts presented in several different films, and we will use that knowledge to understand what each filmmaker chose to include or exclude and why, paying specific attention to representations of race, gender, and class. Over the course of the semester, we will also meet virtually with various historians who have worked in the film industry to discuss their experiences making academic history relevant for Hollywood. This course will provide students with a clear understanding of specific times and places in early American history, while also encouraging them to think about when, why, and how that past remains relevant (or irrelevant) today.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
AMST 4212 - Black Women's Autobiography in the 21st Century WritingHerStory (3 Credits)
Black women first began to shape the genre of autobiography during antebellum era slavery. They were prolific in developing the genre of autobiography throughout the twentieth century, to the point of emerging as serial autobiographers in the case of Maya Angelou. Significantly, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings(1970), the first autobiography of six by Angelou, along with autobiographies by a range of other black women writers, helped to launch the renaissance in black women's literature and criticism in African American literature during the 1970s. In this course, we will focus on how black women have continued to write and share their personal stories in the new millennium by examining autobiographies that they have produced in the first years of the twenty-first century. More broadly, we will consider the impact of this writing on twenty-first century African American literature, as well as African diasporan writing in Africa and the Caribbean. In the process, we will draw on a range of critical and theoretical perspectives. We will read memoirs and autobiographies by a range of figures, including Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lewis, Monica Coleman, Serena Williams, Gabrielle Union, and Tiffany Haddish, among others.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2017
AMST 4218 - History of the United States Senate (4 Credits)
This course will offer students an opportunity to view the process of shaping national debates from the perspective of the United States Senate. The modern Senate will serve as the point of reference for an inquiry into the development of the institution's powers under the Constitution during the past 200 years. Class readings, lectures and discussions will focus on the themes of continuity and change, the role of individual senators, and the institutional evolution of the Senate. In addition to general class reading and written examinations, each student will write a short paper and participate in an oral presentation.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
AMST 4220 - Locke and the Philosophies of Dispossession: Indigenous America's Interruptions and Resistances (3 Credits)
This course looks at the philosopher John Locke as a philosopher of dispossession. There is a uniquely Lockean mode of missionization, conception of mind and re-formulations of the 'soul' applied to dispossess Indigenous peoples of the social institutions, intellectual traditions and the material bases and practices which sustain(ed) them. While colonization is typically used as a kind of shorthand for this process, we will be attempting to stay focused on the specific dimensions of Lockean dispossession and its mutually informing relationship with English colonialism.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Spring 2017
Learning Outcomes:
- Demonstrate a fluency in the philosophical formulations for settler colonialism and the historical and ongoing dispossessing of Native Americans—specifically, a fluency in Locke's philosophies of 1) the workmanship theory of property, 2) of consciousness and the modern "self," 3) theories of mind, 4) metaphysics and theology.
- Develop enhanced interpretive abilities through formal presentations and writing assignments.
- Apply pedagogical skills in teaching course content where they lead seminar topics.
- Employ sharpened interpretation and critical analysis skills through course writing assignments and structured editorial assistance to 1) concisely convey central argument(s) of texts, 2) make warrantable claims using relevant historical, philosophical, legal and material/empirical evidence, 3) clearly indicate one's positionality in developing arguments.
AMST 4252 - Migration and the Peopling of America: A Perennial Debate (4 Credits)
This seminar offers a hands-on approach to US immigration history from the colonial era to the present. In addition to learning the contours of the surprising history of immigration to the United States from all corners of the world, including the impact of questions of legal status, gender, and race, students will strive to develop a sophisticated sense of the historical context of today's immigration debates and issues, with the opportunity to learn about these issues in Washington DC. In the late 19th century, for example, the native born often saw Southern Italian, Eastern European Jewish, and Chinese immigrants as threats to their jobs, their health, and their cultural values. Restrictionists in Congress sought to close the door through legislation or administrative regulation. Others, such as settlement house workers, sought to Americanize newcomers and assimilate them into the American population. Immigrants were often aware of the double message and sought to negotiate a place in American society that allowed them to succeed economically while retaining their identities. The debate continues today as millions of migrants from Latin America and Asia, documented and undocumented, arrive. After a discussion of indentured servitude and slavery (involuntary migration) this course seeks to examine the perennial debate over voluntary immigration through the eyes of both native-born Americans and through immigrants eyes to the present.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2013, Fall 2012
AMST 4262 - Environmental Justice: Past, Present, Future (4 Credits)
Environmental Justice is a relatively recent term, coined in the United States in the 1980s. It usually refers to a social movement fighting against the unfair concentration of toxic sites within impoverished communities of color. As a broader set of ideas, though, environmental justice has a much longer history, going back at least to the 17th century in England, when poor farmers banded together to prevent common land from being enclosed for the exclusive use of the aristocracy. This course explores that deep history, examining various overlaps between environmental thought and theories of social justice over the past 400 years in the western world. It concludes with an examination of the current climate justice movement and a consideration of how environmental justice concerns are being played out in recent works of speculative fiction. What do we owe to the climate refugees of our present day? What do we owe to future generations?
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
AMST 4264 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World (4 Credits)
This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems - such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors - enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people - requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 4272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4272, ARKEO 4272, AIIS 4720
This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2020, Fall 2018
AMST 4280 - Health and Environmental Justice (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020
AMST 4283 - Latino Politics as Racial Politics (4 Credits)
What are the social, policy, and political needs of the diverse Latino community? This seminar delves into the politics of resistance and solidarity of Latinxs/Hispanics in North America, with a primary focus on the U.S. political system. We commence by examining conceptual categorizations and definitions of the Latina/o/x population, pondering whether Latin@s should be regarded as a racial or ethnic group. Then, we follow with a historical survey of Latino migration to the U.S. and analyze how interlocking systems of oppression shape the material conditions and lived experiences of Latin@/x people. Ultimately, we conclude by analyzing Latino collective action to understand how they organize at the local, national, and transnational levels to confront systems of inequality. The class takes a relational approach, focusing on political and ethnoracial relations and their effects on U.S. political institutions and public policy. Themes we will explore encompass (im)migration, interethnic/racial relations, neoliberalism, mass incarceration and settler colonialism, and social movement's effects on policy outcomes.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019
AMST 4318 - American Dream?: Journalism, Politics, and Identity in U.S. Immigration Policy (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021
AMST 4416 - It's the End of the World As We Know It (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4416, STS 4416
Living in the contemporary moment means living with reminders that the end of the world - at least as we know it - is looming. From the global ecological crisis to evangelical apocalyptic visions, and from nuclear threats to the changes wrought by automated work, people are brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and experience. In this course, we will consider how anthropologists have grappled with the end of the world, drawing the discipline's boundaries liberally. Working with ethnography, science fiction, film, and more, we will ask: What does it mean to adopt the uncertain future as an object of study? And might the end of the world as we know it also mean the start of a more speculative anthropology?
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021
AMST 4417 - Ecopolitics (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4417
At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations-conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more-we ask how the environment manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
AMST 4434 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4434, LSP 4434
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021
AMST 4506 - The Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1937 (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 4505
This seminar explores one of the most consequential movements in African American cultural history, a movement of transnational impact. It was empowered in part by new social and institutional developments, including the Great Migration of African Americans, immigration from the Caribbean, and Pan-African contacts in Paris. It also benefited from new pluralistic theories of American culture and developments in the publishing industry centered in Manhattan. African American cultural vitality surged in the context of modern mobility and the rise of new publishing enterprises and technologies of sound reproduction. While chiefly centered on literature, the seminar will also touch on visual art, music, and performance.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
AMST 4519 - Toni Morrison's Novels (3 Credits)
In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the love trilogy on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Spring 2018
AMST 4521 - Gender, Memory, and History in Twentieth Century Fiction (4 Credits)
This seminar will investigate the narrative uses of history and memory in US fiction, focusing particularly on the impact of gender on these representations. How do US writers use history in their fiction, and to what ends? What are the effects on drawing on received historical narratives? What challenges does the attempt to represent a historical event pose for a writer of fiction and how might the author negotiate those challenges? Is History a gendered category and, if so, would male and female and trans histories be narrated differently? We will look at the effects of constructing one's own history to fill a void in the received historical narrative, exploring the relationship between history (or History) and memory as well as the fictional representations of that relationship.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2018, Spring 2017, Fall 2013
AMST 4533 - The Lower East Side: Jews and the Immigrant City (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with JWST 4533, ANTHR 4733, ILRGL 4533
American Jews have frequently been touted as a model minority. This course will take a more critical look at the historical interactions between Jewish immigration, United States industrialization, and processes of social and geographical mobility-all through the prism of New York's Lower East Side, first home for over 750,000 Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere between the mid-19th century and the 1920s. We will compare the Jewish experience to that of other immigrants/migrants by considering social institutions as well as material and other cultural practices. We will examine interactions with the built environment -most especially the tenement-in Lower East Side culture. Special attention will be paid to immigrant labor movement politics including strikes, splits, and gender in the garment trade. From the perspective of the present, the course will examine how commemoration, heritage tourism and the selling of [immigrant] history intersect with gentrifying real estate in an iconic New York City neighborhood. Projects using the ILR's archives on the Triangle Fire and other topics are explicitly encouraged. This course counts as an out of college elective for B. Arch and M. Arch students.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG), (ICE-IL, LH-IL)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2020 AMST 4548 - The Bible in America (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with NES 4548, RELST 4548, JWST 4548
This course will focus on the array of perspectives offered in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament on such contemporary social issues as: immigration; abortion rights, surrogate childbirth, gay marriage, gender identity, etc. We will consider the range of voices the Bible preserves on these and other topics, and how biblical texts and biblically based arguments shape and inform American political discourse. Students will be expected to read biblical texts on their own terms in their ancient Israelite and early Christian contexts, as well as to consider how those texts have been received with Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions and absorbed into American political thought. Students will read political theory, Jewish and Christian ethics, recent newspaper and magazine articles and will also consider other forms of media.
Distribution Requirements: (HST-AS, SCD-AS)
AMST 4550 - Race and the University (4 Credits)
What is a university, what does it do, and how does it do it? Moving out from these more general questions, this seminar will focus on a more specific set of questions concerning the place of race within the university. What kinds of knowledge are produced in the 20th- century U.S. university? Why is it, and how is it, that certain knowledge formations and disciplines come to be naturalized or privileged within the academy? How has the emergence of fields of inquiry such as Ethnic Studies (with an epistemological platform built on the articulations of race, class and gender) brought to the fore (if not brought to crisis) some of the more vexing questions that strike at the core of the idea of the university as the pre-eminent site of disinterested knowledge? This seminar will give students the opportunity to examine American higher education's (particularly its major research institutions) historical instantiation of the relations amongst knowledge, power, equality and democracy.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2013 AMST 4555 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4755, ARKEO 4755, SHUM 4555
This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
AMST 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ARTH 4556, LSP 4556, ENGL 4556, VISST 4556
Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Spring 2020
AMST 4560 - The Politics and Joy in Black Women's Writing (4 Credits)
This course will look at how Black women writers negotiated enslavement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow era segregation while also managing to find avenues of joy, escapism, and a certain kind of freedom through art-making. In addition to reading primary texts by Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Bond, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others we will also look at critical and theoretical work by Toni Morrison, Saidiyah Hartman, Barbara Fields, and Karen Fields.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021
AMST 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies (4 Credits)
As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to undo borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb desbordar (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
AMST 4603 - Black Speculative Fiction (4 Credits)
This course takes up literatures and arts of Black speculation in the broadest terms, from science fiction and fantasy to Afrofuturism and Afropunk to Phillis Wheatley's and Outkast's poetics. We'll give special attention to speculation in African American literature to think through how Black people used art in the midst of anti-blackness to imagine worlds otherwise and for the pleasure of the craft. We'll read Black speculation through multiple forms, including novels, graphic novels, film, and music. Figures for consideration include William J. Wilson (Ethiop), Pauline Hopkins, Frances E. W. Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler, Ryan Coogler, Eve Ewing, N.K. Jemisin, Sun Ra, and Erykah Badu.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020
AMST 4615 - Lovecraft Country: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Literary Racial Speculation (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 4615
H. P. Lovecraft helped to create an American subgenre of horror and speculative fictions. He was also a notorious racist. Writing from New England, he imagined ancient and terrifying landscapes of racial miscegenation and madness that haunt a deeply anti-Black and anti-Indigenous settler colonialism. For Matt Ruff, a graduate of Cornell and author of the novel Lovecraft Country that is the basis for Misha Green's HBO series of the same name, antiblack racial violence provides the deep-seated horror that lurks beneath Lovecraft's stories. Using Lovecraft and the HBO series adaptation as a frame for thinking about the racialized present, we will spend the semester considering how the speculation of settler colonial horrors and fantasies is undone as each of the authors we read reanimate the centrality of race, Blackness, and Indigeneity to just and unjust visions of the past, present, and future.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 4627 - Contemporary Native American Fiction (3 Credits)
If you haven't read contemporary U.S. American Indian fiction, then it might be fair to ask how much you know about the United States, its origins and its current condition. Since the 1960s, American Indians have been producing a significant body of award-wining novels and short stories. In 1969, for example, N. Scott Momaday, from the Kiowa nation, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and in 2012 Louise Erdrich, who is Anishinaabe, won the National Book Award for her novel The Round House. In between these two notable moments and since we can list an impressive number of Native storytellers whose work is aesthetically powerful, offering us a narrative of the United States that counters the official history. Centrally the course will focus on the various formal approaches Native writers take from surrealism to realism in representing the (post)colonial situation of Indian country and the ongoing resistance in Indian country to the U.S. legal and political regime.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
Learning Outcomes:
- Identify contemporary Indigenous writer and the genders they are writing in.
- Communicate the main theme in the discussed novels that relate to contemporary and historical issues in Indigenous communities, such as land rights, child welfare, protection of Indigenous women, Indigenous governance systems, construction of racial and colonial regimes, etc.
- Analyze historical and legal trends in Indigenous-federal relations.
AMST 4632 - Rethinking Asian American Literature: Indigeneity, Diaspora, Settler Colonialism (4 Credits)
What are the limits and possibilities for Asian American longing and belonging? Asian Americans have been variously understood as immigrants, refugees, forever foreigners, and model minorities. These ideas emerge from and shape US understandings of nation, empire, rights, and citizenship. Native and Indigenous studies scholars have asked how and whether immigrants-including exploited workers-are complicit with settlement and occupation. In this course we will read Asian American literary texts from the Americas through Asian American and Indigenous cultural critique to consider the overlapping dimensions of militarism, carcerality, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and dispossession in order to learn what comparative and relational approaches can teach us.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021
AMST 4669 - From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: A History of Policing in Black Communities (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 4674 - Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation (3 Credits)
The dispossession of Indigenous nations by Europeans represents the foundation of the past five centuries of North American history. Yet the truth of that history remains cloaked behind various Western legal-religious justifications for the dispossession of lndigenous American populations by Europeans (i.e., terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the right of conquest, and Manifest Destiny). Through analysis of primary texts and up-to-date historical and legal scholarship, students in this course will unpack these still-thriving tropes of settler-colonial justification for dispossession, assess the true impact of the taking of Indigenous lands, and explore prospects for meaningful reconciliation in the present.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2022
AMST 4675 - The Environmental Imagination in American Literature (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 4675
This course focuses on works that exemplify environmental consciousness-a sense that humans are not the center of the world and that to think they are may have catastrophic consequences for humans themselves. Environmental literature is not just a major strand of American literature but one of its most distinctive contributions to the literature of the world. We will be reading works mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, both poetry and fiction, confronting the challenges of thinking and writing with an ecological consciousness in the 21st. Cornell being a rich environment in which to pursue such investigations, creative projects will be encouraged. Inspiration is assured.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020
AMST 4681 - Cages and Creativity: Arts in Incarceration (3 Credits)
This course explores the increasing presence of all the arts in prisons throughout the country and examines the increasing scholarship surrounding arts programs and their efficacy for incarcerated persons. The course uses video's, archival material, reading material and in-person or Zoom interviews to investigate how and why art is taught in prisons. The course will also look at art produced by incarcerated artists as well as art by those who are still practicing after going home. And finally, the course will explore the increasing scholarship around the impact practicing the arts while incarcerated has on recidivism rates and preparation for re-entry.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SSC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG, SBA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
AMST 4682 - Disturbing Settlement (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SHUM 4682, ANTHR 4182
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 4683 - Disturbing Settlement - Engaged (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SHUM 4683, ANTHR 4183
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 4686 - Feeling Free: Radical Aesthetics and Political Affects (3 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 4705 - Nightlife (4 Credits)
This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
AMST 4725 - American Indian Lands and Sovereignties (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4725
The relationship between North American Indian peoples and the states of Canada and the US is in many ways unique, a product of centuries of trade compacts, treaties, legislation, warfare, land claim negotiations, and Supreme Court decisions. Apparently straightforward concepts such as land, property, and sovereignty, based as they are on European cultural assumptions, often seem inadequate for making sense of the cross-cultural terrain of Indian-State relations, where they tend to take on new - and often ambiguous - meanings. In this course we will explore some of these ambiguous meanings, attending to the cultural realities they reflect and the social relationships they shape. Then we will examine the complex interplay of legal, political, and cultural forces by taking an in-depth look at several selected case studies.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Fall 2016, Fall 2011
AMST 4757 - Be a Man! Masculinity, Race, and Nation (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021
AMST 4792 - Latinx Education Across the Americas (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4790, LSP 4790, EDUC 4790
This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022 AMST 4851 - Refugees (4 Credits)
Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a haven for the oppressed. We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS), (OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2019
AMST 4880 - Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (3 Credits)
What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's textual environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How does contemporary poetry resist, engage, respond to, sound out that noise? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal cultural, economic, historical, philosophical, political developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a wide range of works that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions of personal and collective identity and language in contexts at once local and global. Poets include Armantrout, Bernstein, Collins, Espada, Gander, Fitterman, Goldsmith, Hong, Osman, Place, Rich, Smith, and Waldrop.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2018, Fall 2015, Spring 2014 AMST 4960 - State Policy and Advocacy Clinic I (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 4960
We will learn how to design and advocate for specific state-level public policies by practicing these skills before the legislative and administrative branches of the State of New York. In consultation with the professor, student teams will design public policy proposals based on a review of the academic, governmental and think tank literature; conversations with subject matter experts at Cornell and various NGOs; research and analysis of similar proposals in other states and countries; conversations with state and local policymakers; and discussions with community members and organizations, including community partners with lived experience. Although we will engage in policy design and advocacy primarily in New York State, we will also provide research and policy design services to stakeholders in other states, especially when a comparative or multi-state approach offers strategic benefits.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: juniors and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (D-HE, KCM-HE, SBA-HE), (OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- Develop a strong understanding of state and local politics in New York, the extent to which legislative and administrative institutions and machinery mold political choices, and the extent to which political considerations influence the menu of viable policy choices. Build a theoretical and practical understanding of legislative and administrative process in New York and other states.
- Develop a strong understanding of state and local politics in New York, the extent to which legislative and administrative institutions and machinery mold political choices, and the extent to which political considerations influence the menu of viable policy choices.
- Develop the legal research and reasoning skills needed to engage in comparative state policy analysis; develop a basic understanding of state and federal constitutional constraints on legislative and administrative decision-making.
- Develop the policy research, design and reasoning skills needed to design and evaluate various policy alternatives. Gain an introduction to basic legislative or regulatory drafting skills.
- Design, in teams, a creative, compelling, and politically viable state legislative, or administrative solution to a pressing public policy challenge, based on a review of the academic, government and think tank literature, comparative state and country policy research, discussions with subject matter experts, and conversations with community partners and leaders, including community members with lived experience.
AMST 4961 - State Policy and Advocacy Clinic II (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 4961
As a continuation of our work in PUBPOL 4960/PUBPOL 5960, we will learn how to design and advocate for specific state-level public policies by practicing these skills with community partners and stakeholders and before the legislative and administrative branches of the State of New York. In consultation with the professor, student teams will design and advocate for public policy proposals based on a review of the academic, governmental and think tank literature; conversations with subject matter experts at Cornell and various NGOs; research and analysis of similar proposals in other states and countries; conversations with state and local policymakers; and discussions with community members and organizations, including community partners with lived experience. Although we will engage in policy design and advocacy primarily in New York State, we will also provide research and policy design services to Stakeholders in other states, especially when a comparative or multi-state approach offers strategic benefits.
Prerequisites: PUBPOL 4960.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: juniors and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (D-HE, KCM-HE, SBA-HE), (OCE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
Learning Outcomes:
- Develop a strong understanding of the importance of state-level policy in the United States and of the interaction of federal, state and local governments in our federalist system.
- Build a theoretical and practical understanding of legislative and administrative process in New York and other states.
- Develop a strong understanding of state and local politics in New York, the extent to which legislative and administrative institutions and machinery mold political choices, and the extent to which political considerations influence the menu of viable policy choices.
- Develop the legal research and reasoning skills needed to engage in comparative state policy analysis; develop a basic understanding of state and federal constitutional constraints on legislative and administrative decision-making.
- Develop the policy research, design and reasoning skills needed to design and evaluate various policy alternatives.
AMST 4993 - Honors Essay Tutorial I (4 Credits)
To graduate with honors, AMST majors must complete a senior thesis under the supervision of an AMST faculty member and defend that thesis orally before a committee. Students interested in the honors program should consult the AMST Director of Undergraduate Study during the junior year and submit an honors application by May 1 of the junior year.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 AMST 4994 - Honors Essay Tutorial II (4 Credits)
To graduate with honors, AMST majors must complete a senior thesis under the supervision of an AMST faculty member and defend that thesis orally before a committee. Students interested in the honors program should consult the AMST Director of Undergraduate Study during the junior year and submit an honors application by May 1 of the junior year.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 AMST 4998 - Engaged Learning About Policy Making in Washington D.C. (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 4060, ALS 4998, GOVT 4998, CAPS 4998, NS 4998
The core course at Cornell in Washington is an engaged learning class that focuses on understanding and analyzing the professional experience of being in DC. Its primary purpose is to give students a chance to sunthesize the lessons of their internship work by examining and reflecting on that work, investigating the context and structures of the policy and political world with which they are engaging, and learning and practicing the professional forms of writing that the community uses. This process occurs through readings, written assignments, guest speakers, and signature events. An internship is required for the class.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: students in the Cornell in Washington program.
Distribution Requirements: (OCE-IL), (SBA-AG), (SBA-HE)
Exploratory Studies:
(EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 Learning Outcomes:
- Students will have employed engaged learning techniques through readings, class sessions, reflective journals, guest speakers, and other activities to examine the professional norms and codes of working in the policy world.
- Students will have identified the day-to-day processes of the American policy and political community in DC, its aims and goals, and how it works at the ground level.
- Students will have composed a series of policy memos and done an oral presentation in order to be able to construct a policy analysis and recommendation.
- Graduate students will have assessed the state of knowledge in their particular policy area.
AMST 5710 - US Education System: Courts, Data, Law and Politics (3-4 Credits)
This course aims to explore and answer a single question about America's promise-of success if you work hard and do well in school: Why do we have such substantial and long-standing inequality in the U.S.? In answering this central question, we will investigate the goals, roles, and outcomes of formal educational institutions in American society and the legal and policy environment in which they operate. Specifically, we will review historical state and federal policy, trace the $700 million spent, and interrogate the sociological functions of public and private K12 schools, including the successes, failures, and enigmas of school organization and policy at the local, state, and national level.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: Cornell Teacher Education Program or permission of instructor.
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 Learning Outcomes:
- Students will recognize and assess the sociological function(s) of American Schools (e.g., socializer, sorter, trainer, and caretaker) as well as its role as a change agent, an equalizer, and reproducer of society's inequalities.
- Students will critique education as a major public policy issue in American society.
- Students will synthesize the legal framework and justification for local, state, and federal roles in public and private schooling.
- Students will explore and interpret social and fiscal data to clarify policy assumptions and critiques.
- Students will integrate and discuss their own schooling and what role they can play in the future of school improvement.
AMST 6003 - Doing Research With Marginalized Populations (3 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021
AMST 6011 - The American State (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 6011
Contemporary politics raise profound questions about the American past and how aspects of it have traveled across time and into the present, shaping US government and politics. This PhD-level seminar uses historical and institutional lenses to examine analytical questions about the origins and development of the American state as well as processes of political change. In Spring 2021, we will explore American political development with an eye toward understanding how threats to democracy have waxed and waned and combined over time, and the implications for the present. We will focus on topics such as political parties and polarization; conflict over belongs, with respect to race and gender; economic inequality; and executive aggrandizement. We will read some classic texts as well as new and recent ones.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2021, Spring 2018, Spring 2014
AMST 6022 - U.S. Cultures of War and Empire (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with AAS 6020, ASIAN 6658, PMA 6020
This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in hot wars as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will reckon with Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 6109 - The Practice and Theory of Public History: Slavery and Self-Emancipation in US History (4 Credits)
This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of American history: racialized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 6111 - The Historical Geography of Black America (4 Credits)
This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other undesirable areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to Black heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 6122 - Racial and Ethnic Politics in the U.S. (4 Credits)
This course examines racial and ethnic politics in the United States, highlighting its fundamental and constitutive role in shaping American politics more broadly. We will explore the political origins of the American racial order and the ways it has both persisted and changed over time. Focusing on participation, representation and resistance, we will emphasize the political agency of racialized groups while recognizing the power of institutions and policies in shaping their trajectory. This course should provide students with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to better understand and more effectively study the complexities of race that loom large in a post-Ferguson, post-Obama America.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2018, Fall 2015
AMST 6202 - Political Culture (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 6202, ANTHR 6102, HIST 6202
This course will explore the relationship between popular belief, political action, and the institutional deployment of social power. The class will be roughly divided in three parts, opening with a discussion of how the material world influences the culture of a society. The middle section will connect culture to political ideology, including symbolism and the construction of group identity. The last part of the course will consider ways in which cultural symbols and ideology can be manipulated in order to legitimate government authority. We will then, coming full circle, trace how political regimes can influence the social practices from which culture originates.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2019, Spring 2018
AMST 6210 - Historical Archaeology: Capitalism, Colonialism, Race, Gender (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 6210, ARKEO 6210
AMST 6220 - Locke and the Philosophies of Dispossession: Indigenous America's Interruptions and Resistances (3 Credits)
This course looks at the philosopher John Locke as a philosopher of dispossession. There is a uniquely Lockean mode of missionization, conception of mind and re-formulations of the 'soul' applied to dispossess Indigenous peoples of the social institutions, intellectual traditions and the material bases and practices which sustain(ed) them. While colonization is typically used as a kind of shorthand for this process, we will be attempting to stay focused on the specific dimensions of Lockean dispossession and its mutually informing relationship with English colonialism.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Spring 2017
Learning Outcomes:
- Demonstrate a fluency in the philosophical formulations for settler colonialism and the historical and ongoing dispossessing of Native Americans—specifically, a fluency in Locke's philosophies of 1) the workmanship theory of property, 2) of consciousness and the modern "self," 3) theories of mind, 4) metaphysics and theology.
- Develop enhanced interpretive abilities through formal presentations and writing assignments.
- Apply pedagogical skills in teaching course content where they lead seminar topics.
- Employ sharpened interpretation and critical analysis skills through course writing assignments and structured editorial assistance to 1) concisely convey central argument(s) of texts, 2) make warrantable claims using relevant historical, philosophical, legal and material/empirical evidence, 3) clearly indicate one's positionality in developing arguments.
AMST 6248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 6248, ARKEO 6248, AIIS 6248
This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective. Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2018, Fall 2013
AMST 6264 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World (4 Credits)
This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems - such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors - enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people - requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 6272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7272, ARKEO 7272, AIIS 7720
This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2020, Fall 2018
AMST 6321 - Black Power Movement and Transnationalism (4 Credits)
This seminar explores the international and transnational dimensions of the Black Power Movement, broadly defined. Beginning with an examination of transnationalism in the early 20th century, it examines the thought and political activities of African-American intellectuals and activists who crossed national boundaries, figuratively and literally, in the quest for black freedom. We will focus on the postwar era, particularly the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring transnationalism in the context of black feminism, Marxism, black nationalism, Pan Africanism, and other political traditions. We will examine the meeting and mingling of transnational discourses, ideologies, and activists in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2021, Spring 2019, Fall 2015
AMST 6322 - Readings in 20th Century African-American History (4 Credits)
This graduate seminar will explore major currents in historical writing about African-American life and culture in the twentieth century. Focusing on social, intellectual, and labor history, we will identify key themes in recent studies of the formation of modern black communities and politics before and after World War Two. The course will place special emphasis on class, gender, social movements, and migration.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2018, Spring 2017
AMST 6418 - Environmental Justice Studio (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 6418
AMST 6424 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 6424, LSP 6424, LAW 7231
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2017, Spring 2015 AMST 6464 - Underground Railroad Seminar (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ASRC 6464
This seminar offers students the unique opportunity to explore the abolition movement of upstate New York and to visit and research some of the Underground Railroad routes in Ithaca and the Central New York region. The course provides an introductory examination of antebellum slavery and its abolition in the United States, including slave narratives and the alliances among free African Americans, Quakers, and other abolitionists in the United States. One of the principal student projects includes writing a brief fictional piece on the experience of being on the Underground Railroad or assisting someone to travel on it. These creative writing exercises will be considered for uploading to the Voices on the Underground Railroad website.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022 AMST 6502 - Queer Proximities (4 Credits)
How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities? In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Felix, Gonzalez-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, Cherrie Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021
AMST 6510 - United We Stand - Divided We Fall: The Rise of Polarization and Social Division - and What it Means (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PUBPOL 5510, GOVT 6512
When did bipartisan become a bad word? Should we unfriend and unfollow people who have different opinions than our own? How did we become a country that grows more polarized and divided every year? Most importantly, can we change, or are we destined to continue down this path?
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will identify and describe long term trends, key individuals, and events impacting politics in the U.S.
- Students will analyze the impacts of those key individuals and events and discuss how those impacts are likely to affect future U.S. politics.
- Students will formulate possible strategies to reinforce, or alter, current trends within the U.S.
- Students will research and synthesize the scholarly understanding of specific aspects of polarization (graduate students).
AMST 6513 - Toni Morrison's Novels (3 Credits)
In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the love trilogy on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Spring 2018
AMST 6585 - American Political Thought (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 6585
This course is a graduate seminar that examines a selection of important texts that have helped shape and contest the political idea-and the political ideals-of America, placing particular emphasis on the dissenting traditions of American political thought. Beginning with a sermon delivered to Puritans on their way to the New World, and ending with a seminal debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippman over the very possibility of democratic self-rule in the modern age, the course will emphasize how intellectual argument in America has shaped-and been shaped by-the larger political culture of which it is a part. We will place particular emphasis on four significant periods in American political history: Puritan New England, the Revolution and Founding, Abolition and Civil War, and the Progressive Era. (PT)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Fall 2015, Fall 2012
AMST 6596 - Violence, Power, and Nonviolence (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 6596
This course pursues a theoretical and comparative understanding of the relationship between violence and power. Beginning with an overview of disputes over the politics of 'naming' violence, we will examine a series of intersecting historical disputes about the nature, justification, and functions of political violence between a series of realist, Marxist, and pacifist thinkers. Topics to be discussed will include the relationship between tactics and strategy, means and ends, the dynamics of political contention, revolution and mass politics, the relationship coercion and persuasion, and the power of nonviolence, as well as revolutionary terror, general strikes, civil disobedience, hunger strikes, and political rioting. Thinkers studied may include Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Lenin, Luxemburg, Weber, Sorel, Gandhi, Trotsky, Niebuhr, Du Bois, Fanon, King, Arendt, and Deming.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
AMST 6612 - Minoritarian Aesthetics In-And Performance (4 Credits)
What are minoritarian aesthetics? How do these inform the production and reception of performance, broadly defined? How does attending to the aesthetics involved in the production of artistic and cultural productions open up new ways of critically understanding the world around us? In seeking to answer these questions, and others, this seminar will introduce graduate students to theories and critiques that attend to the aesthetic dimensions of visual culture, scripted staged performances, performance art, and contemporary media created by Black, queer, Asian, Caribbean, and Latinx/Latin people. Drawing on the work of theorists Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Leticia Alvarado, and Sandra Ruiz amongst others, students will interrogate the dialectical relationship between the artist’s subject position and their resultant creative and critical work.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
AMST 6615 - Disobedience, Resistance, Refusal (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 6615
This seminar will survey the field of contemporary political theories of dissent. Beginning with the 'new' civil disobedience debate and the question of whether or not the conceptual framework of civil disobedience can still provide adequate resources for conceptualizing recent protest movements, we will consider alternative theoretical approaches analyzing dissent in terms of repertoires of resistance or practices of refusal. Topics examined will include the relationship of theory and practice, the political functions of dissent, the democracy-inhibiting and democracy-enhancing faces of protest, the politics of in/civility, nonviolence and self-defense, protest policing, freedom and fugitivity, as well as the aesthetic-affective registers of political action. Readings may include recent works by William Scheuerman, Robin Celikates, Candice Delmas, Tommie Shelby, Fred Moten, Audra Simpson, Saidiya Hartman, Bonnie Honig, Banu Bargu, Lida Maxwell, and Judith Butler.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 6632 - Modern American Poetry, 1910-1950 (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ENGL 6632
The first half of the 20th century saw an unprecedented wave of poetic innovation, much of it produced by American poets living both in the United States and abroad. This course will explore crucial texts and movements that range widely in their aesthetic and formal orientations, but that share in the expansive and experimental spirit of modernism. We'll consider key volumes by Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes, as well as major poetic sequences produced in the shadow of World War II. We'll also attend to varying modes of poetic circulation, including periodicals, small presses, and radio. Our primary focus will be on individual poems and their powers to illuminate our lives.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2010
AMST 6645 - Democratic Theory (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 6645
In contemporary political contexts democracy is often invoked as the very ground of political legitimacy. There is very little agreement, however, on what democracy means or how it is best embodied in state institutions and law. This seminar will introduce students to select debates in contemporary democratic theory over the normative meaning of democracy and the limitations of contemporary democratic practice. Beginning with the work of Rousseau and ending with debates over radical democracy, we will explore the following themes: How do democratic theorists and democratic actors negotiate the paradoxes of collective self-rule? What is the relationship between liberalism and democracy? Do rights suspend democracy or establish its preconditions? What are the best procedures for democratic decision-making? How does democracy deal with difference? Is democracy best understood as a form of government or a practice of resistance to domination?
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2016, Spring 2014, Fall 2011
AMST 6669 - From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: A History of Policing in Black Communities (4 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022
AMST 6682 - Disturbing Settlement (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SHUM 6682, ANTHR 7182
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 6683 - Disturbing Settlement - Engaged (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with SHUM 6683, ANTHR 7183
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
AMST 6686 - Feeling Free: Radical Aesthetics and Political Affects (3 Credits)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023
AMST 6703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 6703
The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.
Exploratory Studies:
(LAAREA, SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Spring 2018 AMST 6865 - Martin Luther King, Jr. (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GOVT 6865, ASRC 6865, RELST 6865
This seminar is an intensive study of the political thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. Approaching texts in contexts, we will seek to recover King the political thinker from his mythologization in American political culture by carefully reading his books, speeches, sermons, interviews, notes, and correspondence as illocutionary interventions into the major crises and ideological disputes of twentieth century American politics. Topics we will explore include the politics of dignity, leadership and mass politics, rhetoric and democratic persuasion, law and direct action, nonviolence, loss and mourning, race and political economy, global justice, and the practices of prophetic critique. Along the way, we will study King in dialogue with both his contemporaries as well as more recent interventions in the study of civil disobedience, racial capitalism, and Afro-modern political thought.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023
AMST 7416 - It's the End of the World As We Know It (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7416, STS 7416
Living in the contemporary moment means living with reminders that the end of the world - at least as we know it - is looming. From the global ecological crisis to evangelical apocalyptic visions, and from nuclear threats to the changes wrought by automated work, people are brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and experience. In this course, we will consider how anthropologists have grappled with the end of the world, drawing the discipline's boundaries liberally. Working with ethnography, science fiction, film, and more, we will ask: What does it mean to adopt the uncertain future as an object of study? And might the end of the world as we know it also mean the start of a more speculative anthropology?
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021
AMST 7417 - Ecopolitics (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7417
At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations-conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more-we ask how the environment manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025 AMST 7555 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7755, ARKEO 7755
This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
AMST 7725 - American Indian Lands and Sovereignties (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7725
The relationship between North American Indian peoples and the states of Canada and the US is in many ways unique, a product of centuries of trade compacts, treaties, legislation, warfare, land claim negotiations, and Supreme Court decisions. Apparently straightforward concepts such as land, property, and sovereignty, based as they are on European cultural assumptions, often seem inadequate for making sense of the cross-cultural terrain of Indian-State relations, where they tend to take on new - and often ambiguous - meanings. In this course we will explore some of these ambiguous meanings, attending to the cultural realities they reflect and the social relationships they shape. Then we will examine the complex interplay of legal, political, and cultural forces by taking an in-depth look at several selected case studies.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Fall 2016, Fall 2011
AMST 7792 - Latinx Education Across the Americas (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7790, LSP 7790, EDUC 7790
This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022