Undergraduate

Course Archive

Here is a rotating list of frequently taught departmental courses:

AMS 2270 20th Century American Culture

The twentieth century saw the United States and its people expanding their borders—and their sense of themselves—into areas the nation’s founders could never have anticipated. As their ideas changed, Americans continually debated what their nation could—and should—be: to its citizens, to its leaders, and to the world.

This class has two main goals: first, to increase your familiarity with some of American culture’s most marked characteristics in the twentieth century, exposing you to people, art, and ideas that set the terms for some of the century’s most significant debates; and second, to increase your comfort exploring and adding to the insights and methodologies of scholars of the twentieth century.

AMS 4804 American Film

This course offers an introduction to the history American cinema—from early experiments with moving pictures to recent work in digital formats. Attending to both narrative form and stylistic technique, we will explore the aesthetic, cultural, and psychological consequences of American films from a number of genres and modes.

AMS 4804 Ethics of Food Production

This course starts with the premise that food production in the United States has become problematic to the point of harming citizens, society, and the environ-ment. We will examine the historical and contemporary relationships between people and the food they produce and consume, focusing on the distancing and detachment inherent in the 20th-Century Agro-Industrial complex. How does this distancing from our food sources (both animal-based and plant-based) affect our relationships to the Earth, to our spirituality, and to one another?

HUM 2250 Studies in culture: The twentieth Century

This course focuses on analyses of selected works of twentieth century art, including films, paintings, music, and literature, in the context of major political, social, and economic events, such as war, depression, totalitarianism, and technological change. No prerequisites.

HUM 2522 Introduction to the Cultural Study of Popular Music

How does music "work"? What is the role of popular music in our daily lives? How is musical meaning shaped by ideas of *race*, *gender*, and *class*? What is the role of *technology* in the production and reception of music? What does it mean that a song or performance is "*authentic*"? Is there such a thing as "*selling out*" music for money and fame? Who decides what music is *art*? Who gets to write music *history*? Is music a *political* force?This class will use historical and current-day music to explore these questions. We will listen, read about, and discuss music in many different genres: hip-hop, rock, country, and more. Artists will include: Jay-Z, Led Zeppelin, Trace Adkins, Metallica, and many others.

HUM3240 early middle ages: early christian cultures

This course centers on the culture of the Mediterranean world in the first eight centuries
of the Common or Christian Era (CE or AD). We begin with the life and teachings of Jesus as
portrayed by his followers in the first and early second century. We place the “Jesus movement”
and its success in the context of Jewish texts and traditions, Greco-Roman culture, and the
contemporary Roman Empire. The rest of the course is set between the third and eighth centuries, the transition from late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. We focus on Christian texts and works of art as part of the society and culture of the late Roman Empire. Throughout the course, we explore the diversity of early Christianity and address these major questions: how did medieval Christianity—the religion of Roman Catholicism and the eastern Orthodox churches—take shape from the diversity of beliefs and practices of the first generations of Jesus’s followers? how did Christianity develop its language of art and its longlasting institutions,
practices, values, and doctrines through interactions, exchanges, and conflicts with Greco Roman culture and thought? how were ancient politics, culture, society, and thought, and the Roman Empire itself, transformed by Christianity? We conclude by considering the Qur’an, the
emergence of Islam, and the creation of the Caliphate, and their deep ties to Judeo-Christian
biblical traditions and Greco-Roman culture and politics.

This is a course on culture, not religion, but our emphasis on early Christianity reflects its
centrality—and that of religious practice and thought—to the art and literature, politics and
ideologies, moral values and social institutions of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In
other words, studying early Christian culture, the formation of Christianity, and, finally, the
emergence of Islam is a sensible way to explore the culture and history of this period. It provides a framework for discussing social, political, and cultural aspects of the end of the Roman empire in the west and its transformation in the east, and for understanding how Antiquity came to an end and how the period we call the Middle Ages took shape.

HUM 3242 The Enlightenment

This is a course on the European Enlightenment, a complex cultural phenomenon of the 18th century. The Enlightenment is the idea that we have found the correct worldview, from the moral to the scientific, and that we can structure our way of life according to the principles of Enlightenment. In many ways, this time period is responsible for the picture we have today, from the justifications of our political institutions, economic arrangements, and social lives, to the structure of our science and its place within that society. We shall explore this idea of Enlightenment through various readings from philosophy, science, politics, and elsewhere, in the hopes of not just understanding the history and meaning of this concept, but also how this idea might inform current ideas and debates. The class will involve lectures, group activities, and discussions. 

HUM 3804 introduction to cultural studies

This course aims to introduce students to the major ideas and skills necessary for all majors in the Humanities and Cultural Studies Department. We will conduct an overview of the central topics of cultural studies, including (but not limited to) feminism and gender studies; theories of ethnicity, race, and post-colonialism; theories of class; power relationships; and technology and media. In this class, students will also work on careful analysis of a range of primary aesthetic and cultural forms, including literature, visual art,film, music, and other cultural events and performances. Students will also learn critical thinking skills that will further develop their writing skills. This course provides a thorough grounding in interdisciplinary work through the combination of theoretical readings, primary analysis, the application of cultural criticism, along with some research skills. This course is a requirement for the Humanities and American Studies degrees, and students must pass with a B-.

HUM 4261 Utopia and science fiction

This is a course that explores the idea of utopia—a perfect place and society—through works of science fiction. In this course we will address not only the meaning of utopia, but explore how it has been conceived, attempted, thought about, and represented in literature and film. We will find that in order to talk about utopias, we must also discuss and understand the idea of dystopia: the opposite of a utopia, a place and society that is full of suffering. Finally, we will be concerned not only with fictional representations, but about the ideas of utopia in real life.

HUM 4824 Introduction to Film and Media Theory

This advanced introduction to film and media theory offers students sophisticated tools for thinking critically and creatively about motion pictures and the psychological, cultural, and political meanings they engender. With consistent reference to not only mainstream Hollywood cinema, but also the international history of experimental and oppositional cinema, the early years of silent cinema, and emergent forms of digital media, the course traverses three interrelated areas of inquiry. First, it explores questions of film and media ontology. Second, it assesses the influence of structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and phenomenology in the theorization of film and media. And third, it surveys the plurality of historically specific viewing conditions that vary according to race, class, gender, and sexuality.

HUM 4890 The American Horror Film

Taking stock of the American horror genre, from its early German Expressionist and
Surrealist influences to its more recent appearances in contemporary cinema and
television, this course explores the horror film’s main currents and multiple variations,
including its early interest in monsters and mad scientists, its post-1960 turn toward
psycho killers and internal possessions, and its recent considerations of technology and
torture. To this end, students interrogate the horror genre’s signal characteristics: What
kinds of threat does it depict and how do these change over time? How do different
subgenres respond to these threats? What effects do horror films produce in their
spectators? Fear? Shock? Anxiety? Disgust? Paranoia? Why do viewers find these
sensations so unpleasurably pleasurable? What kinds of “cultural work” does the horror
film do? To answer such questions, the course carefully analyzes foundational films from
horror’s “classic” era, its various convergences with film noir and science fiction, and its
later secularization in the slasher film, familial horror, and so-called “torture porn.” It also
investigates horror cinema’s engagement with other media, including photography,
video, and television. Selections from the Course Reader contribute to our discussions
with texts that take up the history of the horror genre, its narrative structures, formal
styles, and spectatorial pleasures, as well as its links to larger social and cultural
concerns, including race, gender, sexuality, and class.

HUM 4890 Black American cinema

HUM 4890: Black American Cinema provides students with the historical and intellectual grounds of cinema made by Black Americans. Over the course’s four months, we’ll cover a broad variety of cinema, moving from the birth of cinema all the way into web series and digital video installations. Along the way, we’ll encounter revolutionary Black politics, corporate and independent productions, experimental and documentary films, art and genre cinema, and everything in between.

While we will cover many different bodies of thought in Black film studies, the course’s organization is based around an interrogation of the film industry as a kind of mainstream, one that previously excluded people of color from participating in their own image-making, and one that Black filmmakers have dealt with in varied, complex ways. As such, we will move backward and forward in period to show the continuities in various historical moments of Black American cinema, to show how the concept of developing a Black mainstream has varied over the course of cinema’s 130 years. Key to this project is the conceptualization of history itself as a continual rewriting, one accomplished here through the artistic capacities of cinema.

In addition to this specific theoretical context, students taking this course will learn to analyze films using theoretical, critical, and historical approaches informed by scholarship (from film studies, critical race theory, and other approaches). Students will also develop a critical understanding of film history more broadly, focusing in particular on the ways that localized media projects connect to other sites of filmmaking and film theory, both in the United Statesas well as Africa and Europe. Finally, students will learn to contextualize films within pressing contemporary political issues pertinent to race in the United States.

hum 4931 senior seminar (variable topic)

Building on our work from last semester, this course is focused on writing a 15 to 20-page analysis and research paper (between 4800 to 6400 words). This project is the culmination of your work as a major in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies, and the class is designed to guide you through the research and paper writing process. We will learn techniques of research, approaches to analytical writing, and how to build, support, and organize an argument. The writing process will be broken down into stages, with many opportunities for research, writing, revision, workshops, and one on one meetings.

HUM 4938 muslims, christians, and jews: medieval light on modern issues

This course examines relationships among Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Middle
Ages by considering 1) how sacred texts defined and interpreted similarities, differences, and
relationships between their faiths, 2) how rival faiths and believers were portrayed, and 3) how
communities practicing different religions lived together, whether in harmony or conflict. We
treat topics and texts from the Hebrew Bible and the earliest Christian writings of the first and
second centuries of the Common or Christian Era (CE/AD) to the Qur’an and the rise of Islam in
the seventh century, and diverse representations and interactions of Christians, Muslims, and
Jews in Europe and the Middle East through the fifteenth century. We focus on the Middle Ages,
but we explore issues of relevance today, when relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians
range from tolerance, dialogue, and easy coexistence to bitter polemics, suspicion, hostility, and
violent conflict.

This course will give you insights into these modern debates in several ways. You will
learn about the historical development of these religious communities, their shared heritage, and the complex history of their interrelationships. We will examine the origins of common
stereotypes and the causes and nature of intellectual, cultural, social, and political conflict among these communities. We will assess the legacy of medieval conflicts in shaping modern attitudes. Finally, this history has implications that go beyond the specific relationships among the three faiths: it illustrates the ways in which identities—ethnic, national, and racial, as well as
religious—may be defined and hardened; the ways in which communities bolster their own
cohesion through opposition to others; the circumstances that foster cooperation, trigger
persecution, or limit violence among diverse communities; and the social, political, and
intellectual ends that are served by creating “enemies”.