Courses

American Studies courses take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complexity of American culture, also weaving in history, literature, visual media, performance, and other forms of expression. You will be challenged to ask new questions about aspects of American life long taken for granted, and to use American culture as a laboratory for testing classic and contemporary theories about how cultures work.

American Studies Courses

AMST 101 (F, S) SEM America: The Nation and Its Discontents

This course introduces students to the capacious and extraordinarily varied interdisciplinary field of American Studies. First institutionalized in the mid-twentieth century, American Studies once bridged literature and history in an attempt to discover a singular American identity. Over 80 years later, many American Studies scholars reject this exceptionalizing rhetoric, working instead to understand how genocide, enslavement, colonization, and militarism/war are foundational to the formation of the U.S. nation-state, and how marginalized and minoritized peoples have survived through, rebelled against, and created new visions for collectivity, relationality, and community. In this course, students will be introduced to the dynamic ways American Studies work links to ethnic studies; women, gender, and sexuality studies; literary studies, political science; critical geography; critical media studies; disability studies; history; anthropology; sociology; art; and more. We will anchor this array of approaches by examining beliefs, practices, places, and migrations that have shaped and been shaped by the U.S., and we will pay particular attention to the people who labor for, have been racialized by, and who think critically about “America.” Through close reading; discussions; and analyses of music, art, and film, we will collectively reckon with the questions of who and what makes “America” — hemispherically, transnationally, globally. In the process, students will be encouraged to co-create a learning experience rooted in praxis, political consciousness, intersectionality, and mutual support.

Taught by: Jan Padios, Ethan Fukuto | Catalog details

 

AMST 105 (F, S) SEM American Girlhoods

The image of the girl has captivated North American writers, commentators, artists, and creators of popular culture for at least the last two centuries. What metaphors, styles of writing, ideas of “manners and morals” does literature about girls explore? What larger cultural and aesthetic concerns are girls made to represent? And how is girlhood articulated alongside and/or intertwined with other identities and identifications, such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality? These are some of the issues we will explore in this course.

Taught by: Kathryn Kent | Catalog details

 

AMST 107 LEC Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous North America

Last offered Fall 2024

This course introduces students to the art and architecture of ancestral Indigenous and Native North America. It will consider the artistic productions of several pre-contact and early colonial cultures that emerged in the regions now referred to as Mesoamerica, the “United States,” and “Canada.” Cultures to be addressed include Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Mexica (Aztec), Chaco, Mississippian, Inuit, and Native Hawaiian, among others. Students will learn not only about these cultures but also the sources and methods by which present-day scholars have come to know of their complexity. Artforms to be addressed will include ceramics, murals, sculpture, inscriptions, feather work, shell work, sacred architecture, residential architecture, and urbanism. This is one half of a two-course sequence that also includes, “Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous South America and the Caribbean,” (Spring 2024) and may be taken in any order or independently.

Taught by: Trenton Barnes | Catalog details

 

AMST 108 LEC Arts of Ancestral Indigenous South America and the Caribbean

Last offered Spring 2026

This course introduces students to the art and architecture of ancestral Indigenous and Native South America. It will consider the artistic productions of several pre-contact and early colonial cultures that emerged in the Andes, Amazonia, the Southern Cone, and the Caribbean. Cultures to be addressed include Chavín, Nazca, Moche, Tiwanaku, Inca, Casarabe, Tupi-Guarani, Cocle, Taíno, and Mapuche, among others. Students will learn not only about these cultures but also the sources and methods by which present-day scholars have come to know of their complexity. Artforms to be addressed will include ceramics, murals, sculpture, khipu, tocapu, feather work, shell work, sacred architecture, residential architecture, and settlement.

Taught by: Trenton Barnes | Catalog details

 

AMST 109 LEC Global Islamophobia: Crisis of the State and Reconfiguration of Global Power

Last offered Fall 2025

Given the fact that Islamophobia is a global issue, this course focuses on the socio-geopolitical global dynamics of Islamophobia by examining the historical roots of Islamophobia on a global scale and its manifestation in current events in Asia, Europe, Africa, and North and South America. Therefore, the course will follow a two-part line of inquiry that sheds light on two key aspects of global Islamophobia: the genealogy of political islam and the racialization of Islam (In French there is a distinction between islam and Islam. We will discuss this distinction more in class). The first part of the course will explore the racialization of islam in the contexts of migration, minoritization, and indigeneity across different geographies For example, we will compare the social and economic transformation of Arab immigrants and their descendants from Arabs to Muslims in France and the U.S. and identify similarities and differences between the construction of race and anti-Muslim racism in both countries. As for the contexts of minoritization and indigeneity, we will discuss the cases of Muslims in Myanmar, China, India, Palestine/Israel, and Southern Mexico, among other places. The second part of the course will examine political Islam by addressing the following questions: What is political Islam? Why did contemporary political Islam appear, and how was it received globally, from Western countries, namely the U.S., France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, for instance, to Asian countries like Turkey, India, and Pakistan, to Arab countries like Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq? How does the rise of political Islam challenge the global order of the Pax Americana, and what does it express from a geopolitical and sociopolitical point of view, both in the domestic and international scenes? By answering these questions, we will not only obtain a better understanding of global Islamophobia but will also gain a critical insight into how Islamophobia is integrated (or not) within societies and geopolitical order, whether it is the West, Asia (including non Arab countries), or Africa like in Algeria or Nigeria. Moreover, we will comprehend more fully the global crisis of the state and the global structure of power that shaped the reception (and rejection) of political Islam. Overall, by using a global framework of analysis and an interdisciplinary approach that draws on a variety of resources from political economy, anthropology, sociology, critical race theory, and comparative ethnic studies, we will examine the articulation of the racialization of Muslims and political Islam and how they reinforce each other, thus feeding global Islamophobia.

Taught by: Souhail Chichah | Catalog details

 

AMST 113 (F) SEM The Feminist Poetry Movement

Feminist poetry and feminist politics were so integrated in the 1960s and 1970s in America that critical essays on poets, such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, appeared in the same handbook that listed such resources for women as rape crisis centers and health clinics. This course will map the crucial alliance between feminist politics (and its major cultural and political gains) and the feminist poetry movement that became a major “tool” for building, organizing, and theorizing second-wave feminism. In order to track this political and poetic revolution, we will take an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical, critical, and literary documents (including archival ones) and visual products (through the Object Lab of the Williams College Art Museum) that recreate the rich context of the period and help us consider the important social nature of aesthetic production. At the center of the course will be writings of major poets of the period, as well as anthologies and feminist periodicals that published their work and created a significant forum and shared space for women to articulate the politics and poetics of change. These periodicals and anthologies will also help us track the diversity of the feminist poetry movement and its intersection with issues of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Ultimately, we will want to consider how poetry serves as an important tool for thinking through questions of power and injustice and what role it plays in creating necessary imaginative space in the world for expression, critique, and change.

Taught by: Bethany Hicok | Catalog details

 

AMST 122 (S) TUT Black Sounds in the Age of AI

In 1929, legendary Spanish poet, playwright, and flamenco aficionado Federico García Lorca traveled to Harlem. While there, he took classes at Columbia, and socialized with key figures in the Harlem Renaissance, who took him out to bars and clubs to hear jazz and the blues. In this music, he recognized something familiar–the spirit of duende through which flamenco performers in his native Spain are able to express the inexpressible. In subsequent decades, African American writers and musicians such as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Miles Davis traveled to Spain, and recognized in flamenco something familiar: the feeling or soul they thought differentiated African American musical forms like the blues and jazz from many other genres. Is there something that unifies all these different forms of music? According to one flamenco singer, “All music that has black sounds has duende.” In this tutorial, we will explore the meanings of blackness and black sounds in the transatlantic world, both in terms of race, and in relation to cultural, historical, religious, and mythic ideas that predate the conquest of the Americas and the modern conceptions of race that came in its wake. From the nineteenth century, when the nascent recording industry began defining and segregating musical genres and their markets, to our contemporary moment where YouTubers employ generative AI to create deepfaked Kendrick Lamar songs, black sounds have played a key role in how the line between the human and nonhuman is defined in American culture. We will draw on work in American Studies, Ethnomusicology, History, and Religious Studies to better understand the aesthetic power of artists whose work embodies black sounds, from blues icon Bessie Smith to flamenco legend Camarón de la Isla.

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 125 (F, S) SEM Introduction to Asian American Studies

Who or what constitutes the term “Asian American”? Leading with this provocation, this course offers an introductory overview of the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies, including its formation in, and evolution from, the late 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on an array of foundational texts, cultural productions, and primary sources, we will ask who has been included/excluded from this term, how people approach and negotiate Asian Americanness, and what it means to treat Asian America — however it may be defined — as a source of knowledge. We will analyze the shifting constructions and enactments of “Asian American” alongside other markers of difference from as early as the eighteenth century to the present. In particular, we will be attentive to how these constructions have been shaped in relation to other racial formations, political struggles, and overlapping systems of power — including US settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. With this, we will examine how this term has been widely undone and remade via political activism, visual and performance art, plays, media, poetry, etc. The aim of this course is not to identify a singular or “correct’ definition of the term “Asian American,” but to collectively assess and explore its limits, reaches, utility, and meaning in a diverse range of contexts and experiences.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto, Jan Padios | Catalog details

 

AMST 128 SEM Reading Asian American Literature

Last offered Spring 2020

Though the category and term “Asian American” came about as a result of political struggle in the 1960s, what we now call Asian American writing in English began in the nineteenth century and has played a significant role in every American literary “movement” from Modernism, realism, protest literature to various avant-gardes, the graphic novel, and digital poetries. This course closely reads a sampling of texts in a variety of genres and styles-produced by writers from various Asian American ethnic groups-from the late nineteenth century to the present and contextualizes them historically, both domestically and globally. We will examine the material, cultural, political, and psychic intersections of larger structural forces with individual writers and texts. Along the way, we will interrogate the notion of “Asian American”–its contradictions, heterogeneous nature, and our assumptions–and its relation to the idea of “American.” Some questions we will ask: “Why have Asian Americans and Asian American writers and writing so often been viewed as ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ to the American body politic and the English-language literary tradition?” “How might Asian American writing be linked to other English-language texts in the Asian diaspora?”

Taught by: Anthony Kim | Catalog details

 

AMST 132 SEM Contemporary Africana Social and Political Philosophy

Last offered Spring 2022

This introductory seminar investigates the relationship between three major schools of thought in contemporary Africana social and political philosophy: the African, Afro-North American, and Afro-Caribbean intellectual traditions. We will discuss a range of thinkers including Dionne Brand, Aimé Césaire, Angela Davis, Édouard Glissant, Kwame Gyekye, Paget Henry, bell hooks, Katherine McKittrick, Charles Mills, Nkiru Nzegwu, Oyèrónke Oyewùmí, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Cornel West, and Sylvia Wynter. A primary goal of the course is to provide students with the intellectual resources to decipher problems central to philosophical discourse and to allow students an opportunity to apply what they learn to critical issues in current geopolitics.

Taught by: Neil Roberts | Catalog details

 

AMST 135 SEM Queen Sugar and Black Study

Last offered Spring 2026

This seminar will explore the critically acclaimed and award-winning television series, Queen Sugar. An adaptation of the eponymously named 2014 novel by Natalie Baszile, the show follows the Bordelon family as it struggles to hold on to its ancestral land. This seminar, specifically designed for first-year students, will treat the series as an epic text alongside scholarship on key topics offered in Williams’ Africana Studies curriculum: the afterlives of enslavement, plantation regimes, global sugar production, land dispossession, the carceral state, Black gender and sexualities, kinship, activism, and Afro-diasporic spiritualities.

Taught by: James Manigault-Bryant | Catalog details

 

AMST 146 (F) SEM Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies

We think we understand the history of the United States: the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the thirteen colonies revolted against Great Britain, and now, the United States is a melting pot of many different cultures. But how do the land, history, and cultures of the United States change when we view them from Indigenous lenses? What happens when we think of Turtle Island as a homeland to over five hundred Indigenous nations, each with their own cultures, histories, and futures? How, and why, have Indigenous people been systemically erased from the American past and present? This course will investigate these questions using the methods of Native American and Indigenous Studies to understand Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures. This course will prepare students to better understand contemporary Indigenous life, including topics like sovereignty, economics, art, music, literature, activism, and representations. We will enrich our classroom activities with visits to the Williams College Special Collections and the Williams College Museum of Art. This course offers a broad introductory survey of these and other issues as it explores the development and current state of the interdisciplinary field known as Native and Indigenous Studies.

Taught by: Emily Dixon Magness | Catalog details

 

AMST 149 SEM First-Hand America

Last offered Fall 2016

Gonzo journalism, the nonfiction novel, literary journalism, the “new new journalism”: the study of American culture has thrived in the able hands of writers, reformers and amateur anthropologists. This course is an introduction to American writing and culture through the eyes of extraordinary witnesses who work as public intellectuals, addressing a readership that reaches beyond the university. Through essays, films and music we will track the documentary impulse from coast to coast: from Ferguson, Baltimore, Miami, Watts, Denver, Harlem, Chicago, Compton and Sing-Sing prison to the wilds of Alaska and rural Georgia; from mass demonstrations to the most intimate, bedside revelations. How have writers and artists given their audiences tools for understanding power, privilege, and difference in America?

Taught by: Cassandra Cleghorn | Catalog details

 

AMST 150 (F, S) LEC Data for Justice

This course is a unique and inclusive introduction to data science where quantitative thinking, programming, and social justice intertwine. We will build our data science skills using R, a popular open-source data science tool. We will focus on essential stages of data analysis, including data acquisition, cleaning, wrangling, visualization, and exploration. But rather than divorcing these techniques from the social issues they can help illuminate, we ground them in a social justice context. Overall, we will apply data science skills to topics drawn from criminal justice, environmental justice, diversity and inclusion in arts and media, education equity, and much more, with the goal of growing our collective capacity to use data science as a tool for social good. During a time when humans are increasingly subjugated to data-driven algorithmic decisions, when there are social media accounts dedicated to highlighting misuses of data, and when artificial intelligence makes faking data a nearly trivial task, using data to ethically and carefully promote justice is more important than ever.

Taught by: Chad Topaz | Catalog details

 

AMST 151 (F) TUT Black Atlantic Yogas

In contemporary culture, yoga primarily denotes a series of physical postures that strengthen and tone the body. Practitioners embrace yoga–or what is sometimes called “transnational Anglophone yoga”–for personal wellness, self-improvement, and increasing labor productivity and efficiency. Now the center of a billion-dollar industry, yoga is commercialized through studios, virtual courses and podcasts, teaching curricula, professional guilds, and even fashion. This tutorial, “Black Atlantic Yogas,” will approach yoga from the historical perspective of Africana Religious Studies, as one of many spiritual practices Black people across the globe have adapted to reorient the self for survival in the modern world. Five central concepts have appeared most prominently in Black yogas–1) asana; 2) pranayama; 3) dhyana; 4) ahimsa; and 5) satyagraha. We will review interdisciplinary readings and podcasts that consider the application of these concepts across space and time, as well as whether and how they fit together as a coherent yogic system.

Taught by: James Manigault-Bryant | Catalog details

 

AMST 164 SEM Communications in Early America

Last offered Fall 2024

How did the multiplicity of people who shaped “early” North America communicate with each other, across profound linguistic, cultural, social, political, and spiritual differences? What strategies did they use to forge meaning and connections in times of tremendous transformation, while maintaining vital continuities with what came before? This course examines histories of communication in North America and the technologies that communities have developed to record, remember, advocate, persuade, resist, and express expectations for the future. Using a continental and transoceanic lens of “Vast Early America,” we will take up Indigenous oral traditions, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, wampum belts, and winter counts as expressions of ethics, identity, relationality, and diplomacy among sovereign Native/Indigenous nations. We will reflect on artistic and natural science paintings, engravings, and visual culture that circulated widely; and diaries and journals as forms of personal as well as collective memory. We will work with political orations, newspapers, pamphlets, and other forms of print culture that galvanized public opinion in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions; memorials and monuments that communities have created to honor ancestors and significant events; material culture such as baskets and weavings that signified through their imagery and physical forms; and social critique and visions of justice in the verse and prose of Phillis Wheatley Peters and William Apess. These materials take us into the complexities of individuals’ and communities’ interactions and relations of power. They also illuminate spaces of potential or realized solidarity, alliance, and co-building of new worlds. Throughout we will work together to understand different methodologies, theories, practices, and ethics involved in approaching the past. We will at every turn be attuned to the ongoing significances of these experiences among communities in the twenty-first century.

Taught by: Christine DeLucia | Catalog details

 

AMST 166 SEM Being Muslim, Being American: American Muslim Literature in the 21st century

Last offered Spring 2026

Islam and Muslims in the United States are the subject of extensive public scrutiny and media coverage in broader public discourses. It is less common, however, to hear Muslims’ own voices speak about their lives, experiences, beliefs, and commitments. This course takes a literary approach to exploring American Muslims’ own narratives about themselves, which will serve as an introduction to religion in contemporary U.S. culture. We address questions such as: How do American Muslims attempt to fashion their identity in the wake of 9/11? What are the pressures and demands of American national belonging and cultural citizenship that Muslims must navigate? How are race, gender, ethnic heritage, and immigration definitive of Muslim experiences and self-understandings? How are Muslims approaching the tensions between communal belonging and individuality? What are the competing claims and contestations about authentic expressions of Islam? We engage such themes through popular memoirs, autobiographies, novels, short stories, poetry, films, and comedy.

Taught by: Zaid Adhami | Catalog details

 

AMST 170 (S) SEM Chinatowns: Race, Culture, and Politics

In the late nineteenth century, in response to hostility and legal exclusion, Chinese migrants on the West and East Coast of the U.S. began to build self-reliant communities that became known, both to Chinese and non-Chinese residents alike, as Chinatowns. By the turn of the century, Chinatowns had sprung up in cities, from Chicago to Phoenix to San Diego. To some, Chinatown was a haven for Chinese migrants to socialize, worship, shop for familiar food, find jobs, and assimilate into the host country. Others have depicted Chinatown as a homogeneously exotic and dangerous place that posed physical and moral threats to European American and other non-Chinese residents. What do the historical development and representations of Chinatowns tell us about U.S. history and the American imagination? What is the continued significance of Chinatown in the U.S.? This course will help students answer these questions through various primary and secondary sources–including novels, films, business advertisements, travel guides, and oral histories. With a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, we will explore themes including food and culture, labor migration, public health, gender and sexuality, segregation, displacement and gentrification, criminalization and immigrant detention, economic mobility, transnationalism and globalization, and political agency and alliance building. Students will leave this course with an understanding of the different theories, practices, and ethics involved in interpreting race, culture, and politics in American cities and ethnic neighborhoods. As a part of the final research project, students will have the opportunity to consult archival collections on Manhattan’s Chinatown and produce research that sheds light on some of the most critical issues that the neighborhood faces today.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

 

AMST 200 SEM Ethnographic Directions in American Studies

Last offered Spring 2022

This course introduces students to the practice and politics of ethnography, broadly defined as the study and representation of people, culture, and society. Our approach will be post-positive and interpretive, with attention to the social stakes of ethnographic research and methodology writ large. We begin the semester by looking at the history of ethnographic methodologies in anthropology and sociology, and then examine efforts to decolonize ethnography. We then read several examples of decolonial, feminist, or otherwise critical ethnographic research related to marginalized or minoritized groups in the U.S. — such as undocumented migrants from Latin America, formerly unhoused Black girls, Diné fighting resource extraction on the reservation, and Cambodian refugees in the Bronx — along with articles that illuminate issues of power, observation, consent, and representation in ethnographic research. Through readings, discussion, and engagement in ethnographic exercises, students will gain familiarity with the different phases or components of conducting ethnographic research, while also considering different styles of ethnographic production, including creative work. While this course is designed to look specifically at ethnographic directions that intersect with the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, it is open to any student interested in the study of pressing social issues (such as the prison-industrial complex, refugee resettlement, and drug addiction) and creating communities of mutual care and solidarity for surviving, fighting, and quite possibly, solving them.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 201 (S) TUT Cold War Intellectuals: Civil Rights, Writers and the CIA

This weekly tutorial has alternating primary and secondary writers (5pages/2pages). In weekly one-hour sessions, students read their work aloud followed by dialogue and critique. Primary papers are due to respondent/professor 48hrs before the tutorial meets; response papers are emailed to the professor 2hours before the weekly tutorial meets. Readings include: We Charge Genocide; Williams J. Maxwell, F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America; “Part III Supervision and Control of the CIA,” Rockefeller Commission Report; Malcolm X Speaks; Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat By the Door; and, The Murder of Fred Hampton. The tutorial is open to all students.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 203 SEM Militarism and American Culture

Last offered Spring 2024

This course examines the impact of warfare on the history of the United States. Considering a range of conflicts, from the violence of European colonialism to the ongoing War on Terror, the course pays particular attention to the ways in which military violence has shaped (and been shaped by) American culture. In particular, students will engage with texts that interrogate the relationship between race and violence in US history. Students will analyze shifting representations of war through engagement with cultural texts such as film, television, literature, and comics. The scope will be broad, with attention paid to larger conflicts such as the World Wars and the Cold War, as well the lesser-known wars and occupations that have continually occupied the US military.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 204 SEM Modern Rebels: Movement Revolt and Revelation

Last offered Fall 2020

“I dance not to entertain but to help people better understand each other.” –Pearl Primus Modern dance was born of a desire to create expressive forms of movement that could depict real human experience, rather than the fantasy and escapism that some of 20th century American popular culture provided. Initially misunderstood and subject to derision, modern dance was driven by stylistic and thematic calls for, and responses to, social and political upheaval by the unique voices of numerous individual artists. In this immersive course, students encounter modern dance in theory and in practice: in the studio, students engage in guided movement and embodied research over the course of the semester, experiencing principles of modern dance techniques, aesthetics and values. Readings, viewings, writing and seminar discussions will deepen students’ understanding of individual artists’ contributions, as well as myriad global influences present in the “inventions” of modern dance. Deployed as a call to action against crises such as racial violence and poverty, modern dance also celebrated the beauty and resilience of the oppressed. Personal identities, such as gender, race, age, sexual orientation, nationality were woven into work that reflected a shared struggle for artistic freedom. We will investigate critical narratives of cultural appropriation and learn why some artists, and not others, had greater opportunities to advance their art as a tool for expression, social critique and resistance. Studying examples of contemporary dance will illuminate how the values and movement styles of modern dance influence dance creators today.

Taught by: Erica Dankmeyer | Catalog details

 

AMST 206 SEM Designer Genes

Last offered Spring 2025

In this course, we explore cultural texts that attempt to come to terms with–or exploit–the revolution in contemporary genetics with a particular focus on gender, race, class, and sexuality. The mapping of the human genome in 2001 opened incredible opportunities for medicine, law, and society, but it also, as Alice Wexler has written, “opened a vast arena for contests of power over what it means to be human, who has the power to define what is normal, [and] who has access to what resources and when.” Wexler was writing before the final sequencing of the human genome. Now we have CRISPR technology, ushering in a new, more pressing set of ethical concerns. We are currently in the midst of a “global race to genetically modify humans,” as the anthropologist Eben Kirksey has documented in his new book The Mutant Project. How will we come to define the human? Who gets to decide? Our writers and filmmakers make clear that genetic medicine cannot be thought apart from a profit-driven American health care system or family and gender dynamics. Joanna Rudnick’s documentary In the Family, for instance, explores the personal and political issues associated with hereditary breast cancer and the patenting of genes. Octavia Butler’s Afro-futurist novel Dawn explores black female sexuality, reproduction, and the survival of the species in her character’s encounter with a genetically enhanced alien species. The film Gattaca shows us a fully realized dystopian society where genetically modified humans are the norm–a society that now “has discrimination down to a science.” The transgender artist Tamara Pertamina, on the other hand, “hopes to decolonize the science of genetic engineering,” as Kirksey has written, with her performance artist projects. Our texts come from a number of different genres, including the memoir, science fiction, film, documentary, art, and non-fiction writing at the intersections of science, medicine, philosophy, anthropology, and law.

Taught by: Bethany Hicok | Catalog details

 

AMST 208 TUT Time and Blackness

Last offered Spring 2026

The concept of time is one of the most examined concepts in Africana Studies. The field is saturated with historical studies, sociological theories of the modern era, fictional retellings of historical events, as well as literary analyses that take up matters of cultural memory. This tutorial, “Time and Blackness,” will offer a forum to consider how Black writers across a number of genres–spiritual autobiography, fiction, memoir, literary criticism, and cultural theory–understand time, and create paradigms of time to organize their work. The following questions will structure our investigation: What are the constituent elements of time in Black writings? How do Black writers reimagine national mythologies that erase cultural memory of enslavement and colonialism? In examining writings across genres, is there something that we can call an identifiable Black “timescape”?

Taught by: James Manigault-Bryant | Catalog details

 

AMST 209 (S) LEC Latinx Visual Arts

This course introduces students to Latinx visual arts and the histories of the communities from where this artistic production emerges. Latinx art and artists have gained significant attention and inclusion in the art world. For example, the opening of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture reignited interest in Chicana/o art and revamped pressure on peer institutions to diversify their collections, exhibitions, and programming. While this renewed interest is positive, this context runs the risk of framing Latinx art as a new and an emergent category, thus dismissing a longer history of visual arts within Latinx communities across the U.S. This course offers an historically grounded introduction to Latinx visual art by placing the artistic production for the groups included under the label “Latinx” in their social, political and historical contexts. The course provides students with the visual arts vocabulary and theoretical skills to analyze visual art forms including sculptures, murals, posters, performances, and altares, while exploring their relevance to Latinx communities and American art. In debunking the notion of Latinx art as a new phenomenon, students will understand the conditions, struggles, and modes of resistance that inspire Latinx visual arts production in the U.S. since the 19th century and into our contemporary moment. Students will deepen their visual art literacy, enrich their understanding of the histories encapsulated by the term “Latinx,” and develop their appreciation for the visual arts.

Taught by: Kevin Cruz Amaya | Catalog details

 

AMST 210 SEM Culture and Incarceration

Last offered Fall 2011

This seminar examines incarceration, immigration detention centers, and the death penalty from historical and contemporary perspectives. Students will study and examine interdisciplinary texts as well primary sources (legislature and criminal codes and writings by the incarcerated). The emphasis will be on the study of social attitudes concerning ethnic groups, gender/sexuality and class as they pertain to a “penal culture” in the United States.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 211 LEC Race, Environment, and the Body

Last offered Spring 2023

This course is organized around three distinct, but overlapping, concerns. The first concern is how polluting facilities like landfills, industrial sites, and sewage treatment plants are disproportionately located in communities of color. The second concern is the underlying, racist rationales for how corporations, in collaboration with state agencies, plot manufacturers of pollution. The final concern is how the environmental crises outlined in the first two sections of the course are experienced in the body. In reviewing a range of Black cultural productions–like literature, scholarship, music, and film–we will not only consider how environmental disparities physically affect human bodies, but also how embodiments of eco-crises lend to imaginaries of the relationship between the self and the natural world.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 212 SEM Moving While Black

Last offered Spring 2022

Opening your apartment door, driving down the highway, taking a knee, raising a fist, sitting at the lunch counter then or sitting in a café now, these movements have historically and presently prompted fear at a minimum and in the most grave cases death for black people. Whether in the U.S. or globally, moving in the world as a black person often means being perceived as different, foreign and threatening. Crawling, dancing, running and boxing, these movements have countered fear and articulated the beauty, pride, creativity and political resistance of black people. In both cases, black movement matters and means much. While many consider movement to be just organized dance moves, this course expands students’ definitions of black movement and teaches them to analyze multiple perceptions, uses, and reactions to it. “Moving while Black” offers examples of physical movement in improvised and practiced performance, quotidian movement, geographical movement across national borders and symbolic, politicized gestures. Students will investigate black movement via interdisciplinary sources that reflect various time periods and locations. Students may analyze such texts as Jacob Lawrence’s visual art in The Migration Series, the movement of the rumba dance form between Cuba and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s “Revelations,” William Pope.L’s choreographed crawls, the 1995 World Rugby Cup in South Africa, and the 2018 case of a Kansas resident arrested while moving into his own home. Additionally, this course features an important practice element, in which students experiment with in-class movement exercises and workshops, engage with dance archives at Jacob’s Pillow, interview participants of Kusika, and create and perform their own choreographies. While no previous experience in performance is required, curiosity and openness to learning through one’s own body movement is expected.

Taught by: Rashida Braggs | Catalog details

 

AMST 213 (F) SEM Asian/American Identities in Motion

The course aims to explore dance and movement-based performances as mediums through which identities in Asian and Asian American (including South Asian) communities are cultivated, expressed, and contested. Students will engage with how social and historical contexts influence the processes through which dance practices are invested with particular sets of meanings, and how artists use performance to reinforce or resist stereotypical representations. Core readings will be drawn from Dance, Performance, Asian, and Asian American Studies to engage with issues such as nation formation, racial and ethnic identity politics, appropriation, tradition and innovation among other topics. This is primarily a discussion-based seminar course, and might also include screenings, movement workshops, and discussion with guest artists and scholars. No previous dance experience is required.

Taught by: Munjulika Tarah | Catalog details

 

AMST 214 SEM Performance Ethnography

Last offered Fall 2019

The course aims to explore the theory, practice, and ethics of ethnographic research with a focus on dance, movement, and performance. Traditionally considered to be a method of research in anthropology, ethnography is the descriptive and analytical study of a particular community through fieldwork, where the researcher immerses herself in the culture of the people that she researches. In this course students will be introduced to (i) critical theory that grounds ethnography as a research methodology, (ii) readings in ethnographic studies of dance and performance practices from different parts of the world, and (iii) field research in the local community for their own ethnographic projects. This is primarily a discussion-based seminar course and may include fieldwork, attendance at live performances, film screenings, workshop with guest artists etc. No previous dance or performance experience is assumed or required.

Taught by: Munjulika Tarah | Catalog details

 

AMST 215 SEM Experimental Asian American Writing

Last offered Spring 2015

Asian American literature did not begin in the 1980s with Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Nor has the writing primarily been confined to autobiographical accounts of generational conflict, divided identities, and glimpses of Chinatown families. Asian American literature in English began with poetry in the late nineteenth century, and has encompassed a variety of aesthetic styles across the last century–from Modernism to New York School poetry to protest poetry to digital poetics. This course will explore Asian American writings that have pushed formal (and political) boundaries in the past 100+ years, with a particular focus on avant-garde writers working today. We will look at such authors as Jose Garcia Villa, Chuang Hua, Wong May, Theresa H., Cha, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tan Lin, Prageeta Sharma, Bhanu Kapil, and Tao Lin.

Taught by: Dorothy Wang | Catalog details

 

AMST 217 TUT Women and Girls in (Inter)National Politics

Last offered Fall 2021

This tutorial focuses on the writings and autobiographies of women who have shaped national politics through social justice movements in the 20th-21st centuries. Women and girls studied include: Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Safiya Bukhari, Erica Garner, Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, Marielle Franco, Winnie Mandela.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 218 (S) SEM Black and Brown Jacobins

What does it take to be free in the free world? In this class we explore the dark side of democracy. The title is inspired by C.L.R. James’ famous book, Black Jacobins, about the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). This revolution was the most successful revolt of the enslaved in recorded history. But the irony is that their oppressors were the leaders of the French Revolution across the Atlantic. Those who proclaimed “liberty, egality, fraternity” for themselves violently denied them to others. There is a similar dismal irony to the American Revolution, as captured by the title of Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Not even the Civil War could resolve this issue, as demonstrated by the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. To revisit this history, we will read W.E.B. Du Bois’ great book, Black Reconstruction in America. Alongside a selection of readings by canonical postcolonial writers and current political theorists, James and Du Bois provoke us to ask what it would take for the democratic world to be truly free.

Taught by: William Samuel Stahl | Catalog details

 

AMST 220 SEM Introduction to African American Literature

Last offered Spring 2023

What does it mean, socially, culturally, historically, personally, and spiritually, to be African American? No single, simple answer suffices, but African American literature as a genre is defined by its ongoing engagement with this complex question. This course will examine a series of texts that in various ways epitomize the fraught literary grappling with the entailments of American blackness. Readings will include texts by Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 222 SEM Hip Hop Culture

Last offered Spring 2026

The course examines how young people of color created hip hop culture in the postindustrial ruins of New York City, a movement that would eventually grow into a global cultural industry. Hip hop music producers have long practiced “diggin’ in the crates”–a phrase that denotes searching through record collections to find material to sample. In this course, we will examine the material and technological history of hip hop culture, with particular attention to hip hop’s tendency to sample, remix, mash-up, and repurpose existing media artifacts to create new works or art. We will use a media archaeological approach to examine the precise material conditions that first gave rise to graffiti art, deejaying, rapping, and breakdancing, and to analyze hip hop songs, videos, and films. Media archaeology is a critical and artistic practice that seeks to interpret the layers of significance embedded in cultural artifacts. How does hip hop archaeology remix the past, the present, and the future? How do the historical, political, and cultural coding of hip hop artifacts change as they increasingly become part of institutional collections, from newly established hip hop archives at Cornell and Harvard to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture?

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 224 (S) SEM Indigenous Feminisms

In 1817, a commission of Cherokee women sent a petition to their “beloved children” on the men’s council regarding land sales to the United States federal government. Expressing their objections to selling any more Cherokee land, the women claimed that selling the land “God gave [them] to inhabit and raise provisions” would be akin to “destroying [their] mothers.” These women appealed to the men’s shared kinship and history on the land to sway the men’s council towards preserving as much Cherokee land as possible. This course will investigate Indigenous feminisms in order to understand how Indigenous women think about themselves, the world around them, and paths towards liberation. Using a thematic approach, we will study many different Indigenous communities across time and space to gain familiarity with these women and their diverse approaches to feminism. Additionally, we will explore the many epistemologies that root Indigenous women’s feminist thought. Students will sharpen their research, writing, and analytical skills as we discuss and apply these sources and methods. Ultimately, students will understand how Indigenous women across time and space were at the center of the world, and how Indigenous women work today to free their communities.

Taught by: Emily Dixon Magness | Catalog details

 

AMST 225 Black Outside the U.S.

Last offered NA

This course explores multiple ways Black identity evolves, adapts and is experienced differently depending on location. Students analyze Black experience in the U.S., France and Senegal through a range of texts from books and social media to music and film. One key aspect of the course is a study abroad trip to Senegal, which increases cultural awareness through experiential learning. This combination of textual learning with experiential knowledge exemplifies how language, religion, gender, geography, and performance shape one’s racial identity. In the first section of the course, students investigate Black experience in the U.S., focusing on such topics as the one-drop rule, racial profiling and where mixed people fit within Black/White tensions. The second section highlights the politics of language in France. Students explore how words like “Black,” “noir” and “race” have strong political connotations in France and spur both resistance to and alliance with Black American civil rights history. In the third part of the course, students visit Dakar, Senegal, and analyze Blackness through their own observations and encounters. Their trip insights jumpstart the final focus of the course on Senegal. Students investigate the influence of French colonialism on Black identity in Senegal, which makes the two geographical experiences of Blackness very different but still forever linked.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 226 SEM Gender and the Dancing Body

Last offered Spring 2026

This course posits that the dancing body is a particularly rich site for examining the history of gender in America and beyond. The aim of the course is to explore ideas related to gender as prescribed by dominant cultural, social, and religious institutions, and how dance has been used to challenge those normative ideologies. We will examine a wide range of dance genres, from stage performances to popular forms to dance on television, with particular attention to the intersections of race and class with gender. This is primarily a discussion-based seminar course and may also include film screenings, movement workshops, discussions with guest artists and scholars. No previous dance experience required.

Taught by: Munjulika Tarah | Catalog details

 

AMST 229 LEC Reel Jesus: Reading the Christian Bible and Film in the U.S.A.

Last offered Spring 2017

In this course we examine some of the ways that Christian biblical narratives have appeared in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century Hollywood movies, looking in particular at films such as The Matrix (1999),The Passion of the Christ(2004),Jesus Christ Superstar(1973),The Shawshank Redemption(1994),The Omen (1976),Children of Men (2006), and The Book of Eli (2010). What are the overt and subtle ways that these films seek to interpret and employ biblical texts? Why do they draw upon the texts they do and read them as they read them? What can cinematic interpretations of biblical texts reveal to us about how these texts are used in broader U.S. culture, especially to crystallize and reflect certain political, economic, ethnic, racial, sexual, and social parameters of U.S. cultures? How does an awareness of this scriptural dimension in a work of “popular culture” affect our interpretation of both the film and the scriptural text’s meanings? How do varying interpretations of biblical texts help us to understand cinematic meaning? By assuming that we can read both biblical texts and films in multiple and contradictory ways, this class can use film as the occasion for interpreting, analyzing, and debating the meanings, cultural functions, and affective responses generated by biblical narratives in film. Finally, this course asks us to analyze the implications of ways in which we read texts and films. For this interdisciplinary course we will read selected biblical and extra-canonical texts, including selections from canonical and non-canonical gospels, the letters of Paul, and the book of Revelation, but our focus will be on the way that movies (and the people who make them and watch them) make meaning out of these biblical texts.

Taught by: Jacqueline Hidalgo | Catalog details

 

AMST 230 SEM Contemporary American Fiction

Last offered Spring 2019

In this course we will read and analyze a selection of fiction written between 1945 and the present, with an emphasis on proving (in the sense of testing) the three terms in the course title. Could John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” really be contemporary? Is James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room American in the same way as Alice Munro’s Dear Life? And is Michelle Tea’s Black Wave fiction or something else? Along the way, we’ll also ask: What forms and themes define contemporary American fiction? And why should we invest in defining the “contemporary” period at all? Other authors we will study may include: Raymond Carver, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Renata Adler, Margaret Atwood, Lydia Davis, Chang Rae Lee, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead.

Taught by: Ezra Feldman | Catalog details

 

AMST 232 Bewilderment: Contemporary U.S. Poetry and the Ethics of Unknowing

Last offered NA

“I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,” wrote Walt Whitman in a great poem of 1860. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” answered Emily Dickinson a few years later, as if suggesting a strategy for how to write one’s way into Whitman’s radical uncertainty. These articulations of knowing and unknowing, of telling and untelling, continue to thread their way into U.S. poetry today. This course will explore bewilderment as both a poetic strategy and an ethical position. How do error, randomness, contradiction, obliquity, and dissociation serve the poem and the poet? How do such strategies counter ideas of literary mastery, heroism, virtuosity, privilege and celebrity? What are the political possibilities of such counter stances, especially as embodied and expressed by poets who speak from outside the stronghold of the white male establishment? We will primarily read from recently published work in the U.S., but will also be interested to track the literary traditions that have shaped how contemporary poets think and write. Authors read may include: Wanda Coleman, Eileen Myles, Anne Carson, Layli Long Soldier, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, Fanny Howe, Terrance Hayes, Jennifer Chang, Tiana Clark, Brenda Hillman, Jane Wong, Tommy Pico, Paisley Rekdahl, Brian Teare, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and C. D. Wright.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 233 SEM Memory and Forgetting

Last offered Spring 2023

On the surface, remembering generally confronts us as a deeply personal act. What is more private than nostalgic reverie or the secrets of a dark and painful past? Yet even “individual” memories take shape through social frameworks, and we also remember “collectively” through shared myths, narratives, traditions, and the like. This course will explore the social dimensions of memory and remembering as well as their inevitable counterpart–forgetting. How do social frameworks inform our individual understandings of the past and shape our sense of selfhood? How and why are figures from the past cast as heroes or villains? How do collectivities celebrate past glories, and how do they deal with shameful or embarrassing episodes? How do economic and political power relations shape struggles over the past? In an increasingly global society, can we speak of “cosmopolitan” or “transcultural” forms of memory? Topics will include autobiographical memory and self-identity; memorials, museums, and monuments; reputations, commemorations, and collective trauma; silence, denial, and forgetting; and transitional justice, official apologies, and reparations.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 234 (S) SEM American Dreams Deferred: Postwar Drama in the U.S.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” asks Langston Hughes in his poem “Harlem,” the titular source for Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun. Focusing on the myth of the “American dream” and its tragic deferrals, both onstage and off, this course offers an introduction to U.S. drama in the postwar era, from roughly 1945 to the present. Other content for discussion may include: O’Neill’s A Long Days Journey Into Night, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Styne/Sondheim/Laurents’ Gypsy, Albee’s The American Dream, Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, Fornés’ Mud, Wilson’s Fences, Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Kushner’s Angels in America, Parks’ The America Play, Alfaro’s Electricidad, Hwang’s FOB, Mac’s 24 Decade History, Vogel’s Indecent, and Nottage’s Sweat. Emphasis will be placed on close reading, analysis, and discussion of plays and their theatrical productions. We will also examine how constructions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, immigration status, and ability play into theatrical critiques of the American dream. As of today, roughly 70% of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream, yet its mythos continues to haunt the dramatic imagination.

Taught by: Amy Holzapfel | Catalog details

 

AMST 235 LEC The American/Asian/European Triad: Globalization, Crisis, and New World Orders

Last offered Spring 2026

This course offers a comprehensive examination of the economic and geopolitical links between Asia, Europe, and the United States, collectively forming what we term the “American/Asian/European Triad”. Through a multidisciplinary approach, we will analyze how globalization and its crises along with the evolving power dynamics within this triad are shaping contemporary global affairs and the emergence of new world orders.The course begins with an exploration of the foundational economic and geopolitical connections between Asia, Europe, and the U.S. We will examine historical contexts and key events that underpin these connections, thereby setting the stage for a deeper analysis of this Triad. A significant portion of the course will focus on the impact of the global financial crisis in the late 2000s on these regions. We will analyze how this crisis reshaped economic interdependencies and power dynamics within the triad and globally, considering both immediate effects and long-term implications. Geopolitically, we will delve into unfolding competitions, strategic tensions, and evolving alliances among the triad nations. Case studies and current events will illustrate the complex dynamics influencing global governance and the balance of power. Specific topics include the economic rivalry between Europe, the U.S., and China for the control of African resources, providing insights into how these interactions shape regional and international relations. We will also explore the impact of these global interactions on democratic institutions in the U.S. and Europe, with a particular focus on countries like France, the UK, Italy, and Germany to illustrate the challenge for the EU to integrate very different economies This analysis will highlight challenges and opportunities for democratic governance amidst global economic and political pressures. In the context of Asia, we will focus on the interplay between China and the U.S., examining its implications for Chinese domestic policies and regional dynamics in East Asia. Special attention will be given to regions such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, where geopolitical tensions have significant implications for global stability. Finally, the course will reflect on how China’s economic ascendancy is reengineering the global oil economy and reshaping geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East. This discussion will underscore broader implications for reconfiguring post-colonial dependencies. Through this course, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between economic interdependence and geopolitical competition within the American/Asian/European Triad. By examining real-world case studies and current events, they will develop the analytical skills and insights necessary to navigate and contribute to discussions on global democracy and the future of world orders.

Taught by: Souhail Chichah | Catalog details

 

AMST 236 SEM Making Things Visible: Adventures in Documentary Work

Last offered Spring 2019

Photography, like ethnography, is an art of looking carefully and taking notice. This course will explore the overlaps between documentary photography and field methods of social science, concentrating particularly on the genre in which the two intersect: the photo essay. The students will learn methods of visual narrative and storytelling, using techniques of interviewing, still photography, and video. Concurrently, we will explore a number of examples of investigative work that blend word and image. We will ask questions about the changing practices and expectations associated with the documentarian’s role, and the evolving media in which such work can be presented. Lastly, we will discuss ethical questions that haunt documentary work, including issues of responsibility and politics of representation, as well as the perennial question of whether “objective representation” is even possible or desirable. Experience in photography and/or video is not required, but students will be expected to master basic technical skills in image acquisition and audio editing taught in a separate lab section. Students should also be prepared to interact extensively with people in the community and spend a significant time off campus doing fieldwork.

Taught by: Olga Shevchenko | Catalog details

 

AMST 237 SEM Islam in the United States: Race, Religion, Politics

Last offered Fall 2025

Malcolm X–whose 100th birth year is being commemorated this year–is one of the most iconic yet controversial figures in the black freedom struggle. He is also arguably the most prominent and influential Muslim in the history of the United States. His story and legacy powerfully illustrate the complex intersections of Muslim identity, political resistance, and national belonging. From the early period of “Black Muslim” movements represented by Malcolm X, to the current “War on Terror” era, American Muslims have faced a complex intersection of exclusions. Taking Malcolm X as our point of departure, this course examines how American Muslims have navigated these multiple layers of marginalization. In so doing, we consider how broader socio-political contexts inform Muslims’ competing visions of Islam, and we unpack the complex relations between religion, race, and politics. This also allows us to reflect on urgent yet challenging questions regarding national identity and security, collective belonging, the politics of difference, and the imperatives of solidarity. Throughout the course, we will be engaging with historical and anthropological material, autobiographies, documentaries, films, historical primary-source documents, music videos, and social media. The course fosters critical thinking about diversity by challenging assumptions of who Muslims are, what being American means, and what Islam is. It also focuses on the politics of managing and navigating difference, as well as the complex interaction of different dimensions of diversity, from religion to ideology, race, nationality, ethnicity, culture, gender, and language.

Taught by: Zaid Adhami | Catalog details

 

AMST 240 SEM Latinx Language Politics: Hybrid Voices

Last offered Spring 2025

In this interdisciplinary course we focus on questions of language and identity in the contemporary cultural production and lived experience of various Latinx communities. We consider the following questions and more: In what ways does Spanish shift as it crosses over to the US from Latin America and the Caribbean? How does Latinx identity challenge traditional notions of the relationship between language, culture, and nation? How does careful attention to language elucidate the dynamics of gender and sexuality in the Latinx community? How are cultural values and material conditions expressed through Latinx linguistic practices? In what ways might Latinx literary and linguistic practices serve as tools for social change? Departing from an overview of common linguistic ideologies, we will examine code-switching or Spanglish, bilingual education, linguistic public policy, the English Only movement, and Latinx linguistic attitudes and creative responses to linguistic colonialism. In addition to a consideration of language and identity grounded in sociolinguistics, anthropolitical linguistics, Latinx studies, and cultural studies, we will survey a variety of literary genres including memoir, novel, and poetry. Both directly and/or indirectly, these texts address Latinx language politics, as well as the broader themes of power, difference, and hybridity.

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 242 SEM Americans Abroad

Last offered Spring 2026

This course will explore some of the many incarnations of American experiences abroad from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Materials will be drawn from novels, short stories, films, and nonfiction about Americans in Europe in times of war, peace, and pandemic. We will compare and contrast the experiences of novelists, soldiers, students, war correspondents, jazz musicians, and adventurers. What has drawn so many Americans to Europe? What is the difference between a tourist, an expat, and an émigré? What are the profound, and often comic, gaps between the traveler’s expectations and the reality of living in, say, Paris or a rural village in Spain? What are the misadventures and unexpected rewards of living, working, writing, or even falling in love in translation? How do international situations impact and/or interrupt these complex personal experiences? Authors may include: Edith Wharton, Henry James, Langston Hughes, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, Elaine Dundy, Richard Wright, and Ben Lerner. Additional reading will be drawn from historical and critical works. All readings will be in English. This comparative course is designed to highlight the challenges and benefits of cultural immersion abroad. It will focus on the linguistic, emotional, intellectual, and social adaptation skills that are required to understand others, and oneself, in new contexts. Many of the authors and artists we will study chose, or were forced to, leave oppressive situations in the United States where their futures were limited due to factors related to politics, gender, race or class (and combinations thereof). We will study their dislocation, and freedom, and struggles to reshape their (and our) concept of “home” into something that reflects individual experience and artistic output.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 243 SEM Asian/American and Black Literary and Cultural Thought

Last offered Spring 2020

One durable legacy of white settler colonialism has been to its divide-and-conquer management of minority populations–an amazingly effective strategy still widely practiced in a variety of forms today. While Asian Americans have been deemed “model minorities” in contrast to “unmodel” minorities–namely, African Americans–and racial minorities have been pitted against one another in the oppression Olympics and on the issue of affirmative action, there has, in fact, been a long history of political, literary, and cultural thought that have joined blacks and Asian/Asian Americans, from W.E.B. Du Bois to current ideas about digital possibilities (and constraints). In this course we will examine the theory, political writings, art, music and literature that sprang from and attended the early Marxist-Communist fight for universal brotherhood; movements against colonialism, capitalism, and the Vietnam War; Yellow Power and Black Power; and topics such as black and Asian diasporas, Afro-futurism, multiculturalism, “Afro-pessimism”, racial melancholia, and digital futurities.

Taught by: Dorothy Wang | Catalog details

 

AMST 244 SEM What They Saw in America

Last offered Fall 2025

This course traces the travels and writings of important observers of the United States, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G.K. Chesterton, Sayyid Qutb, and Wang Huning. The course will consider their respective journeys: Where did they go? With whom did they talk? What did they see? The historical scope and varying national origins of the observers provide a unique and useful outsider’s view of America–one that sheds light on persisting qualities of American national character and gives insight into the nature and substance of international attitudes toward the United States over time. The course will analyze the common themes found in the visitors’ respective writings about America and will pay particular attention to their insights on religion, democracy, agrarianism, capitalism, and race.

Taught by: James Nolan | Catalog details

 

AMST 245 (S) SEM Orthographic Imaginations: Drafting Space, Place, and Memory in America

Graphic novels and memoirs are popping up on bookshelves and screens everywhere these days, but what about orthographic stories? Often drawn by architects or engineers, orthographic representations are abstract and technical ways of depicting buildings, furniture, machines, and more. Such images project three-dimensional objects and space onto two-dimensional surfaces, communicating form and function. But what can orthography project when combined with literature or poetry? What can lyrical prose or experimental writing do in the presence of a blueprint, an exploded axonometric drawing, or a gathering of lines and negative space? And what of orthography’s other meaning i.e., the correct, or “upright” way of writing and picturing words? In this seminar, we will study and create hybrid literary-visual texts that incorporate orthographic imagery to convey complexities of time, space, history, and language, while also learning about the multiple meanings and uses of orthography more broadly. We will read scholarship that refuses the separation of text from image, turning toward work in Native American, Black, and Critical Ethnic studies to trace the overlapping terrain of writing and drawing, especially toward the study of slavery, colonialism, incarceration, and dispossession in America. Our study and creations will be guided by the question of how and why writers and artists combine the aesthetics of drafted imagery with narrative and poetics, and how such work can render and re-member life-worlds, communities, struggles, and survivance. Our companions on this journey will include Black experimental author Renee Gladman (Prose Architectures); visual artist Tings Chak (The Architecture of Migrant Detention), Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks (The Common Pot), Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier (Whereas), Comp Lit and Law scholar Sora Y. Han (mu: 49 marks of abolition), and race and architecture scholars Williams Gleason (Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature) and Peter L’Official (“Black Builders”). No experience or coursework with drawing or literary writing needed.

Taught by: Jan Padios | Catalog details

 

AMST 250 (S) SEM Two-Spirit Studies

In A Minor Chorus, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation,) writes: “If anything would save two Cree boys from the throes of a world that wasn’t built for them it would be love and little else.” This work exposes the tensions between settler-colonial patriarchy and the Two-Spirit, queer, and trans Indigenous people who continue to live and love despite it. This course centers on Two-Spirit people across Indigenous communities, exploring the knowledge systems, cultural expressions, and personal experiences of Two-Spirit people resisting a settler-colonial gender system. Using a thematic approach, we will study many different Indigenous communities across time and space to understand various forms of Two-Spirit identities and how individuals work towards the liberation of Two-Spirit people. Students will sharpen their research, writing, and analytical skills as we discuss topics such as gender and sexuality, sovereignty, art, literature, and activism. Ultimately, students will understand how the settler-colonial patriarchy was created, how Two-Spirit people unsettle ideas of sex, gender, and indigeneity, and how Two-Spirit are on the front lines of Indigenous liberation.

Taught by: Emily Dixon Magness | Catalog details

 

AMST 251 North American Histories to 1865

Last offered NA

This course surveys North American histories from ancient Indigenous pasts to the U.S. Civil War. Beginning with the diverse Native societies that have long lived and interacted in specific Indigenous homelands, it then traces Indigenous encounters with a range of expansionist European colonial projects, and the dynamic, contested quality of these relationships and resistances. The course delves into the origins, evolution, and violences of the transatlantic slave trade, and the ways that peoples of African descent created new lives and identities in the Caribbean and North America. The transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are examined in detail, including political, economic, cultural, and religious transformations and upheavals that fostered new senses of individual and collective identities. Connecting the pivotal Seven Years War and American Revolution, the course traces out the legacies of these contestations for multiple empires, nations, and communities. The last section of the course examines the antebellum era, multiple struggles for rights, land, and autonomy, and the coming of the U.S. Civil War as well as its ongoing legacies. The course introduces students to a wide range of historical methodologies and critical approaches to the past, and moves from large-scale vantages to on-the-ground accounts of how specific people experienced historical changes. The course conveys a sense of how key debates and struggles from the past have shaped North American presents and futures, and how scholars and communities have grappled with these topics. It also provides opportunities for engaging original archival and material culture collections at Williams College.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 252 SEM Im/mobilities

Last offered Fall 2024

We think of the freedom to move as a mark of privilege. In the United States, passing a driving test, owning a car, and getting a passport are milestones that signal modernity and freedom. Likewise, we think of restrictions on movement as the domain of the underprivileged, such as the current and formerly incarcerated. But as the Covid-19 pandemic revealed, there have always been two sides to immobility: privileged as well as involuntary immobility. There are correspondingly two sides to mobility: those who move because they want to and others because they have no choice. In this class, students will explore conceptions of mobility as adventurous, free, and modern (as with jet-setting international elites). They will compare and contrast when mobility can be threatening, exclusionary, and limited (as recognized by the Black Lives Matter movement). This class invites students to interpret their environment through the lens of mobility and inequality. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and migration studies, this interdisciplinary course offers a beginning conversation on the causes and consequences of the freedom to move–or to stay still.

Taught by: Phi Su | Catalog details

 

AMST 253 (F) SEM Embodied Knowledges: Latinx, Asian American, and Black American Writing on Invisible Disability

This interdisciplinary course assumes an expansive approach towards disability, defining it not exclusively as a legible identity that one can lay claim to, but rather as an identity grounded in one’s relationship to power (Kim and Schalk, 2020). This course centers on the critical role of lived experience as a key site of everyday theorization for the multiply marginalized, and specifically on the ways in which invisibly disabled Latinx, Asian American, and Black American individuals write the self. As scholars in disability studies argue, self-representations of disabled individuals carry the potential for us as a society to move beyond the binary narratives of “tragedy or inspiration” so often associated with disability. Rather, the self-produced narratives of US disabled writers of color offer a much more nuanced portrayal of everyday life with disability/ies for the multiply marginalized. Much like invisible disability itself, these self-representations ultimately refute traditional depictions of disability, and underscore the ways in which the bodymind serves as a rich, albeit often overlooked, site of knowledge. Embodied Knowledges draws on the insights of disability studies, crip studies, anthropology, literary studies, medicine, psychology, education, cultural studies, ethnic studies, American studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, and trauma studies. We will examine the works of Latinx, Asian American, and Black American writers and scholars others in relationship to one another, and as points of departure for examining issues such as the relationship between immigration and disability; intergenerational trauma; the impacts of paradigms such as the Model Minority Myth and notions of cultural deficit; passing; the politics of disability disclosure, the paradoxes of invisible disability; invisible disability in academic spaces; the role of culture and categories of difference such as race, gender, class and immigration status in societal approaches to and understandings of invisible disability; and future visions in the realm of disability justice and care work.

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 254 (S) LEC Sovereignty, Resistance, and Resilience: Native American Histories to 1865

This course surveys Native American/Indigenous North American histories from beginnings through the mid-nineteenth century, tracing the complex ways that sovereign Native nations and communities have shaped Turtle Island/North America. Equally important, it reckons with the ongoing effects of these pasts in the twenty-first century, and communities’ own forms of interpretation, critique, action, and pursuits of justice. It also introduces foundational methodologies in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and strategies for pursuing decolonizing scholarship and action. Emphasis is on primary and secondary works produced by Indigenous authors/creators. Starting with the diversity of Indigenous societies that have inhabited and cared for lands and waters since “time out of mind,” it foregrounds the complexity of Native peoples, nations, and worldviews situated in particular homelands. It addresses how societies confronted contended with Euro-colonial processes of colonization, extraction, and enslavement. Indigenous nations’ multifaceted efforts to maintain sovereignty and homelands are centered, as well as forms of relations and kinship with African-American and Afro-Indigenous people. It concludes with how different communities negotiated the American Revolution, forced removals, and Civil War, and created pathways for endurance, self-determination, and security. The course centers on Indigenous actors–intellectuals, diplomats, legal strategists, knowledge keepers, spiritual leaders, artists, and many others–and connects historical events with present-day matters of Land Back, historical memory, education, caretaking, repatriation, and activism. It provides opportunities to engage original materials in the College Archives and Art Museum. While the scope of the course is continental and transoceanic, it devotes significant attention to the Native Northeast and Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican homelands that Williams occupies.

Taught by: Christine DeLucia | Catalog details

 

AMST 256 SEM Social Justice Traditions: 1960s to #Black Lives Matter

Last offered Fall 2018

We live in a time of renewed social justice activism, as people from all walks of life confront economic inequality, police violence, discrimination against transgender individuals, and other forms of oppression. This course is designed to clarify where recent initiatives like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street came from, and to evaluate how they might shape American life in the near future. Movements have histories, as today’s activists draw on the “freedom dreams,” tactics, and styles of rhetoric crafted by their predecessors, while making use of new technologies, such as Twitter, and evolving understandings of “justice.” Taking a historical approach, we will begin by studying the civil rights, Black Power, anti-war, counter-culture, and feminist initiatives of the 1960s. We will then explore how progressive and radical activists adjusted their theories and strategies as the country became more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s. Making use of movement documents, documentary films, and scholarly accounts, we will study the development of LGBTQ, ecological, and economic justice initiatives up to the present day. Throughout, we will seek to understand how movements in the United States are shaped by global events and how activists balance their political work with other desires and commitments.

Taught by: Andrew Cornell | Catalog details

 

AMST 258 SEM Transatlantic Political Theory

Last offered Spring 2026

Political theory tends to look towards Europe for inspiration. This course suggests an alternative. It traces how theory crisscrosses the Atlantic Ocean to and from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. We will begin with Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1840 classic, Democracy in America, which is a snapshot of antebellum America from the perspective of a French aristocrat. Then we will flip things around and view Europe from America. During the Cold War, American political theorists, including European émigrés, were preoccupied by the threat of totalitarianism. We will read the definitive text on this subject, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, paying special attention to the link she makes between totalitarianism and imperialism. In the final section of this course, we will read Richard Wright’s reports on Europe and Africa during the decolonization era, and conclude with a reading of Cedric Robinson’s classic, Black Marxism. Together, these texts emphasize the importance of an African perspective on modern politics. Assignments in this reading- and writing-intensive course consist of reading quizzes, term papers, and in-class debates.

Taught by: William Samuel Stahl | Catalog details

 

AMST 260 (F) SEM Writing Across the Disciplines

Interdisciplinary writing is a complex art. What skills do we bring to the analysis of a poem, a bridge, an ethnographic monograph, a scrap of cloth from the archive? What are the relations between primary and secondary texts? How do we build an interpretive argument that incorporates close analysis, historical contexts and theoretical frameworks? Studying exemplary work by scholars and theorists, students will generate their own analyses of a variety of texts including painting, film, architecture and material culture. The final project offers students the opportunity to choose their own objects of study. This writing-intensive course is designed especially for students in interdisciplinary programs. Open to all levels, first-years through seniors. Priority given to American Studies majors.

Taught by: Cassandra Cleghorn | Catalog details

 

AMST 261 SEM Global Gulags

Last offered Spring 2025

Why does the land of the free put so many people in prison? The United States of America has more prisoners than any other country in the world and one of the highest rates of incarceration. During the Cold War, prison writings such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago were held up as the truest literature to escape the USSR. But could the same be true of the USA? Martin Luther King, Jr. is remembered as a prophet and peacemaker who spoke to America’s soul. But in his own lifetime, he was famous for being a political prisoner locked in a Birmingham jail. What does it say about America when advocates of freedom and democracy end up behind bars? To be sure, there are people in prison who have committed crimes we would all consider heinous. But the plurality are non-violent offenders serving time on drug-related charges. This crackdown has continued regardless of rates of drug use and disproportionately targets poor people of color. In this class, we will explore the origins of the carceral state, starting with Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Then, we will compare the prison-building projects of the USA and USSR in terms of political economy and comparative literature. This approach combines a historical overview with eyewitness testimony from prisoners, including Solzhenitsyn and George Jackson.

Taught by: William Samuel Stahl | Catalog details

 

AMST 262 SEM Race-Making and the Politics of Performance

Last offered Fall 2024

What is the relationship between contemporary understandings of race, American national identity, and performance? From the Sons of Liberty “playing Indian” during the Boston Tea Party to spectacles of racialized violence into the freakshow exhibition of “primitive, exotic Others” and the emergence of modern theater and film in the 19th and 20th century, performance has played a central role in shaping and disseminating ideas of race and racism in the American popular imaginary. This course will examine how the overlapping histories of settler colonialism, slavery, immigrant exclusion, and imperialism have been variously framed, justified, and contested through performance (in both an artistic and everyday sense). A central contention of this class is that race is constantly “made” (and remade) through performance, which we will explore through a historical survey of theater, film, popular culture, anthropological documents, and law. We will take a comparative ethnic studies approach that tracks the interconnections between Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latina/o racial formations across public spectacle and theatrical/cinematic representation. We will also tend to the ways in which minoritized folks have used performance as a powerful tool to rethink identity, subjectivity, and community.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto | Catalog details

 

AMST 263 SEM Cold War Technocultures

Last offered Spring 2015

With the Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of the twentieth century and the emergence of the United States as an unchallenged victor and “new world” hegemon, have we lost a sense of the drama, fear, and unbridled terror that permeated American life during the Cold War? In this course we will set out to understand Cold War American culture(s) by examining the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and a range of major technoscientific developments during this period. The course will take shape in three parts. Part I will explore the emergence and role of the computer in shaping the distinctly American style of thought aimed at Soviet “containment”. We will furthermore trace historical treads connecting MIT’s legendary Whirlwind computer, the SAGE continental air defense system, nuclear wargaming at the RAND Corporation, artificial intelligence, and the advanced technologies, management strategies, and atrocities of the Vietnam War. Part II takes up the symbolic potency of the space race, which we will use as a conduit through which to explore the following events and developments: Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, the Apollo moon landing, and American civil defense; the postwar science of cybernetics and the emergence of the now iconic cyborg; the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report and the Gaia hypothesis; plans backed by NASA for the industrialization, humanization, and colonization of outer space; and Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, ‘”Star Wars”. Finally, case studies considered in Part III will focus on moments of conflict and resistance, appropriation, and unintended consequences of the preceding and other Cold War technological developments, among them antipsychiatry and environmentalism; Project Cybersyn, an infrastructural causality of the US/CIA-backed Chilean coup of 1973; the American counterculture and the countercultural roots of neoliberalism(s).

Taught by: Grant Shoffstall | Catalog details

 

AMST 264 LEC American Art and Architecture, 1600 to Present

Last offered Fall 2025

American art is often looked at as a provincial version of the real thing–i.e., European art–and found wanting. This course examines American architecture, painting, and sculpture on its own terms, in the light of the social, ideological and economic forces that shaped it. Special attention will be paid to such themes as the Puritan legacy and attitudes toward art; the making of art in a commercial society; and the tension between the ideal and the real in American works of art.

Taught by: Michael Lewis | Catalog details

 

AMST 265 LEC Pop Art

Last offered Spring 2020

The use of commercial and mass media imagery in art became recognized as an international phenomenon in the early 1960s. Items such as comic strips, advertising, movie stills, television programs, soup cans, “superstars,” and a variety of other accessible and commonplace objects inspired the subject matter, form, and technique. This course will critically examine the history and legacy of Pop Art by focusing on its social and aesthetic contexts. An important component of the course involves developing skills in analyzing visual images, comparing them with other forms, and relating them to their historical context.

Taught by: C. Ondine Chavoya | Catalog details

 

AMST 267 SEM The Roaring Twenties and the Rough Thirties

Last offered Fall 2024

This course will probe the domestic history of the U.S. from 1919 to 1939 and the cultural, economic, political, and social changes accompanying America’s evolution into a modern society. Themes include: developments in work, leisure, and consumption; impact of depression on the organization of the public and private sectors; persistence of traditional values such as individualism and the success ethos in shaping responses to change; and the evolving diversity of America and the American experience.

Taught by: Tyran Steward | Catalog details

 

AMST 269 SEM Where Men Become Gods: The Arts of Teotihuacan

Last offered Fall 2025

Teotihuacan (c. 100 BCE-800 CE) was the largest city of the pre-contact Indigenous Americas. Its name, bestowed by the later Mexica (Aztecs), means “Place Where Men Become Gods” or “Where Gods Are Made,” and serves as testament to the sense of awe later Mesoamericans felt for the city’s ruins. In this course, students will engage the major art historical works concerning this city. By the end of the semester, they will emerge with strong knowledge of the city’s arts, architecture, culture, and historical influence, as well as of the historiography that has developed around study of the city. Art forms to be considered will include murals, hand-built ceramics, mold-pressed ceramics, city planning, stonework, monumental sculpture, shell work, and obsidian work. Students will also wrestle with the varying approaches to addressing the ruins that have been developed by art historians, archaeologists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, the modern Mexican nation-state, and other concerned parties.

Taught by: Trenton Barnes | Catalog details

 

AMST 270 SEM Colonialism, Indigeneity, and the Environment

Last offered Fall 2025

In this course students will explore the intersections of environmental history and the history of colonialism in the United States. We will examine how scholars have crafted narratives that focus on “nature”–both as a cultural concept and as a set of biological processes and systems. Readings and assignments will analyze the ways in which these different “natures” have acted as both agents and objects of historical change. We will pay particular attention to how different environments were impacted by the Euro-American conquest of indigenous homelands. Course topics will include (but are not limited to) European settlement in New England, the North American fur trade, US continental expansion and the destruction of the bison, the transcontinental railroad, the creation of the National Park system, Native American environmental activism, and paramilitary responses to struggles over natural resources (such as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests).

Taught by: Stefan Aune | Catalog details

 

AMST 271 SEM Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern City

Last offered Fall 2025

This course focuses on the systems and politics that produce urban inequality, displacement, and dispossession, as well as social and spatial justice movements in cities. Drawing on urban sociology, sociology of race, and related fields such as Africana studies, Indigenous studies, and geography, we focus on key themes such as residential segregation, eviction, post-industrial decline, gentrification, the underdevelopment of public housing, environmental racism, and Indigenous dispossession.We analyze the modern city as a site for democratic struggles and for various classes and populations to enact inclusionary or exclusionary visions of modern society. The main questions this class grapples with are: What are the racial, class, gender, and colonial dynamics that explain different forms of displacement and dispossession in modern cities? What political, social, and cultural factors play into different groups, organizations, or states making claims to who belongs and does not belong in a modern city? How do organizations or movements–decolonial, abolitionist, or otherwise–challenge urban displacement and dispossession? And, how are urban displacement and dispossession shaped or shaped by durable inequalities in other spheres of life, including those in the criminal justice system, health, schooling, and the labor market?

Taught by: Peter Kent-Stoll | Catalog details

 

AMST 272 (S) SEM American Postmodern Fiction

What is postmodernism? What was the radical cultural break at the close of the modern era (in the late 1950s, perhaps), and why did that break lead to so much self-consciousness in American literary narration? Why, in other words, do so many postmodern books seem to be about themselves, even when they are also historical or realist? To address these and related questions, we will read about six novels, analyzing what forms and themes define American postmodernism and whether postmodernism offers a positive vision of the world, or only a rejection of what came before. Readings may include Toni Morrison’s Sula, Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Renata Adler’s Speedboat.. As a Gateway course in English, this course will focus on analytical writing skills while introducing students to multiple critical approaches to the aesthetic and conceptual difficulties of its subject matter.

Taught by: Ezra Feldman | Catalog details

 

AMST 273 (S) SEM The Cultural Politics of AIDS

Popular understandings of the HIV/AIDS crisis attribute its spread to individual, rather than structural, matters of ignorance and choice. Starting from a stark refusal of this claim, this class asks: What does the HIV/AIDS epidemic tell us about the operations of racial capitalism, globalization, and the structural violences of the nation-state? How, in turn, do communities, activists, scholars, and artists navigate the crisis and advocate/agitate towards change? We will track AIDS across its varied “origin stories” in the U.S. and abroad, its representations, and its place in shaping late 20th-century and early 21st-century culture. More nearly, we will look to AIDS and its discourses as they shape understandings of embodiment, normativity/deviancy, public health, sexuality, race, and the human itself. We will likewise focus on networks of care, practices of intimacy, and strategies of survival produced in response to the abjection of queer, racialized, and disabled life as subjects map out and actualize alternate structures of being and relating in the longue durée of crisis. Tentative readings include writing by Cindy Patton, Cathy Cohen, Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, Marlon Bailey, Douglas, Crimp, Simon Watney, and Robb Hernandez. The class will look to artists and cultural workers such as Marlon Riggs, Richard Fung, DIVA TV, Ron Athey, Kia LaBeija, Assotto Saint, Teddy Sandoval, and Lloyd Wong.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto | Catalog details

 

AMST 282 The Captive Maternal & Anti-Fascism

Last offered NA

Theoretical constructs of the ‘Captive Maternal’ appear in “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal.” This seminar examines the concept of the Captive Maternal and its relationship to (Black) feminism, political resistance, and gender constructs and political actors/authors/artists such as: Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Mamie Till Mobley. The Captive Maternal emerges from Black/feminist/socialism, anti-fascism and marronage. Texts/readings include: New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; “The Womb of Western Theory”; Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind; A. Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; James, The Captive Maternal: AntiFascists in Search of the Beloved as well as other texts by Black theorists, feminists, activists.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 283 SEM Black Queer Looks: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary African-American Film

Last offered Fall 2022

In this course we will foreground questions around visibility and memory. We will explore representations of Black queer bodies in experimental, documentary and narrative film. This course will engage foundational texts from Black Queer Studies. We will pair texts with film in order to examine the various relationships between art and scholarship. You will also be asked to think about yourself as a filmmaker. We will screen films such as Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989), The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), U People (Olive Demetrius and Hanifah Walidah, 2009), Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989) and Litany for Survival (Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, 1995). Throughout the course we will evaluate the different ways filmmakers represent Black queerness on screen. The goal is to think about the possibilities and limitations of representation and visibility. Each of you will be asked to facilitate a class discussion. You also will be required to do weekly critical response papers. In lieu of a final paper you will create a detailed proposal for a short film that “represents” some segment of Black queer living.

Taught by: Marshall Green | Catalog details

 

AMST 284 (F) SEM Asian American History

This discussion-based class, with brief lectures, offers an overview of Asian American history from the late seventeenth century to the present. It will cover the earliest Asian migration and settlement in the U.S., the rise of anti-Asian movements, the experiences of Asian Americans during World War II and the Cold War, the emergence of the Asian American movement in the 1960s, the post-1965 Asian immigration, and the War on Terror. We will investigate broader themes including labor, citizenship, political resistance, gender and sexuality, community formation, empire, and transnationalism. We will also consider key contemporary issues, including race and ethnic relations, anti-Asian harassment and violence, and the legacy of U.S. colonialism in Asia-Pacific. Along the way, we will engage classic and recent scholarship in the field, and form our own interpretations of the past based on a wide range of sources–including films, novels, newspapers, government documents, political cartoons, and more. Throughout, the course advances the argument that citizenship and belonging in the U.S. cannot be fully understood without accounting for the experiences of Asian Americans.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

 

AMST 285 LEC U.S. (Im)migration History: A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered

Last offered Fall 2025

How do we reconcile the popular notion that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants with the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past? In this course, we will investigate how immigrants have come to be viewed as symbols of the United States’ highest ideals and as existential threats to the nation’s survival. We will also consider how immigrants themselves have shaped American institutions and ideas about political rights and citizenship. This course aims to go beyond traditional narratives of U.S. immigration, which have often focused on early 20th century migrants from Europe. By centering the experiences of African, Asian, and Latin American migrants and their descendants from the 19th century through the present, we will understand elements of American history–including settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, Asiatic Exclusion and U.S. imperialism–that the nation-of-immigrants paradigm leaves out and obscures. In addition to reading key academic works in the field, students will engage with a variety of primary sources, from newspaper articles and films, to memoirs, immigration files, and oral histories. Students will also get to develop a creative immigrant/family history project. Students will leave this course with a more nuanced understanding of current immigration politics–including the historical roots of immigration and border enforcement within and beyond U.S. territorial borders, and strategies of survival and resistance against xenophobia.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

 

AMST 286 (S) SEM Making Latina/o Communities: U.S. Imperialism and Latinx Resistance, 1848 to the Present

This course explores the long histories of Latina/o/x communities in the United States, asking how and why such diverse groups of Latinxs have become part of the U.S. over such a long period of time. Attentive to U.S. conquest and imperialism, we also consider the underlying tensions in U.S. policies that often recruit Latinas/os/xs as low-wage workers while nativist sentiments call for their exclusion. U.S. immigration, refugee, and deportation policies have long defined who can enter and who is deemed eligible for citizenship and belonging, often creating marginalization and undocumented people in their wake. We begin in 1848, when the U.S. conquered half of Mexico’s territory, creating Mexican American communities by moving the border. In 1898, the U.S. became an empire, turning Puerto Rico into its colony, and in 1917, Congress declared all Puerto Ricans to be U.S. citizens, cementing that colonial relationship and fostering Puerto Rican communities throughout the continental U.S. As U.S. military, political, and economic interventions continued, so did the migrations and the making of communities by peoples from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, as well as Central and South American countries. At the same time, from 1848 to the present, each Latinx group has developed survival, family reunification, and community-building strategies. These efforts have been shaped by the time of arrival, geographic location, internal group dynamics, and the political, social, and economic contexts in which each group settles. Given these long histories and complexities, we ask how and why Latinxs are still too often cast as perpetual foreigners despite having generations of communities in the US, and how and why these histories are too often erased or denigrated.

Taught by: Carmen Whalen | Catalog details

 

AMST 299 TUT Let the Record Show: U.S, Literature of Research and Witness

Last offered Fall 2023

This is a course on the literature of research and witness in the U.S., from 1853 to the present. We will train our attention on works of long form journalism that stand at the intersection of reportage, archival history, documentary nonfiction, narrative and activism. The writers we study present quantitative and qualitative data that document the existence and effects of systemic racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia and uneven economic development. How have American writers defied disciplinary boundaries to speak truth to power? What critical reading skills are mobilized by books of sweeping scope and unflinching detail? The course will be taught in reverse chronological order. Readings include: Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show; Layli Long Soldier, Whereas; Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee; James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio; Ida B. Wells, A Red Record; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Taught by: Cassandra Cleghorn | Catalog details

 

AMST 301 (F) SEM Theories and Methods in American Studies (Junior Seminar)

This seminar serves as an introduction to theories, methods, sources, and approaches for interdisciplinary research and creativity in and through the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. We will study diverse ways of “doing” American Studies work (including but not limited to visual studies, ethnography, literary studies, theory, or museum studies) and how this work speaks to various intellectual and political priorities within the field. Through readings, discussions, and unit assignments, students will not only deepen their knowledge of American Studies but will also have concrete opportunities to research, explore, experiment, construct arguments, and play. In the process, students will gain a working competence in all four tracks of the major (Space and Place; Comparative Studies in Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora; Arts in Context; and Critical and Cultural Theory). Topics in the course may include environmental justice, racial formation, social movements, the prison industrial complex, infrastructure, or the aesthetics and form of minority literature.

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 303 SEM Feminist Disability Studies: Bodyminds in Place and Space

Last offered Spring 2021

In this course we will engage anti-racist feminist theory, disability (or ‘crip’) theory, and human geography to think critically about disability. We will draw on critical geographies of disability to understand the built environment and institutional design; geographic scales of the body and the bodymind; spaces of the home and institutions; and im/mobility and spatial access. We will also consider how disability is shaped by (and shapes) practices of care and mutual aid; experiences of embodiment and impairment; and structures of vulnerability and agency. The course will trace, historically, how ableism has been produced through slavery, colonization, surveillance, and incarceration as well as through movements like eugenics and white liberal feminism. The course will also analyze disability’s construction through medicalized notions of wellness, illness, pathology, and cure. Throughout the course, we will consider disability as intersecting with gender, race and ethnicity, queerness, trans*ness, fatness, class, nationality, and citizenship. Most centrally, we will ask: What is the spatiality of dis/ability, and how can space be occupied and reappropriated for radically inclusive uses? How can we understand both normality and deviance as socially constructed concepts that nonetheless have real, and uneven, implications for people’s lives?

Taught by: Emily Mitchell-Eaton | Catalog details

 

AMST 304 SEM Queer in Asian America

Last offered Spring 2026

Asian America has always been queer. This is both to say that, since the first waves of Asian immigrants to the Americas, there have always been queer individuals counted among them, and that the Asian American subject has historically figured as “queer” and “different” within the Western cultural, social, and economic landscape. How does queerness resonate, redound, or otherwise modulate the idea and experience of Asian Americanness? What are the textures and contours of this queerness? Does it have an aesthetic and literary dimension? This course surveys a range of scholarship and literature by queer and feminist Asian Americans that explore the interpenetrations of race, gender, and sexuality in the construction of Asian America and Asian American identity. Particular focus is paid to how Asian American artists and writers actualize queer subjectivity, relation, and intimacy across experiments in narrative, form, and media. The class will move between foundational scholarship at the intersections of Asian American studies, queer studies, and gender and sexuality studies alongside key works of art and literature. Students will also have the opportunity to contribute their own selection of art and literature to the class conversation.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto | Catalog details

 

AMST 305 SEM The Gay Menagerie: Gay Male Subcultures

Last offered Fall 2022

Bears. Cubs. Otters. Pups. Twinks. Radical Fairies. Leathermen. Mollies. Drag queens. Dandies. Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Gay men, including gay trans men, have organized themselves into various subcultures within their community for centuries. This seminar is devoted to exploring these subcultures in (a mostly US-context) in greater detail using ethnographic texts, anthropological studies, historical accounts (including oral histories), and media. Topics include cruising and flagging, the anthropological significance of gay bars, histories of bath house culture, rural vs urban queer experiences, the ball scene, drag, diva worship, the reclamation of “fabulousness and faggotry,” the leadership roles of trans women and effeminate gay men in activist movements, gay gentrification, the growth of gay consumerism/ gay tourism/homonationalism, hierarchies of masculinity in the gay community (i.e., masc for masc culture), HIV/AIDS and the politics of PrEP, chemsex, the role of racialized dating “preferences,” genealogies of BDSM and leather culture, sexual health and discourses of “risk,” the politics of barebacking and other sexual practices, queering consent, and the effects of hookup apps on gay culture. In addition to lectures, and discussions, there will also be some low-key performance-studies based exercises in queer praxis (e.g., drag workshops, mock debates, animal improvisation, role playing, etc.)

Taught by: Gregory Mitchell | Catalog details

 

AMST 307 SEM Experimental African American Poetry

Last offered Fall 2019

Contemporary African American poets in various cities and towns across the nation–from New York City to Los Angeles, from Berkeley to Durham, N.C.–are currently producing a vibrant and thriving body of formally experimental work, yet this poetry is largely unknown to readers both within and outside the academy. This formally innovative poetry defamiliarizes what we normally expect of “black writing” and pushes us to question our assumptions and presumptions about black identity, “identity politics,” the avant-garde (for example, is it implicitly raced?), formalism, socially “relevant” writing, the (false) dichotomy of form versus content, the black “community,” digital poetics, and other issues of race and aesthetics. We will examine the writings of living poets, who range widely in age, and those of their avant-garde predecessors in the twentieth century. We will also be making links between this poetry and African American music and visual art.

Taught by: Dorothy Wang | Catalog details

 

AMST 308 TUT Angela Davis and Abolition

Last offered Spring 2026

This tutorial examines the political thought and contributions of Angela Davis. Texts include: Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Freedom Is a Constant Struggle; Abolition. Feminism. Now; If They Come in the Morning. Additional texts include: J. James, The Angela Y. Davis Reader; and, Contextualizing Angela Davis.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 309 (F) SEM Marxism in Reverse

This is an experimental course, designed to get students to consider the influence of Marxism on contemporary thought. The course will begin by examining contemporary studies that deploy Marxist thought, progressing in reverse chronological order to show the influence of Marxism in previous eras until we get back to the 19th century and the work of Karl Marx himself. Topics to be discussed in this course include, but are not limited to, artificial intelligence, the Internet, the end of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, automation and deindustrialization, anti-colonial and Third World Marxism, China and the peasantry, the rise of fascism, the Russian Revolution, imperialism, the Second International, the Paris Commune, and Karl Marx. These topics and more will provide the groundwork to allow students to think about how the thought of one figure from the nineteenth century developed and how that thought continues to be transformed to fit new, shifting conditions unimaginable in the nineteenth century. These topics will be examined through the lens and literature of Africana studies thinkers, including C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, and more.

Taught by: Armond Towns | Catalog details

 

AMST 310 SEM “A language to hear myself”: Advanced Studies in Feminist Poetry and Poetics

Last offered Spring 2023

The title of this course comes from Adrienne Rich’s 1969 poem “Tear Gas,” grounding our study in 1960s, 70s, and 80s feminist activist poetry but also in our current moment to answer a fundamental question: what can poetry do for us? In this period, feminist activist poets were at the center of a revolutionary social justice movement that changed the world. Feminist presses published much of the new poetry. This course focuses on the theory and practice of feminist poetry and print culture during this period, and how feminist experiments in language changed how we understand American poetry. We focus on the theoretical writings and poetry chapbooks of a diverse group of poets who powered the movement, including Audre Lorde, Mitsuye Yamada, Nelly Wong, Robin Morgan, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sonia Sanchez, Adrienne Rich, Judy Grahn, and Pat Parker. We also read the work of some later feminist theorists, such as Sara Ahmed. We spend time in the archives, analyzing documents from the period, including feminist magazines and original publications of poetry chapbooks often published by the period’s many feminist presses and consider how such attention allows us to construct alternative narratives for feminism and American poetry. Writing at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and of multiple social justice movements (Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, LGBTQ activism, and Black Power), these poets gave us a new language to “hear,” not only ourselves, but the experience and pain of others, and, in so doing, they moved personal experience into public discourse around issues of inequality and human flourishing in a democratic society.

Taught by: Bethany Hicok | Catalog details

 

AMST 312 (S) SEM Immigrant Voices: Cultural Production in the Age of Mass Deportation

In the United States, some immigrants–like those without legal authorization–have little recourse in the political arena to improve their life conditions. Many seek to shape their lives by adopting a “hardworking immigrant” identity, whereas others become politically involved despite their inability to vote. Some have delved into cultural production (art, music, television, film, clothing, theater) to share their perspective on life before they migrated to the U.S., their journey to a new country, and surviving with diminishing legal protections. This course introduces immigrant narratives within a context of mass deportation. Considering reports of deported U.S. citizens, how does a growing immigration enforcement system affect not only immigrants but all those within and outside the nation-state? How does the immigration system shape people’s ability to relate to a place, and how does people’s relationship to place enable them to navigate and resist the exercise of federal immigration powers? Drawing on critical race theory, queer theory, Latina/o Studies, human geography, and migration studies, this course examines how the state structures the lives of immigrants and how immigrants–especially youth, women, and LGBTQ people–imagine alternative futures, complicating how we think about legal status, “illegals,” and the role of detention in immigration enforcement. Through an interdisciplinary exploration of ‘migration,’ we will examine the depth and range of migrants’ experiences (such as through Javier Zamora’s Solito: A Memoir as well as other narratives of immigrants from all over the world) in shaping Latinx and American life. This course invites students to deepen their appreciation for knowledge production from the perspective of the Latinx migrant community.

Taught by: Edgar Sandoval | Catalog details

 

AMST 313 (F) SEM Gender, Race, and the Power of Personal Aesthetics

This media/cultural studies course focuses on the politics of personal style amongst women of color in the US and around the globe in the digital era. We undertake a comparative, transnational exploration of the ways in which categories of difference such as gender, disability, sexuality, class, and ethno-racial identity inform normative beauty standards and ideas about the body. The class pays particular attention to the ways in which neoliberal capitalism shapes contemporary understandings of gendered bodies and the self. We examine an array of materials from across the disciplines including commercial websites, music videos, photography, histories, film, television, personal narratives, ethnographies, and sociological case studies. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we engage the following questions, among others: What are some of the everyday functions of personal style among women of color in the US and globally? How do Latina/x, Black, Arab American, and Asian American personal aesthetics reflect the specific circumstances of their creation, and the unique histories of these racialized communities? What role do transnational media and popular culture play in the development and circulation of gendered, raced, and sexualized aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as an activist strategy complicate traditional understandings of feminist political activity? And what do the combined insights of ethnic studies, feminist studies, cultural studies, media studies, queer studies and disability studies contribute to our comprehension of gendered Asian American, Arab American, Black, and Latina/x bodies?

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 314 LEC Groovin’ the Written Word: The Role of Music in African American Literature

Last offered Spring 2026

In an interview with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison once said, “Music provides a key to the whole medley of Afro-American artistic practices.” Morrison is not the only one who believes that music speaks to numerous aspects of the African American experience. From Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston to John Edgar Wideman and Suzan Lori-Parks, many African American authors have drawn on music to take political stands, shape creative aesthetics, and articulate black identity. In this course, students will explore the work of these authors and more, investigating music’s ability to represent and critique African American culture in their literature. Texts will cover a range of literary forms including poetry, plays, short stories and novels alongside theoretical and critical essays. Students will discuss such key issues as assimilation into mainstream culture, authenticity claims on black music, and music used as a tool for protest. Additionally, class assignments will include musical examples in spirituals/gospel, blues, jazz, and rock/rhythm and blues. While this class requires students to practice in-depth literary and performance analysis skills, students are not required to have technical musical knowledge.

Taught by: Rashida Braggs | Catalog details

 

AMST 315 SEM Muslimness: The Making of a Race–Comparative Studies of the United States and France.

Last offered Fall 2025

This interdisciplinary course critically examines the construction and racialization of “Muslimness” in two key Western contexts: the United States and France. Moving beyond religion as a purely spiritual or cultural identity, the course investigates how Muslim identity has been transformed into a racialized category with far-reaching social, political, and legal implications. France–home to the largest Muslim population in Europe and shaped by a long history of colonial domination in Muslim-majority countries–provides a valuable heuristic lens for understanding the racialization of Muslims in the U.S. Students will explore the historical foundations of Muslim racialization, including France’s colonial legacies and specific colonial dynamics, alongside the American context where Arabs are legally classified as white yet socially racialized as Muslim. Other Muslim communities–such as South Asians and African Americans–experience distinct but intersecting forms of racialization. Focusing on the racialization of Arabs as Muslims in both France and the U.S., the course analyzes how Islamophobia–manifested through national security regimes, immigration discourses, and media representations–drives the production of ‘Muslimness’ as a racialized marker. These processes, in turn, shape lived experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and resistance. Through a comparative U.S.-French framework, students will engage with key theories of race, ethnicity, and religion, as well as decolonial and critical race approaches. Case studies will highlight how Muslim individuals and communities navigate complex identities under the weight of securitization, cultural discrimination, and everyday acts of marginalization and resistance. By the end of the course, students will develop a nuanced understanding of how “Muslimness” functions as a racial category, its implications for citizenship, belonging, and civil rights, and the ongoing struggles against racial and religious oppression in contemporary Western societies.

Taught by: Souhail Chichah | Catalog details

 

AMST 316 SEM Spatial Technologies of Domination and Resistance

Last offered Spring 2026

This course tracks the social and political emergence of technologies of spatial control and domination, including but not limited to those of map-making, architecture, city planning, and social confinement. Drawing on approaches from sociology, science and technology studies, history, Africana studies, Indigenous studies, and geography, we focus on the emergence of cartography as a foundational science of modern empires, the attempted mapping and spatial domination of so-called “new lands,” the trafficking of enslaved people, and the surveillance of unfree labor and migration. We then track struggles over place and space via the vantage point of cartographies of resistance, such as from Black and Indigenous forms of maintaining claims to land space and creating new forms of place in ways that challenge or subvert colonial and racial landscapes. Lastly, we turn to contemporary struggles over land and space and how various spatial tools, such as environmental surveys and housing assessments, are used as both mechanisms of domination and resistance and sites of contestation against various forms of dispossession and domination.

Taught by: Peter Kent-Stoll | Catalog details

 

AMST 317 SEM Black Migrations: African American Performance at Home and Abroad

Last offered Fall 2025

In this course, students will investigate, critique and define the concepts migration and diaspora with primary attention to the experiences of African Americans in the United States and Europe. Drawing on a broad definition of performance, students will explore everything from writing and painting to sports and dance to inquire how performance reflects, critiques and negotiates migratory experiences in the African diaspora. For example, how did musician Sidney Bechet’s migration from New Orleans to Chicago to London influence the early jazz era? How did Katherine Dunham’s dance performances in Germany help her shape a new black dance aesthetic? Why did writer James Baldwin go all the way to Switzerland to write his first novel on black, religious culture in Harlem? What drew actor/singer Paul Robeson to Russia, and why did the U.S. revoke his passport in response to his speeches abroad? These questions will lead students to investigate multiple migrations in the African diasporic experience and aid our exploration of the reasons for migration throughout history and geography. In addition to critical discussions and written analysis, students will explore these topics through their own individual and group performances in class. No prior performance experience is necessary.

Taught by: Rashida Braggs | Catalog details

 

AMST 320 SEM “With God On Our Side”: Race, Religion, and American Public Life

Last offered Spring 2026

Race and religion remain powerful forces that shape American society, driving populist political movements, sparking intense public debates, and fueling fundamental struggles over the meaning and direction of the nation. This seminar delves into the complex and often contentious intersection of race, religion, and politics, with a particular focus on the last few decades of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. The seminar will examine key historical, political, and theoretical issues that continue to shape American democracy including the role of religion in populist movements and the ongoing battles over racial and religious identity in politics and political formations. Specific and sustained attention will be given to the ways these dynamics inform contemporary debates about citizenship, democracy, equality, justice, and solidarity in a time of deep political conflict and planetary crisis. In all, the seminar will offer fresh perspectives for critically analyzing the ongoing tensions at the heart of American public life.

Taught by: Corey D. B. Walker | Catalog details

 

AMST 322 SEM Race, Culture, Incarceration

Last offered Spring 2025

This course explores racially-fashioned policing and incarceration from the Reconstruction era convict prison lease system to contemporary mass incarceration and “stop and frisk” policies of urban areas in the United States. Also explored will be political imprisonment in the United States.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 323 SEM Comic Lives: Graphic Novels & Dangerous Histories of the African Diaspora

Last offered Spring 2025

This course explores how the graphic novel has been an effective, provocative and at times controversial medium for representing racialized histories. Drawing on graphic novels such as the late Congressman John Lewis’ March and Ebony Flowers’ Hot Comb, this course illustrates and critiques multiple ways the graphic novel commingles word and image to create more sensorial access into ethnic traumas, challenges and interventions in critical moments of resistance throughout history. Students will practice analyzing graphic novels with the help of critical essays, reviews and film; the chosen texts will center on Africana cultures, prompting students to consider how the graphic novel may act as a useful alternate history for marginalized peoples. During the course, students will build comic creation and analysis skills through short exercises, eventually building up to the final project of a graphic short story that illustrates historical and/or autobiographical narratives. No art experience is required, only an openness to expanding one’s visual awareness and composition skills. This course is often taught in collaboration with the Williams College Museum of Art’s Object Lab program, which allows the class to have its own space and art objects that are directly related to the course topic. This class may feature Object Lab participation, film screenings, and collaborations with guest speakers.

Taught by: Rashida Braggs | Catalog details

 

AMST 325 SEM Asian/African American Cultural and Political Theory

Last offered Fall 2021

Contrasted as “model minorities” or “incorrigible minorities” Asian Americans and African Americans have been pitted against one another in social standing and political objectives. However, throughout the twentieth century, African/Asian solidarity and alliances existed in political movements and literary and cultural productions. From Ho Chi Minh’s anti-lynching writing, the founding conference of the WIDF (Women’s International Democratic Federation) in China in 1945, through the Bandung Conference, coalitions against U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, and alignments with Chinese anti-imperialist endeavors, black and Asian peoples have joined in international political formations. Contributions to theory include the writings and activism of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Robert Williams, Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs, Ishmael Reed, and Amiri Baraka; films of Bruce Lee; music of Fred Ho; revolutionary praxis of Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book and his writings on art and society; the Marxism of the Black Panther Party; the Afro-futurism of Sun Ra and Samuel Delany; and contemporary “Afro-pessimism.” Such cultural works depict futurities and possibilities for Black and Asian diasporas. This seminar examines theory, politics, literature, film, and music produced from and linked to twentieth-century movements against capitalism, racism, colonialism, and imperial wars to think through how Black and Yellow Power have shaped solidarity to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism. Requirements: One midterm paper (5-6 pp.) = 30%; final paper/project (10-12 pp.) with a creative option = 50%; short response paper and GLOW posts = 10%; participation (attendance and class discussion) = 10% Course cap: 19 Priority given to AMST majors, Africana concentrators

Taught by: Dorothy Wang | Catalog details

 

AMST 326 SEM Unfinishing America

Last offered Spring 2026

The Great American Novel is a moribund cliché. Few would argue that any one work of fiction could capture the essence of American life. In this class, we will flip the Great American Novel on its head by reading Ralph Ellison’s unfinished second novel. After publishing the acclaimed Invisible Man in 1952, Ellison seemed poised to deliver the next Great American Novel. But he never did. When he died in 1994, 42 years later, he left behind thousands of pages of material, but no finished second novel. Why wasn’t he able to finish it? Some of it was bad luck. Some of it was a struggle with genre and form. However, perhaps the real reason Ellison’s novel proved impossible is what it was trying to say. This is a book about the historical trauma of racism. Therefore, the thesis of this class is that the Great American Novel cannot be written as long as American history remains whitewashed. This class culminates in a final project that asks students to “unfinish” a Great American Novel of their choice, using Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark” as a critical guide.

Taught by: William Samuel Stahl | Catalog details

 

AMST 328 SEM American Social Dramas

Last offered Fall 2016

As Shakespeare wrote memorably in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Sociologists have heeded Shakespeare’s wisdom, arguing that social and political events are “performances” that take shape in accordance with familiar cultural scripts, and indeed that social actors implicitly interpret real-world events using plot structures from literary and dramatic genres such as romance, irony, comedy, and tragedy. We will explore this thesis through the lens of contemporary American political events, including the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, September 11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2012 presidential election, and current debates over Confederate symbolism. We will also pay careful attention to the unfolding drama associated with the 2016 presidential election. How do social performances and struggles to “control the narrative” shape the meanings and outcomes of political events? Are they merely “spectacles,” or wellsprings for genuine civic participation? What role do political comedy, satire, and social media play in shaping the trajectory of contemporary events? Major authors will include Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, J.L. Austin, Erving Goffman, and Jeffrey Alexander. Throughout the semester, each student will develop a significant project on a political event of their choosing.

Taught by: Christina Simko | Catalog details

 

AMST 329 SEM American Biography X

Last offered Fall 2025

If history is the sum total of individual life stories, what do we do when these stories don’t add up? In this course we will witness the power of biography to subvert and disrupt how we tell history. Specifically, we will explore how the tradition of Black American biography and autobiography has consistently challenged and destabilized the ongoing project to whitewash American history. From Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X, Black autobiographers have engaged in critical projects of self-making in resistance to white supremacy. Their works are testaments to a lifelong struggle: Frederick Douglass wrote no less than three autobiographies, and W.E.B. Du Bois did the same. On a micro level, we will analyze this unending process of self-revision across these authors’ lives. On a macro level, we will interrogate American history from enslavement to the civil rights era. In addition to autobiographies by Douglass, Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, and Malcolm X, we will explore Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” as well as the “biomythography” of Audre Lorde.

Taught by: William Samuel Stahl | Catalog details

 

AMST 335 SEM Uncovering Williams

Last offered Spring 2021

Sparked by current controversies around visual representations at Williams, this course–a joint effort of the Williams College Museum of Art and the American Studies Program–interrogates the history of the college and its relationship to land, people, architecture, and artifacts. Students in this course will examine the visual and material culture of Williams and the land it occupies to uncover how the long and complex history of the college reverberates in the spaces and places students, faculty, and staff traverse daily. We take seriously that objects and environments are not neutral nor are the atmospheres that they reflect and produce. Our interdisciplinary approach draws from the methods and theories of American studies, art history, material culture studies, critical race theory, gender studies, and eco-criticism. Topics of discussion may include: the foundation of the college and displacement of native populations; buildings, objects, and monuments linked to Williams’ evangelical history and the role of missionaries in American imperialism; the symbolic meaning of the varied architectural styles at the college; and the visibility/invisibility of the college’s relationship to slavery and Abolitionism.

Taught by: Dorothy Wang | Catalog details

 

AMST 337 SEM Queer in the City

Last offered Spring 2020

In this course we will examine the various ways scholars and filmmakers have used ethnography as a critical tool for understanding the intersections of race, place, space, gender and sexuality. We will foreground studies that examine unfamiliar sites of Black struggle, resistance, and survival. We will examine Black gender variant and sexual minorities and how they produce, reproduce and struggle for spaces and places of desire, community, pleasure, love, and loss. We will explore these stories through primarily ethnographic modalities. We will discuss the political and ethical ramifications of these ethnographic narratives paying particular attention to the usefulness and limitations of both ‘Thin’ and ‘Thick’ descriptions. We will use ethnography to center debates regarding the politics of representation of racialized queer space, place, and people through both filmic and written accounts. All students will be asked to discover and develop their ethnographic voices through various critical, creative, experimental and performative assignments.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 339 (S) SEM Rock, Reggaetón, Cumbia: Listening to the Sounds of Latinx Musical Cultures

What do the various reactions to Bad Bunny’s upcoming Super Bowl half-time show say about the current place of Latinx popular music? How does investigating the broader historical, cultural, and political context of Latinx popular music enhance our understanding of everyday Latinx lives? What does examining Latinx music in context reveal about the relationship between race, gender, sexuality, disability, and sound in the US more broadly? In this course, students are introduced to the interdisciplinary fields of Latinx Sound Studies and Latinx Media Studies, with particular attention to the sonic and the visual as they relate to gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and disability in Latinx communities. Grounded in the analysis of Latinx popular music ranging from salsa to reggaetón to vallenato to rock and pop, we engage the following questions, among others: What unique roles does musical sound play in our everyday understanding of Latinx identities? How are gender, sexuality, disability, and ethno-racial identity articulated via sound? What are the most effective tools for assessing Latinx sound in context? What alternatives to dominant understandings of Latinx identities might the sonic contributions of Latinx musical performers offer? If Latinx sound may sometimes become a site of oppression, then how might it also serve as a vehicle for joy? Students in this course are expected to achieve proficiency in the sonic analysis of Latinx music, They will improve their musical listening skills via a regular semi-structured listening journal. Studies will also gain experience in media production. The final project for this course is a podcast, prepared over the course of the semester, that focuses on some element of the class material. Proficiency in Spanish, experience in podcast/media production, or formal musical education are welcome, but not required. (All course materials are bilingual, and students will be taught how to produce the podcast as well as how write about music).

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 340 SEM Elizabeth Bishop in the Americas

Last offered Spring 2026

Elizabeth Bishop has emerged as one of the most important poets of the 20th century. She is admired not only for her dazzling mastery of the craft but also her adventurous life as a world traveler. Her more than two decades living in Brazil and translating the culture and literature of that country for a North American audience make her life and work a rich focal point for cross-cultural study. At the center of the course is Bishop’s poetry–her stunning meditations on childhood, love and loss, the boundaries of memory, travel, lesbian sexuality, gender identity, ecology, and race and class in the U.S. and Brazil. We will look at how Bishop intertwines personal and global historical encounters in order to raise ethical questions about our shared history of conquest and sense of place in the Americas. What is ultimately at stake in our claiming of a “home”? We study archival materials–letters, poem drafts, Bishop’s paintings, and collage-like notebooks–in order to deepen our understanding of her writing practice and articulate the role the archive plays in shaping our reading of a poet’s work. And, finally, we read Bishop alongside Brazilian writers she read and translated. We draw on critical tools throughout the course (case studies, translation and archival theory, and close reading) in order to articulate Bishop’s writing in the larger context of literary history and culture in the middle of the twentieth century.

Taught by: Bethany Hicok | Catalog details

 

AMST 341 (F) SEM Desire and Dissent in US Modernist Literatures

This course investigates how sexual identities, desires, and acts are represented and reproduced in U.S. literary and popular culture. Focusing on 1880-1940 (when, in the U.S. the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” came to connote discrete sexual identities), we will explore what it means to read and theorize “queerly.” Among the questions we will ask are: What counts as “sex” or “sexual identity” in a text? Are there definably queer and/or transgender writing styles or cultural practices? What does sexuality have to do with gender? How are sexual subjectivities intertwined with race, ethnicity, class, and other identities and identifications? Why has “queerness” proven to be such a powerful and sometimes powerfully contested concept? We will also explore what impact particular literary developments–the move from realism to modernism– and historical events such as the rise of sexology, first-wave feminism and the Harlem Renaissance–have had on queer cultural production. The class will also introduce students to some of the most influential examples of queer literary and cultural theory. Readings may include works by authors such as James, Cather, Far, Hughes, Nugent, Stein, Hurston, Eliot, and Larsen, as well as queer literary theory and critique by scholars such as Butler, Foucault, Freud, Abdur-Rahman, Lorde, Muñoz, Shah, Ross, Johnson and Sedgwick.

Taught by: Kathryn Kent | Catalog details

 

AMST 342 SEM Borders, Solidarities, and Diaspora: Contested Representations of U.S. Central Americans

Last offered Spring 2026

This course explores who U.S.-Central Americans are through their visual cultural production, as well as how US-Central Americans have been portrayed by others. Recently, Central Americans have gained visibility in the U.S. public sphere as mainstream media coverage of the “crisis at the border” has sensationalized the arrival of migrant caravans. The images and visuals resulting from mainstream coverage has led to monolithic representations of Central Americans framing them as “illegal aliens,” violent gang members, or agentless victims. By engaging with visual culture ranging from social media, films, and zines, we challenge these monolithic perceptions and representations of Central Americans by pursuing the following set of questions: How have others visualized Central Americans and what has been the effect on lived experiences of U.S. Central Americans? How do U.S.-Central American communities visualize their identity formation in the U.S.? What is the role of visual culture in their resistance to racism, classism, sexism, and other structures of marginalization in the U.S.? As part of this course, we explore the range of social, political, economic, and historical forces that have pushed migration from each of the countries in the isthmus and the formation of their respective diasporas in the U.S.

Taught by: Kevin Cruz Amaya | Catalog details

 

AMST 343 (F) TUT Representations of Racial-Sexual Violence from Enslavement to Emancipation

This tutorial (updated) focuses on racial-sexual violence in the Americas from colonial to contemporary times. Texts include: Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America; Diana Block, Arm the Spirit; Assata Shakur: An Autobiography; J. James, The Womb of Western Theory; Octavia Butler, Kindred; Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro; Rise Up or Die!: The Struggle Against Genocide of Black People in Brazil, ed. J.Costa Vargas.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 344 SEM Pacific-New England Material Histories

Last offered Fall 2019

This course looks at the indigenous, colonial, maritime, and missionary histories that connect New England to island nations in the Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than thinking of Hawai’i and Massachusetts merely as opposite ends of United States colonial expansion, we will focus on the heterogenous cast of historical actors-from queens to whalers-who interacted in these places and generated new forms in architecture, painting, printmaking, the decorative arts, textiles, and publishing. Particular attention will be paid to the politics of Hawaiian visual culture and the histories of Williams alumni in Hawai’i, but the readings, discussions, and student papers will not be limited exclusively to those subjects. Our time together will be split between lecture and class discussion, with some meetings devoted to archival research and object-based case studies in collections on campus. As a group, we will establish a corpus of objects and conceptual frameworks for analyzing what “Pacific-New England” means and how that might challenge our existing assumptions about regional art histories. Finally, we will experiment as a class with the best ways to convey what we’ve learned through our collective inquiry-whether in different forms of writing or by workshopping more creative approaches.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 345 SEM Capitalism and Racism in the American Context and Beyond: A Global Approach

Last offered Fall 2023

American Studies emerged with the idea that transdisciplinarity is crucial for comprehending the concept of America. Building on this framework, this course foregrounds transepistemology as an equally important method for understanding the dynamics of America, both locally and globally, at the level of the world-system. In addition to tracing the consubstantial genealogy of racism and capitalism, we will examine their local manifestations, mainly in Asia, Europe, Africa and America, as well as their current geopolitical, social and economic outcomes, especially the reproduction of systemic inequalities and domination. Through an interdisciplinary approach and engagement with a variety of resources from economics, anthropology, sociology, critical race theory, comparative ethnic studies and decolonial thinking, this course will address the following: i) review the different forms of economic organization of human societies throughout history (with special focus on the work of Karl Polanyi); ii) trace the epistemological origins of capitalism and investigate what makes capitalism and its crises unique; iii) trace the genealogy of the concepts of race, racism and discrimination; iv) interrogate the intersection of racism and capitalism in different traditions of thought and epistemologies in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. For example, we will read key texts from “French theory”, (Deleuze, Foucault, etc.), US Black tradition, (W. E. B. Du Bois and Cedric Robison, etc.), Chinese social sciences (Li Shenming, Cheng Enfu, etc.) and African economy and anthropology (Mahdi Elmandjra, Cheikh Anta Diop, etc.) and Latin American decolonial philosophy (Quijano, Dussel, Mignolo, etc.) By doing this, we will situate the rupture that capitalism and racism introduced at the level of global history, which is the first step to conceptualizing racism and capitalism. After showing that the development of capitalism and racism are historically linked, we will proceed to examine the manifestations of their interaction at local and global levels. Locally, we will focus on the effects of racism on the labor market: discrimination in hiring, wage discrimination, segregation, duality and stratification of the labor market, etc. We will also analyze how sexism and racism play out in the labor market in racialized communities. We will also reflect on the links between racism and politics and their effects on economic policies. From a more global perspective, we will analyze the roots of the global economic crisis and the resulting geopolitical issues at the international level and the racist dynamics they generate. Overall, as we will move through readings, we will situate the United States in a cross-regional perspective that would enable us to develop critical insights concerning links and convergences between capitalism and racism.

Taught by: Souhail Chichah | Catalog details

 

AMST 346 SEM Latinas/os and the Media: From Production to Consumption

Last offered Fall 2020

This interdisciplinary course focuses on the areas of Latina/o media production, policy, content, and consumption in an attempt to answer the following questions, among others: How do Latinas/os construct identity (and have their identities constructed for them) through the media? How can we best understand the complex relationship between consumer, producer, and media text? How are Latina/o stereotypes constructed and circulated in mass media? Where do issues of Latina/o consumer agency come into play? In what ways does popular media impact our understanding of ethno-racial identities, gender, sexuality, class, language, and nation?

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 347 TUT Whitman and Dickinson in Context

Last offered Spring 2026

In this tutorial, we will read closely the works of two of the most influential and experimental poets of the nineteenth-century U.S., Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. In addition to studying in depth their poems and other writings–in Whitman’s case, his essays, in Dickinson’s, her letters–we will delve into some of the major critical debates surrounding their work, both individually and when compared to one another. For example, Whitman is often viewed as perhaps the most public nineteenth-century American poet, whereas Dickinson is regarded as perhaps the most “private.” We will interrogate this assumption, exploring how each poet represents publicity and privacy in their work, as well as their efforts to “perform” and/or reform an American self. We will also examine how each poet engages questions of gender and sexuality, as well as contemporary debates surrounding such issues as abolition, slavery, women’s suffrage, temperance, and settler colonialism. We will consider what role their whiteness plays in their poetry and personas. Finally, we will explore Whitman and Dickinson’s relation to significant literary and philosophical movements of the period, including transcendentalism and the culture of sentiment. Throughout the course, emphasis will be on analyzing and generating interpretations of Whitman and Dickinson’s works, constructing critical arguments in dialogue with other critics, formulating cogent written critiques, and carrying on an oral debate about a variety of interpretations. Students will meet with the instructor in pairs for an hour each week. They will alternate between writing 5- to 7-page papers and commentaries on their partner’s papers.

Taught by: Kathryn Kent | Catalog details

 

AMST 348 SEM Drawing Democracy: Graphic Narratives as Democratic Ideals

Last offered Spring 2022

This course examines the graphic narrative in terms of how each author/illustrator employs narrative elements (plotting, structure, characterization, text, and visuals) to express social realities within the context of democratic ideals. Regular assignments and in-class exercises throughout the course offer students the opportunity to create their own graphic narratives.

Taught by: Nelly Rosario | Catalog details

 

AMST 349 SEM The Politics of Algorithms

Last offered Fall 2021

Every day, you interact with or through computer algorithms. In ways often obscure to users, they structure communication or conduct in social media, education, healthcare, shopping, entertainment, dating, urban planning, policing, criminal sentencing, political campaigns, government regulation, and war. Moving from the emergence of cybernetics during World War II through such contemporary examples as facial recognition software, this seminar approaches algorithms as complex technological artifacts that have social histories and political effects. Asking how algorithms are political and what that tells us about politics today (particularly in the U.S.), we will consider how their design expresses forms of power and their deployment shapes ways of living. What behaviors do different algorithms solicit, reward, discourage, or stigmatize? What kinds of selfhood and relationships do they promote or thwart? How do various algorithms influence political partisanship and beliefs and intersect with existing hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality? When inequities are built into a design, can that be addressed by rooting out “bias,” or do such efforts miss something more inherent in the kinds of artifacts algorithms are or what they can be in a capitalist economy? Might developments in artificial intelligence transform our sense of the human or even threaten the species? Many of the seminar’s themes, including democracy, power, inequality, judgment, deliberation, publicity, subjectivity, and agency, are central to political theory, but readings and course materials will also be drawn from such fields as media theory, surveillance studies, sociology, American studies, critical data science, film, and contemporary art. The course neither requires nor teaches any computer science skills.

Taught by: Mark Reinhardt | Catalog details

 

AMST 350 SEM Prehistories of the War on Terror

Last offered Spring 2026

On September 11th, 2001, members of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania. For many Americans this tragedy seemed to come out of nowhere. In an attempt to historicize these shocking events, and the global wars that resulted from them, this course will examine the prehistories of the War on Terror. We will study the United States’ emergence as a global power after World War II, US foreign policy and its relationship to the Middle East, and the political and cultural currents that informed American responses to the events of 9/11. We will also explore the history of the War on Terror itself. Topics will include the Cold War, the environmental history of oil, the history of terrorism, the relationship between race and war, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Taught by: Stefan Aune | Catalog details

 

AMST 351 SEM Queer Linguistics

Last offered Fall 2021

This course in linguistics provides an introduction to linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and folklore studies using topics and approaches related to gender and sexuality. It is a methods course based in empirical research principles, but a basic familiarity with the broad strokes of queer/feminist theory may be helpful. One goal of the class will be learning to read and write in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and how to construct and use IPA “change charts.” We then build on this as we turn to sociolinguistics as students will learn how to do Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis, using WGSS-oriented topics (e.g., upspeak, vocal fry, so-called “gay voice,” the gendered nature of turn-taking and interrupting.) We then turn to an extended unit on queer folklore and folklife, learning how anthropologists and folklorists use motif type indexes (e.g., Propp Functions, Thompson Type Index, etc) to study oral narratives and how feminist/queer theorists can use these to analyze gender in folk/fairytales and other stories. We also read several linguistic anthropologists’ ethnographies of queer communities’ language practices in global context. The semester concludes with a unit on LGBT slang, argots, and profanity.

Taught by: Gregory Mitchell | Catalog details

 

AMST 352 SEM Global Health in the Transpacific

Last offered Spring 2022

East is East, and West is West, Rudyard Kipling famously wrote in 1889, but never has this been true. Just as war, imperialism, and transnational flows of capital move people, cultures, and ideas across the Pacific, similar patterns of migration and mobility shape the transmission of illness and disease as well. This course explores global health and disease control as sites of domination and resistance in the Pacific Rim. Articulating the linkages between Asia/America, we will look at the racialization of people and pestilence during the third plague pandemic in Hong Kong and San Francisco, malaria control projects in colonial Southeast Asia, and the rise of modern genomics out of the ashes of Hiroshima and concern over radiation risk, and other cases, to understand how disregard for Asian bodies has shaped the development of modern medicine and public health. At the same time, Indonesia’s claim of “viral sovereignty” to protect their biological specimens from Western intellectual property regimes and Hmong refugees’ resistance to biomedical intervention in their struggles with mental illness offer counterpoints to Western hegemony. This course provides a critical examination of biosecurity as modern geopolitical struggle and puts Asia-Pacific and the Pacific Rim at the center of our exploration of global health.

Taught by: Shoan Yin Cheung | Catalog details

 

AMST 354 SEM Race/War: Critical Readings on Violence

Last offered Spring 2025

We live in a moment where the media visibility of warfare is surging. On both mainstream media outlets and social media platforms often-pervasive depictions of violence challenge our ability to analyze, historicize, and empathize. This course will step back and explore a longer history of military violence and its connection to key American Studies concepts including race, empire, settler colonialism, and more. We will interrogate a mix of historical, literary, and theoretical texts that offer tools for analyzing the tangled intersections of race and violence, with an emphasis on the history of the United States and its militarized relationship to the rest of the world. Course texts will invite us to investigate how categories like “civilized” and “savage” have intersected with concepts like the “rules of war,” international law, and forms of violence that draw the label “race war.” Course topics will include Native resistance to US continental expansion, overseas US imperialism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, indiscriminate violence during World War II, the relationship of Cold War foreign policy to the Global War on Terror, and more. Students can expect to engage a range of sources, including archival materials, legal texts, novels, films, video games, and much more.

Taught by: Stefan Aune | Catalog details

 

AMST 358 SEM Performing Masculinity in Global Popular Culture

Last offered Spring 2026

This course examines popular cultural contexts, asking what it means to be a man in contemporary societies. We focus on the manufacture and marketing of masculinity in advertising, fashion, TV/film, theater, popular music, and the shifting contours of masculinity in everyday life, asking: how does political economy change the ideal shape, appearance, and performance of men? How have products – ranging from beer to deodorant to cigarettes — had their use value articulated in gendered ways? Why must masculinity be the purview of “males” at all; how can we change discourses to better include performances of female masculinities, butch-identified women, and trans men? We will pay particular attention to racialized, queer, and subaltern masculinities. Some of our case studies include: the short half-life of the boy band in the US, hip hop masculinities, and the curious blend of chastity and homoeroticism that constitutes masculinity in the contemporary vampire genre. Through these and other examples, we learn to recognize masculinity as a performance shaped by the political economy of a given culture.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 360 SEM The Atlantic World: Connections, Crossings, and Confluences

Last offered Fall 2024

This course considers the Atlantic World as both a real place and a concept: an ocean surrounded and shaped by diverse people and communities, and an imagined space of shared and competing affiliations. Moving from “time out of mind” to the early nineteenth century, it examines ecological, cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual transits as well as exchanges among Indigenous/Native American, African and African American, Asian and Asian American, and Euro-colonial people. It introduces conceptual dimensions of this Atlantic paradigm and case studies that illuminate its human subtleties, with the goal of examining “early American” histories through transnational and transoceanic lenses. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to these intertwined histories, and reckons with how the very construction of “history” has, at different turns, affected what is shared, known, valued, and commemorated–or overwritten, denied, or seemingly silenced. Attentive to the structures of power that inflect every part of Atlantic histories, it offers specific ethical frameworks for approaching these topics. Blending methods grounded in oral traditions and histories, place-based knowledge systems, documentary/written archives, songs, archaeology, material culture, and other forms of expression and representation, it invites class members to revisit the nature and meanings of these connected spaces. The course consistently connects historical experiences with the twenty-first century, and how communities today are grappling with the afterlives and ongoing effects of these Atlantic pasts through calls to action for reparations, repatriation and rematriation, Land Back, climate justice, and other forms of accountability. The course also provides an opportunity to engage with original materials pertaining to Atlantic World histories in the Williams College Archives/Special Collections and Art Museum.

Taught by: Christine DeLucia | Catalog details

 

AMST 361 (S) SEM Marking Presence: Reading (Dis)ability in/to Latinx Media

This course explores the intersection of (dis)ability and Latinx identity in the contemporary US context. Employing Angharad Valdivia’s (2020) notion of “marking presence” to describe the intentional ways in which Latinx subjects gain and hold on to mainstream media space, the class places the fields of Disability Studies, Latinx Studies, Gender Studies and Media Studies into conversation. We address the following questions and others: What does media reveal to us about the place of (dis)ability and Latinidad in contemporary US life, particularly as these categories intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, national identity and citizenship? How might we read Latinidad and (dis)ability into media texts in which they are not otherwise centered? What are the advantages of deploying mainstream media presence as a claim to power for disabled Latinx individuals, particularly those who are multiply marginalized? What are the limitations of such an approach? We will focus on these questions, as well as deploy various media examples (podcasts, social media, film, television and music) alongside scholarly texts to explore topics impacting the Latinx communities such as the relationship between the relationship between immigration and (dis)ability, intergenerational trauma and migration, the gendered archetype of the Latina “Loca,” (dis)ability in academia, the politics of self-care amongst Latinxs in the neoliberal context, and the very legal, cultural, and social category of “(dis)abled” itself within dominant society as well as in Latinx communities.

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 362 SEM Queer of Color Critique and Literatures

Last offered Spring 2026

Queer of color critique (QoCC) takes an intersectional approach to the study of sexuality and is particularly interested in how sexuality is constituted with and through other social formations like race, class, ability, gender, and nation. It draws on many different theoretical frameworks (women of color feminisms, materialist and post structuralist critiques, and queer critiques) and draws from many different disciplines (sociology, literary studies, psychology, etc). In this course we will study the key histories, terms, and debates in QoCC. Rather than imagine QoCC as a response to queer critique alone, we will study it as a co-occurring field with a long history. Reflecting QoCC’s interest in national and diasporic formations, we will situate our exploration of queerness in a transnational and global perspective. Our course materials include scholarly works as well as arts and literatures which develop and employ QoCC. QoCC is not only a theoretical framework, or a way of interpreting the world. Through our discussions and assignments, we will use QoCC to imagine new worlds.

Taught by: Mejdulene Shomali | Catalog details

 

AMST 363 (F, S) SEM Data for Justice Research Practicum

Civil rights activist, educator, and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells said that “the way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth upon them.” In this inclusive, collaborative, research-based course, students will bring statistical, computational, and/or mathematical approaches to bear on issues of social justice. Guided closely by the instructor, students will work in groups to carry out original research in an area such as criminal justice, education equity, environmental justice, health care equity, economic justice, or inclusion in arts/media. Prior research experience is not required; one goal of this course is to build skills for advanced research. Students must contact the instructor prior to preregistration to fill out an interest form.

Taught by: Chad Topaz | Catalog details

 

AMST 364 SEM Trans Film and Media

Last offered Spring 2026

This course provides an introduction to contemporary trans culture and politics via the lens of film and other (mostly visual) media. We’ll focus mainly on media production in the U.S. since the early 1990s, as this moment is usually understood as inaugurating contemporary “transgender” politics; additionally, the 90s saw a profusion of diversity in popular representation generally. This class has two main priorities: first, to use visual media as a lens for surveying major developments in trans studies, politics, and representation over the last few decades; second, to develop a critical repertoire for thinking about our current conjuncture of “trans visibility” in particular. By tracking a longer history of both popular and alternative trans media production, this course will question the vanguardism and celebratory progress narratives associated with “trans tipping point” visibility conditions. Drawing from perspectives in WGSS, American studies, and ethnic studies, we will especially situate trans representation in relation to the institutionalization of minority difference under neoliberal capitalism. In line with scholarship, we’ll approach trans representation as interlocking with structures like race, heteropatriarchy, dis/ability, immigration, and nationality and empire.

Taught by: Abram Lewis | Catalog details

 

AMST 366 SEM Music in Asian American History

Last offered Fall 2025

Is “Asian American music” all music made by Asian Americans, music by Asian Americans specifically drawing on Asian heritage, or music engaging with Asian American issues? This course embraces all three definitions and the full diversity of Asian American musical experience. We will study the historical soundscapes of immigrant communities (Chinese opera in North America; Southeast Asian war refugees) and how specific traumatic political events shaped musical life (Japanese American internment camps). We will encounter works by major classical composers (Chou Wen-Chung; Chen Yi; Tan Dun; Bright Sheng) and will investigate the careers and reception of prominent classical musicians (Midori; Seiji Ozawa; Yo-Yo Ma). Afro-Asian fusions, inspired by civil rights protest movements, manifested in jazz (Jon Jang; Fred Ho; Anthony Brown; Hiroshima; Vijay Iyer) and hip hop (MC Jin; Awkwafina; Filipino and Desi rappers). Asian Americans have been active in popular music at home and abroad (Don Ho; Yoko Ono; Wang Leehom; Mitski). Finally, we will investigate communal forms of Asian American music making that have crossed racialized and gendered boundaries (taiko drumming; Indonesian gamelan; Bhangra; Suzuki method). This seminar is designed to develop research skills, as we pursue original fieldwork, archival research, and oral history interviews.

Taught by: W. Anthony Sheppard | Catalog details

 

AMST 368 (S) SEM Latinx Environmentalisms

Latinxs in the U.S. may engage with environmental themes in their life and work, yet many disidentify with the term environmentalist. For example, Latinx landscape workers, or jardineros, are familiar with pesticides’ potential harm in lawncare and advocate for sustainable practices. They do not identify with mainstream environmentalism due to its association with a middle- to upper-class white demographic. This course examines geographies of social relations, focusing on how we imagine nature and our relationship to it. It is designed to use the themes of environment and social justice as an exploration into Latinx environmentalisms, or the plurality of Latinx environmental thought. This course offers a historically grounded introduction to the conditions, struggles, and modes of resistance of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinxs, African Americans, and Native Americans that constitute the environmental justice movement. Through broadening social assumptions about what the environment is and who can be an environmentalist, we then consider how these histories affect contemporary environmental work in the social sciences, politics, and the arts. Students will enrich their understanding of how Latinx cultures are often environmental despite hardly ever identifying as environmentalists.

Taught by: Edgar Sandoval | Catalog details

 

AMST 369 SEM Gender, Sexuality & Disability

Last offered Spring 2025

From classical mythology to reality TV, bodies and minds that depart from the ordinary have long been sources of popular fascination. In recent history, people marked as “disabled” have been subject to medical scrutiny, labeled deficient or defective, and often barred from full participation in society. And yet, what counts as “disability”–and who counts as disabled–varies greatly depending on cultural and historical context. Arguably, disability has more to do with social conditions than with any innate characteristics of disabled people themselves. This class introduces disability studies, situating disability within its historical, political, and cultural contexts. As a GWSS course, we’ll center queer and feminist perspectives; this class also emphasizes recent work. Echoing arguments in gender and sexuality studies, scholars have insisted that disability is not a natural or biological fact, but a socially constructed category. As such, scholars and activists have challenged medical models that conceptualize disability as an individual defect in need of elimination. They have also questioned the idea that disability is simply a minority identity — to the contrary, disability is a condition that most humans will experience at some point in our lives. This class frames “disability” broadly–encompassing not just conditions of physical impairment, but a wide range of bodily, sensory, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral differences and capacities. This class also centers how disability is produced intersectionally through regimes like race, capitalism, and empire. Topics include: theories of embodiment, eugenics, institutionalization and incarceration, neurodivergence, mad studies, the politics of health, storytelling and narrative, disability justice activism, neoliberalism, biopolitics, and crip theory. Along with scholarly writings, we’ll consider activist texts, popular press, fiction, memoir, and a variety of other media.

Taught by: Abram Lewis | Catalog details

 

AMST 370 (S) SEM Visual Politics

Even casual observers know that appearances matter politically and that the saturation of politics by visual technologies, media, and images has reached unprecedented levels. Yet the visual dimensions of political life are at best peripheral topics in contemporary political science and political theory. This seminar explores how our understanding of politics and political theory might change if visuality were made central to our inquiries. Treating the visual as a site of power and struggle, order and change, we will examine not only how political institutions and conflicts shape what images people see and how they make sense of them but also how the political field itself is visually constructed. We will consider a wide variety of visual artifacts and practices, including, for example, ancient practices of burying images, 17th century paintings, gazes and glances in everyday life, the history of modern surveillance, iconoclasm, lynching photography, and machine-machine exchanges of “operational” images within algorithmic systems. Through these inquiries, we will also take up fundamental questions about the place of the senses in political life. Readings may include excerpts from ancient and modern theorists, but our primary focus will be contemporary and will bring political theory into conversation with other fields, particularly art history and visual studies but also media studies, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, STS, and the writings of practicing artists. Possible authors include Belting, Benjamin, Bousquet, Browne, Buck-Morss, Butler, Campt, Clark, Crary, Debord, Deleuze, Fanon, Foucault, Freedberg, Hobbes, Koerner, Kittler, Mercer, Mitchell, Mulvey, Paglen, Parikka, Plato, Rancière, Scott, Steyerl, and Virilio

Taught by: Mark Reinhardt | Catalog details

 

AMST 371 SEM Rebels, Guerillas, and Insurgents: Resistance and Repression in US History

Last offered Spring 2024

This course examines histories of resistance and repression throughout US history. We will consider the role of militancy in social or revolutionary movements, how states deploy power to respond to those movements, and debates around “violence” and political action. Wide ranging in both chronology and topic, course materials will explore slavery, piracy, indigenous resistance to US continental expansion, the expansion of US empire to places like Hawaii and the Philippines, social movements focused on race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship, as well as struggles over environmental justice and indigenous sovereignty. The course will also interrogate the rise of far-right paramilitary violence in the United States and the backlash to the social movements of the 1960s and 70s. Students will develop their skills in reading, writing, and communication, and classes will emphasize engagement with primary sources, cultural texts, and different forms of media.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 372 SEM Technologies of Race

Last offered Spring 2025

This course is an introduction to theories, methods, sources, and approaches for interdisciplinary research and creativity in and through the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. We will focus on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and disability with modern media technologies, from early photography in the mid-19th century to contemporary trends in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through a process of shared inquiry, course participants will investigate the ways that historical legacies of oppression and futuristic speculation combine to shape human lives in the present under racial capitalism. Whether analyses of the automation of militarized border control in Texas, or of the ways that obsolete, racist concepts are embedded in machine vision and surveillance systems, the readings in the course will chart out the key moments in the co-evolution of race and technology in the Americas. Students will gain a working competence in all four tracks of the American Studies major (Space and Place; Comparative Studies in Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora; Arts in Context; and Critical and Cultural Theory). Finally, we will also explore alternative paths toward a future where technology might help to effect the abolition of oppressive structures and systems, rather than continue to perpetuate them.

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 373 (F) SEM US Empire in the Philippines: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Revolution

When the United States of America took official colonial control of the Philippines in 1898, the country had already been fighting an anti-colonial struggle against Spain for several years. With the start of the Philippine-American War in 1899, that fight continued. Beginning with a survey of the racial and class complexities of the Philippine revolution, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of U.S. empire-building in the archipelago from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, while also connecting the history of US empire to Filipinx art, culture, and politics today. We will pay particular attention to plantation systems that connected the Philippines, Hawaii, and other sugar-growing regions; the history of Muslim communities’ resistance to imperial power (of the Spanish, US, and the Philippine state) in the southern Philippines; constructions of Indigeneity during US colonialism; and various ways American notions of freedom, independence, and global power were articulated in, and transformed by, US occupation. Our readings may be drawn from critical ethnic studies, gender & sexuality studies, American studies, postcolonial theory, Black geography, disability studies, and more. Students are expected to take an active role in discussion, but no prior knowledge of the Philippines is expected.

Taught by: Jan Padios | Catalog details

 

AMST 375 SEM Asian American Sexualities

Last offered Spring 2025

Perceived as objects of sexual use and perversity, how might Asian/Asian American subjects contend with these projections and enact their own genders and sexualities? Anchored in this question, this theory-intensive seminar will provide a study of seminal and recent scholarship at the intersections of Asian American Studies, feminist criticism, and queer theory that focus on or are read in tandem with a collection of cultural expressions, including film, sculpture, poetry, drag performance, music, manifestos, and visual and performance art. To first root us, the seminar will introduce key uses and theorizations of sex/gender, sexuality, and queerness. Then, across the semester, we will focus on deployments of them through a range of topics, including sexual subjugation and activism of “comfort women,” orientalism/ornamentalism, the queering of Sikh, South Asian, and Muslim Americans post-9/11, western demands to “come out,” representations in pornography, lesbian invisibility, devaluation of trans* lives, etc., exploring questions of racialized, gendered, and sexual subordination alongside power, pleasure, play, and critique. To this end, we will approach gender and sexuality not as identity categories that one is or has but socially and biologically construed categories, loci for intervention and play, anti-normative positions, lived experiences, and ever-evolving processes of doing, becoming, and unbecoming.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 376 SEM Landscapes in American Literature

Last offered Fall 2019

This course examines representations of American landscapes in selected texts from the British colonial era to the present. Critical approaches will include narrative theory, formalism, eco-criticism, and science and technology studies. The central questions are: (1) How do authors adapt narrative and poetic forms to the representation of particular landscapes? (2) How do literary landscape representations change when new technologies arise for traversing and transforming them? (3) What effects can literary landscapes have on the landscapes we live in? Landscapes include settlements, cities, wildernesses, “frontiers,” suburbia, and infrastructural scenes. Relevant technologies include the postal service, the railroad, the telegraph and telephone, the automobile, commercial aviation, and Skype. Texts may include: letters of Columbus, American Indian creation stories, early American religious texts, captivity narratives, slave narratives, and poems, short stories, and novels from the 17th to the 21st centuries, as different from one another as Dickinson’s “Nature-sometimes sears a Sapling-” and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain.

Taught by: Ezra Feldman | Catalog details

 

AMST 378 SEM Policing, Incarceration, and the State

Last offered Spring 2026

Drawing on political sociology, the sociology of race, and critical criminology, this course explores the mutual construction of the state, prisons, and policing. With more of a focus on the US–but also drawing on comparisons with other countries–we draw on Du Boisian, Weberian, Foucauldian, and intersectional approaches to examine the role that prisons and policing play in the reproduction and maintenance of racial, gender, and class inequality, as well as how different movements have challenged these structures of inequality and oppression. We will explore how various institutions of policing, punishment, and social control have reflected a society’s hierarchies and also been a key site through which these hierarchies have been generated or contested. We will explore critical questions such as: What social and political factors explain the rise and fall of different regimes and policing, punishment, and control? Why did incarceration exponentially grow in the late 20th century US despite declining crime rates? How do abolitionist perspectives and movements imagine alternative forms of social organization and accountability as opposed to current practices of policing and incarceration? Key topics include the role of policing within racial slavery, struggles for Black liberation during Reconstruction, convict leasing in the aftermath of Reconstruction’s demise, mass incarceration, policing and the War on Drugs, surveillance, deportation regimes, and movements against police brutality.

Taught by: Peter Kent-Stoll | Catalog details

 

AMST 379 SEM American Pragmatism

Last offered Spring 2025

Along with jazz, pragmatism stands as the greatest uniquely American contribution to world culture. As the music wails in the background, we will study the classic pragmatists: William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey. We will continue with the contemporary inheritors of the tradition: Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. Although it has influenced both analytic and continental philosophy, pragmatism is a powerful third philosophical movement. Always asking what practical difference would it make, our authors investigate the central questions and disputes of philosophy, from epistemology and metaphysics to ethics and religion. Rather than seeing philosophy as an esoteric discipline, the pragmatic philosophers (with the possible exception of Peirce) see philosophy as integral to our culture and see themselves as public intellectuals.

Taught by: Steven Gerrard | Catalog details

 

AMST 380 SEM Documenting Democracy on Film

Last offered Fall 2025

Documentary filmmakers use a variety of tools to explore not just themes but also truths. This course will examine how the idea of democracy is addressed in modern and historical documentary film. Each class will include a review of select scenes from a collection of assigned films to evaluate how interviews, music, cinematography, and presentation of facts are used to communicate the filmmaker’s thesis. How does the film’s structure impact its message? We will analyze films including episodes of Eyes on the Prize (Volume 1); Hale County This Morning, This Evening; The Island President; Union; Gideon’s Army; Stamped From the Beginning; Girls State; and others. We will consider how filmmakers have incorporated history, philosophy, and investigative journalism to create a deeper understanding of democratic processes, norms, and rules.

Taught by: Dawn Porter | Catalog details

 

AMST 381 (S) SEM Reading for Pleasure

Reading has been making a comeback, in large part through the increase in consumption of novels read purportedly for pleasure, rather than edification. Critics decry this sort of reading as a waste of time, or as a symptom of a culture of consumption. In this course we will consider debates over what kinds of novels are “worth” one’s attention, debates that have raged since the novel emerged as a form. We will explore eighteenth-century fears about novel reading as a kind of frivolous, gendered pleasure, rooted in the body, and trace how these anxieties recur all the way into the twenty-first century. We will examine twentieth-century debates over the emergence of mass-marketed genres such as science fiction, mysteries, romance, and YA. In addition to reading closely these works, we will explore other ways to analyze them, including ethnographies of actual readers. We will examine the efflorescence in the twenty-first century of contemporary book culture (possibly including topics such as the role big data is playing in guiding people’s reading choices; the phenomenon of BookTok; AI-generated novels; celebrity book clubs; fan fic; and what it means to be in publishing at this particular historical moment).

Taught by: Kathryn Kent | Catalog details

 

AMST 382 (F) SEM Exile in La La Land: Pessimism in Paradise

“The optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.” This caustic quip is attributed to Billy Wilder, director of Hollywood classics such as The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. It points to a malaise much deeper than the cheer of prosperity, popularity, and professional success: Wilder was an Austrian Jew for whom Los Angeles was a place of exile, and as he was finding his footing in the film industry, the members of his family who remained in Europe were being murdered by the Nazis. But the bitter poignancy of Wilder’s life in LA is not unique–he was far from the only pessimist in paradise. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer penned their critique of the culture industry in the Pacific Palisades; Bertolt Brecht honed his “alienation effect” in the all-too-pleasant atmosphere of his Santa Monica home; Arnold Schoenberg composed atonal music at UCLA in between tennis matches with George Gershwin; all as Thomas Mann wrote his diagnosis of Germany’s decline, Doctor Faustus, at 1550 San Remo Drive. In this class, we will closely examine the cultural production of this small but influential exile community. Even though we will be reading their works in English, almost every one was originally written in German, which shows the strength of their cultural formation as well as the extent of their alienation in La La Land. Class assignments are designed to simulate the everyday cultural reproduction of this exile community and include journaling, letter-writing, poetry reading, music appreciation, and the analysis of film and text. The final group project is to produce a short theater piece about everyday life in Los Angeles during WWII.

Taught by: William Samuel Stahl | Catalog details

 

AMST 383 (F) SEM Comparative History of Science and Medicine in Asian/Pacific America, 1800-Present

How have scientific knowledge and medicine been tools of exclusion, violence, and imperial control against Asian Americans, as well as indigenous peoples, Black, Latinx, and white migrants, and their descendants? How have these groups negotiated and resisted encounters with such knowledge from the 19th century to the present? This seminar explores these questions by examining a series of case studies–including American colonial medicine and science in the Philippines and Hawai’i, Cold War migration of Chinese scientists and South Asian doctors to the U.S., and the politics of HIV/AIDS, psychiatry, and culturally competent care in Black, Asian, and Cuban migrant communities. Together, we will survey the literature in history, English, Global Health, Sociology, and other fields and consider how the Asian/Pacific American experience in science and medicine has been integral to, as well as informed by, the experiences of other groups in the transpacific world. Students will leave this course with interdisciplinary tools for understanding present-day health inequities in underserved Asian/Pacific American communities and other marginalized groups.

Taught by: Hongdeng Gao | Catalog details

 

AMST 384 SEM Asia and Asian Americans During the Cold War

Last offered Spring 2025

This course traces how American geopolitical interests and involvement in Asia during the Cold War affected Asian Americans. It examines the history of the Cold War as a period of U.S. imperial expansion as well as a time when various actors and organizations, especially those of Asian descent, harnessed the East-West rivalry to advance their own agendas. We will consider how diverse diplomatic strategies including militarization, educational exchange, and immigration reform shaped East, South, and Southeast Asian migrations to and settlement in the United States and the social and material lives of these diverse communities. Case studies include transnational adoptees from Korea, Hmong and Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. and across Guam and Israel-Palestine, Black, Latinx, and Asian American activists who traveled to Vietnam, educated Indian and Pakistani immigrants, and American-born individuals of Japanese ancestry in Japan. We will also explore how individuals of Asian descent leveraged Cold War geopolitics and forged cross-ethnic, cross-class alliances to advocate for social change both at home and abroad.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 385 (S) SEM Black Panthers and Political Philosophy

This seminar examines the political thought and contributions made by the Black Panther Party which had mulitiple formations in the south and on the west coast, with Oakland chapter originating in 1966. The BPP was influential and controversial. Key thinkers include: Huey P. Newton, George Jackson, Angela Davis; Fred Hampton; Bobby Seale, Geronimo Pratt, Afeni Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver, Dhoruba bin Wahad, A. Shakur etc. Texts include biographies of leaders of the Party as well as government documents from the FBI and federal committees.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 395 Care Work, Gender, and Migration

Last offered NA

This course examines the intersections of migration, care work, and gender. Drawing on approaches from sociology, labor studies, women¿s and gender studies, Africana studies, and American studies, we consider how geopolitics and global capitalism shape gendered patterns of migration and how the intersections of gender, race, nation, and class shape how immigrants navigate labor markets as well as build coalitions for workers¿ rights. Focusing specifically on how migration from the Global South to the Global North shapes gendered occupations within the care work industry, we examine how domestic workers’ and healthcare workers¿ labor experiences, among others, are shaped by gendered ideologies of coercion, hyperexploitation, and invisible labor that shape these various occupations. Building on this focus, this class considers how migration shapes the economies of both sending and receiving countries, family dynamics, transnational cultures and identities, political movements for labor rights, and the reimagining of understandings of national belonging and community.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 396 (S) SEM Race and Performance

How does one “do” race? This seminar surveys foundational and emergent scholarship at the nexus of performance studies, critical ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies alongside contemporary visual and performance art works. It will explore how the framework of performance destabilizes notions of race, gender, and sexuality, approaching them not as ones we are or possess but as ones we enact and remake. We will begin the course by tracing key concepts in performance studies (i.e., performance, performative, performativity) before examining a range of performances that respond to and negotiate life under ongoing conditions of racial capitalism, empire, anti-blackness, and settler colonialism. To this end, we will focus on how qualities attributed to racialized and gendered bodies, such as silence, disease, patience, depression, waiting, and aloofness, are retooled as actions or positions.

Taught by: Kelly Chung | Catalog details

 

AMST 397 (F) IND Independent Study: American Studies

American Studies independent study

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 398 (S) IND Independent Study:American Studies

American Studies independent study

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 400 SEM Cuba, US, Africa, and Resistance to Black Enslavement, 1791-1991

Last offered Fall 2022

This seminar focuses on the entwined histories of liberation movements against racism, enslavement, and imperialism in the US, Cuba and Africa. Readings include: Hugh Thomas, Cuba: A History; Che Guevara: The Motorcycle Diaries; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Laird Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States; Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle; Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, How Far We Slaves Have Come! Students will read and analyze texts, screen documentaries, collectively compile a comprehensive bibliography, and present group analyses. The seminar is open to all students; however, priority is given to seniors majoring in American Studies.

Taught by: Joy James | Catalog details

 

AMST 402 (S) SEM Marxist Feminisms: Race, Performance, Labor

This seminar traces queer, black and women of color feminist, and critical ethnic studies critiques of orthodox Marxism. Beginning with core texts from the tradition, including Capital Volume I, we will examine a range of social positions and modes of extraction that complicate Marx’s emphasis on the factory worker. Every week, we will draw our focus to conditions of reproduction, racial slavery, care and domestic work, indentured servitude, immigrant labor, land expropriation, and sex work among conditions. Throughout and towards the last half of the semester, we will turn to aesthetic practices that respond to these conditions and incite new ways of being in the world. To this end, this seminar will equip students with critical understandings of how racial capitalism has fundamentally relied on the mass elimination, capture, recruitment, and displacement of different racialized, gendered, and abled bodies in and beyond the U.S. and how value and life under these conditions can and must be undone.

Taught by: Kelly Chung | Catalog details

 

AMST 403 SEM New Asian American, African American, Native American, and Latina/o Writing

Last offered Spring 2020

The most exciting and forward-thinking writing in the English language today is being done by formally experimental writers of color. Their texts push the boundaries of aesthetic form while simultaneously engaging questions of culture, politics, and history. This course argues not only for the centrality of minority experimental work to English literature but a fundamental rethinking of English literary studies so as to confront the field’s imbedded assumptions about race, a legacy of British colonialism, and to make the idea of the aesthetic more open to ideas generated in critical race studies, diaspora studies, American studies, and those fields that grapple more directly with history and politics. In the critical realms of English, work by minority writers is often relegated to its own segregated spaces, categorized by ethnic identity, or tokenized as “add-ons” to more “central” or “fundamental” categories of literature (such as Modernism, poetics, the avant-garde). Recent work by Asian American, African American, Native American and Latino/a writers challenges our assumptions and preconceptions about ethnic literature, American literature, English literature, formal experimentation, genre categorization, and so on. This writing forces us to examine our received notions about literature, literary methodologies, and race. Close reading need not be opposed to critical analyses of ideologies. Formal experimentation need not be opposed to racial identity nor should it be divorced from history and politics, even, or especially, a radical politics.

Taught by: Dorothy Wang | Catalog details

 

AMST 404 SEM New Works in Asian American Studies

Last offered Spring 2026

In this seminar, we will consider recent and/or recently intensifying debates, conversations, and intellectual directions in Asian American Studies. Topics may include settler colonialism; indigeneity, the Pacific, and the transpacific; war and refugee experiences; media, including video games; political participation, conservativism, and religion; affirmative action; sexual violence; mental health; and comparative and relational racialization e.g. scholarship at the intersection of Asian American, Latinx, Native American/Indigenous, and African American/Africana studies. We may also consider some new works of Asian American film and literature, and the criticism it generates. Course material will focus on scholarship that critically engage race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and/or disability as key terms. Students may be asked to develop a final project or paper based on one of the topics or books covered in the course; review a new work independently; or conduct an interview with an author. Students will gain an understanding of the field’s recent concerns but also become familiar with the broader political, social, and cultural contexts from which they emerge.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 406 (F) CON Environmental Planning Workshop: Community Project Experience

Become an engaged citizen in this class: you will apply your education to effect environmental and social change in the Berkshires or Southern Vermont. Students work in small collaborative groups to address pressing issues facing the region. You work with community partners (local organizations, local governments, regional planning agencies etc.) to conduct applied research and develop workable solutions. Students will get to know the community and will contribute to improving the region through their work in this class. Environmental Planning is an interdisciplinary field that encompasses the built environment (eg: housing, zoning, transportation, energy, waste, neighborhood design), the natural environment (eg: woodlands, rivers, ecosystems, habitats, farmland, ecosystems, habitat, air and water, climate changes, wildlife, human impacts), and the social environment (eg: racial zoning, class divisions, spatial geography, recreation, livable neighborhoods, placemaking, environmental justice, food security, public health). Skills taught include applied community-based research, basic GIS mapping, land use planning, developing/conducting surveys, interview technique, project management, public presentations and professional report-writing. The class culminates in presentations to the client organizations. The class schedule includes time for team project work, and regular client and professor meetings. Recent project topics include neighborhood housing assessments, open space plans, climate resiliency planning, regional housing and transportation plans, bike path planning, campus planning (Mass MoCA, Williams), renewable energy planning, food system/food security assessment, accessible park planning, neighborhood walkability assessment, affordable housing, and smart growth. https://www.williams.edu/environmental-studies/research/environmental-planning-reports/

Taught by: Sarah Gardner | Catalog details

 

AMST 407 SEM Colonialism and Critical Theory

Last offered Fall 2024

French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that “racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide.” Many prominent philosophers have developed intellectual tools that can help us better understand the ongoing colonialisms that impact our world. At the same time, many of these same theorists–Foucault included–are criticized for failing to pay adequate attention to the colonialism that shaped their historical moments. Taking this paradox as our jumping-off point, this course will examine prominent philosophical and theoretical texts and assess their utility for understanding processes of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism. We will also explore how the interventions of Postcolonial Theory and Critical Indigenous Theory highlight gaps in prominent theories of political-economy, ideology, biopower, race, gender, sexuality, and more. How do ideas like orientalism, settler-colonialism, sovereignty, or decolonization challenge the traditional “canon” of critical theory? How do intellectual ideas evolve over time, and how can we use these tools to make sense of a complex world too-often organized around fundamental inequalities? In our class meetings students will develop the reading and discussion practices necessary to parse dense theoretical texts, and practice deploying theoretical concepts to better understand complex philosophical, ethical, and political questions. Since this course counts as a Senior Seminar (core course), writing will be organized around a longer, more intense research project that follows from a student’s particular interests.

Taught by: Stefan Aune | Catalog details

 

AMST 410 SEM Black Literary and Cultural Theories

Last offered Fall 2016

This course will examine the writings of black twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone and Francophone literary and cultural theorists in the African diaspora. We will begin with Sojourner Truth and W.E.B. Du Bois and end with current debates between the “Afro-Pessimists” and “Afro-Optimists.” We will be reading writers from the United States, Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe, moving through the writings of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Pan-Africanism, the Black Arts movement and Black Panthers, the Black Atlantic, and black feminism and queer studies. We will come to see that there is no easy separation between questions of politics (e.g., anti-colonialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist) and those of aesthetics and poetics.

Taught by: Dorothy Wang | Catalog details

 

AMST 411 SEM Transnationalism and Difference: Comparative Perspectives

Last offered Fall 2021

In the age of digital communications and mobile applications such as WhatsApp and Skype, transnational living has rapidly emerged as the norm as opposed to the exception. However, what does it really mean to “be transnational”? How are the lived experiences of transnational individuals and communities shaped by categories of difference such as gender, ethno-racial identity, sexuality, and class? What impacts do the growing number of transnational citizens and residents in the U.S. have on our understanding of “American” identity in the local, national, and global contexts? In this interdisciplinary seminar we will analyze recent theories regarding the origins and impacts of transnationalism. Particular attention will be paid throughout the semester to the intersections of gender, ethno-racial identity, sexuality, and class in connection with everyday transnational dynamics. The broad range of case studies examined includes Central American, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Indonesia, Jamaica, Mexico, the Middle East, and Peru.

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 412 SEM Cold War Archaeology

Last offered Spring 2024

In this advanced American Studies course, we will examine Cold War history and culture with attention to the intersection of racialization and nuclear paranoia. The concurrent unfolding of the struggle for Civil Rights and the national strategy of Civil Defense played out against the backdrop of a global ideological battle, as the United States and the Soviet Union fought each other for planetary domination. From the scientific fantasy of bombproofing and “safety in space,” to the fears of both racial and radioactive contamination that drove the creation of the American suburbs, the affective and material dimensions of nuclear weaponry have, from the beginning, been entangled with race. Drawing on the critical and analytical toolkits of American Studies and media archaeology, students will dig beneath the surface of received narratives about the arms race, the space race, and race itself. Students will uncover generative connections between mineral extraction, the oppression of Indigenous populations, the destructive legacies of “urban renewal,” and the figure of the “typical American family” huddled in their backyard bunker. Finally, this course will examine the ways in which the Cold War exceeds its historical boundaries, entangles with the ideology and military violence of the Global War on Terror, and persistently shapes the present through its architectural, affective, and cultural afterlives.

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 413 SEM Dreaming Latina/x Feminist Disability Studies

Last offered Spring 2026

In this course we defy the notion that disabled and queer people of color have no right to future dreams, as we collectively imagine how the emergent and contestatory field of Latina/x Feminist Disability Studies is taking shape. Feminist, queer, and crip-of-color scholars have recently called for a more meaningful engagement with race in feminist disability studies. Simultaneously, we have also witnessed steady growth in the amount of Latinx Studies scholarship that thoughtfully integrates questions of disability not solely as an identity category, but rather more expansively, and ultimately as more reflective of societal power relations. This interdisciplinary course responds to these important shifts in its focus on a series of topics bridging Latinx Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Crip studies, and Critical Disability Studies. Via themes such as the body, the environment, temporality, labor, citizenship, dependency, visibility/invisibility and others, we explore the ways in which the different approaches to these specific issues across Latinx, Critical Disability, Crip, Ethnic, Queer and Gender Studies are in fruitful conversation with one another — and sometimes even at odds — as we actively interrogate the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability within the everyday. What are the sites of focus, methods, and political commitments of Latina/x Feminist Disability Studies? Where is the power in meaningfully uniting an analysis of disability to one of sexuality and gendered Latinidad? How does a Latina/x-centric approach productively inform our understanding of disability? What is the political potential of Latina/x Feminist Disability Studies — not exclusively as a set of theories, but also as a mindset and an everyday call to action? If we were to collectively compose a manifesto for Latina/x Feminist Disability Studies, what might it contain? How might we cultivate a community of care in institutional spaces, even in the face of the ongoing pressure to produce? Previous experience with Disability Studies is welcome, but not at all required.

Taught by: Maria Elena Cepeda | Catalog details

 

AMST 415 (F) SEM Racial Melancholia, Queer Melancholia

Psychoanalysis teaches that the inauguration of our subjectivities (the entry into sociality, into language, etc.) names at once our arrival into, and our break from, the world. Loss–or the condition of deprivation which instigates all manners of reaching out towards, holding on to, and finding objects anew–thus serves as a foundational framework in psychoanalysis and its uptake in contemporary theories of identity, race, gender, sexuality, relationality, trauma, and memory. This class explores loss–and more specifically the Freudian concept of “melancholia”–across psychoanalytic theory, queer and feminist theory, Black studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian American studies. In the wake of losses due variously to histories of forced migration and slavery, the AIDS epidemic, war, and social exclusion, theories of racial and queer melancholia have emerged as supple frameworks through which to consider how queer and racialized subjects hold onto non-normative ways of being, relation, and sociality against the normalizing tides of erasure. To that end, we will also look at a range of work by artists and writers such as Dionne Brand, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Gil Cuadros, Richard Fung, and Isaac Julien. The course moves back and forth between loss as a historical/collective and personal/subjective phenomenon as it cuts across the construction of queer, racialized, and diasporic subjectivities.

Taught by: Ethan Fukuto | Catalog details

 

AMST 418 (S) SEM Modernisms and the Archive

This seminar positions us at the intersection of archival theory, print culture, and literary study in order to chart new pathways for understanding the making of modern poetry and poetics during the period of literary history (from 1900 to 1945) that we most closely associate with the term Modernism. Modernist Studies is at the moment undergoing a major and exciting shift made possible by digital archives that allow us to access and document the rich intertextual experience of reading Modernism as it unfolded in the influential little magazines that came to define Modernisms. Some, like Poetry magazine, defined the new poetry strictly along aesthetic lines and treated these publications as collectible objects. Others, such as The Crisis, brought together poetry and the politics of race and social justice and encouraged, as Bartholomew Brinkman has argued, “both aesthetic and socially engaged readings.” We take advantage of digital archives, as well as physical ones, in order to tell new stories about both familiar and unfamiliar writers that can be discovered at the intersections of literary history and archives. Students will also have the opportunity to work in the Sterling Brown archive here at Williams. Recently acquired by Williams College Library Special Collections, this significant archive documents the life, work, and poetic practice of African-American writer and educator Sterling Brown, whose poetry and prose spans nearly five decades of the twentieth century, yet Brown has often been left out of the narrative we tell about modern poetry. Work in the Sterling Brown archive will culminate in a curated public exhibition featuring your discoveries. Iain Bailey has argued that we should think of the archive “as a place of work, rather than as a cache from which to draw certainties.” With this caveat in mind and in the spirit of discovery, we will act over the course of the semester as investigators, curators, collaborators, and inquirers in the workshop of literary production and its aesthetic products.

Taught by: Bethany Hicok | Catalog details

 

AMST 424 SEM New Work in American Studies

Last offered Spring 2026

In this seminar, we will consider recent and/or recently intensifying debates, conversations, and directions in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Topics may include settler colonialism, the carceral state, trans politics, US empire, refugees, indigeneity, and more, and draw on scholarship at the intersection of Asian American, Latinx, Native American/Indigenous, and African American/Africana studies. Class discussion and writing will revolve around the construction of arguments in American Studies scholarship, methodological approaches to research and analysis, how American Studies researchers combine various types of sources (e.g., art, archives, interviews, media), and understanding the current intellectual priorities in the field. Students may be asked to develop a final project or paper based on one of the topics or books covered in the course, such as reviewing a new work independently. Students will gain an understanding of the field’s recent concerns but also become familiar with the broader political, social, and cultural contexts from which they emerge.

Taught by: Jan Padios | Catalog details

 

AMST 427 SEM Anticolonial Approaches to the Arts of Ancestral Indigenous Americans

Last offered Fall 2024

Approaches to the study of the arts of Ancestral Americans have traditionally emanated in both their conceptions and practices from settler colonialism, resulting in often hostile relations between investigators and descendant communities, the exclusion of Indigenous researchers, their sovereignties and knowledge regimes, and substantial distortions to historical understandings of the past. This course takes art histories of the Ancient Americas as its site for intervention as a means of introducing students to the oftentimes challenging labors of anticolonialism and the pursuit of the repair of past harms. Over the semester, students will learn how colonialism and its epistemologies have guided the formation of the field; how they can prioritize Indigenous and Native American ways of knowing and thinking in their understandings and research; how they can ethically conduct research without disturbing Ancestral American remains and the sovereignties of their descendants; and learn to make meaningful contributions to the projects of decolonization and repair.

Taught by: Trenton Barnes | Catalog details

 

AMST 428 SEM Relationality and Its Antagonisms

Last offered Spring 2025

Relationality has been the defining approach, feature, and framework of ethnic studies since its inception in the late 1960s. Since then, notable scholars have applied multiple keywords, including difference, comparison, entanglements, cacophonies, and intimacies, to emphasize how processes of racialization and racial formation are not isolated and separate but inextricably linked and shaped by one another. Only from these distinct, uneven, yet shared positions of oppression, as scholars argue, solidarity across race, gender, class, sexuality, and location may emerge. At its crux, this seminar will underscore major tensions and antagonisms against frameworks of relationality. Tracing primary sources, cultural expressions, and literature within the traditions of ethnic studies and transnational/women of color feminisms, it will trace the shifts in approaches to relationality, especially as it relates to practices of reciprocity and community-building across difference. At the same time, it will turn to works that name relationality as what Frank B. Wilderson calls a “ruse,” or trick, that subsumes the specific, exceptional position of blackness. Our units will include discussions of Afro-Pessimism, indigeneity, racialized settler colonialism as well as queer theory debates on queer presentism (i.e., a queer “no future”) versus queer futurity. Studying the tensions that emerge from multiple, distinct, and contradictory planes of power, oppression, and temporalities, how do we assess, work through, and reconcile, if at all, relations deemed as “irreconcilable” across vectors of difference?

Taught by: Kelly Chung | Catalog details

 

AMST 429 SEM The Painted Books of Indigenous Mexico

Last offered Spring 2026

This class considers the Indigenous Mesoamerican painted screenfold manuscripts, which are representative of the most consequential bookmaking tradition of the ancestral Indigenous Americas. These books contain essential knowledge of the religious practices, belief systems, histories, and mathematics of pre-contact Mesoamericans, and were perceived as highly threatening by sixteenth-century European colonizers of the Americas. Today, only fifteen or sixteen volumes from the pre-contact period survive of a lost corpus of unknown scale. Most of these works have been lost to climactic conditions and, more infamously, a concerted campaign of extirpation undertaken by Spaniards in the sixteenth century. This course will examine each of these sixteen documents in detail alongside the most consequential scholarship written on them to date. We will situate these pre-contact documents alongside the 500 or so early Spanish colonial painted manuscripts thought to have been executed by Indigenous painter-scribes.

Taught by: Trenton Barnes | Catalog details

 

AMST 435 Ghosts: Race, Memory, and Haunting in the United States

Last offered NA

This course explores interdisciplinary scholarship, literature, and artistic work related to race, memory, and haunting in the United States. Across diverse historical moments and sites of cultural production, ghosts and other absent presences are conjured to mediate the meanings of race, gender, colonialism, enslavement, patriotism, and other keywords in American Studies. From plantations and abandoned prisons, to battlefields and sites held sacred by indigenous communities, the contemporary ghost tourism industry offers a blend of history, national mythology, and popular beliefs about paranormal activity to reshape national memory. During the 19th century, activities such as spirit photography, telepathic experiments, and seances engaged with ghostly phenomena. In the 21st century, digital technologies have the capacity to resurrect dead musicians and other cultural icons as “holograms” or “digital humans” that can interact with the living. Students will explore how haunting has played an important role in the formation of American identities, how various kinds of ghosts come to life through texts, material culture, performance, and technology, and how the past can be reimagined to generate new understandings of the present and the future.

Taught by: TBA | Catalog details

 

AMST 455 SEM Material Cultures in North American History

Last offered Fall 2023

Material culture studies consider the dynamic relationships that people develop with the physical world. Tangible items like clothing, furniture, tools, and the built environment are all shaped by communities’ identities, aspirations, resources, struggles, and forms of power. This course approaches North American histories through the lens of materiality, and examines how interdisciplinary methodologies can illuminate multiple or alternate understandings of the past–and its continuing impacts in the twenty-first century. While many historians emphasize written archives and documents as primary sources, scholars and practitioners of material culture studies center everyday as well as exceptional material items that communities have produced and interacted with over many generations. Equally important are the afterlives of these items. At different turns, and across time, social groups have cherished certain belongings; contested, rejected, or remade them; ascribed and activated meanings that may be very different from what the original makers conceived. These continuing transits compel reckoning with major issues of justice, rights, restitution, and sovereignty. The course traces key theories, ethics, and practices of caretaking, preservation, repatriation, curation, creative re-making, and digitization. Members will participate in a series of visits to area museums, collections, and meaningful places to deepen skills of critical analysis. The scope of the course is North American and at times transoceanic. It also includes substantial focus on our location in the Northeast and local formations of materiality and memory, as well as topics in Native American and Indigenous Studies, settler colonialism, and decolonizing approaches. Class members will build familiarity with appropriate techniques for approaching and handling different forms of material culture. They will also cultivate skills for developing and carrying out an original research project; and explore diverse modes of analysis and expression for representing the stories of materials and the communities who engage with them.

Taught by: Christine DeLucia | Catalog details

 

AMST 491 (F) HON Senior Honors Project: American Studies

This seminar is the first half of a year-long seminar that is required of AMST seniors who have been approved to write an honors thesis (critical-analytical, research-focused, creative, performative, or hybrid). Students will share work, critique each other’s proposals and drafts, and support each other in the process of producing a thesis project. Although each student’s major work for the year will be focusing on a specific topic with an advisor, the instructor of the honors seminar will offer helpful guidance on more general concerns such as conceptual approaches, research methodologies, creative exploration, the honing of arguments, writing issues, and other theoretical and practical questions. Satisfactory completion of the course will be required for students to continue on in the honors program.

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details

 

AMST 492 (S) HON Senior Honors Project: American Studies

This seminar is the second half of a year-long seminar that is required of AMST seniors who have been approved to write an honors thesis (critical-analytical, research-focused, creative, performative, or hybrid). Students will share work, critique each other’s proposals and drafts, and support each other in the process of producing a thesis project. Although each student’s major work for the year will be focusing on a specific topic with an advisor, the instructor of the honors seminar will offer guidance on more general concerns such as conceptual approaches, research methodologies, creative exploration, the honing of arguments, writing issues, and other theoretical and practical questions. Guest speakers may also be invited to talk to the class.

Taught by: Brian Murphy | Catalog details