American Studies Fall 2009 Course Descriptions

Course Offerings for Fall 2009

American Studies
Cherokee Language
Folklore

American Studies Course Offerings Fall 2009

AMST 51 - FYS: Navigating America
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
3:30-4:50 MW; 212 Graham Memorial

This seminar is designed to teach students how to navigate new intellectual terrains and process unfamiliar information from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The seminar emphasizes discussion and field study. We will plan, implement, and document a common journey during the first half of the semester.  Each student will then do the same for an  individual journey during the second half of the term. This voyage of discovery on the campus or in the surrounding community can be either physical or intellectual, but must be chronicled with a documentary journal and presented to the class in a multi-media format that conveys the individual's perspective, journey, and discoveries. These assignments will enable students to appreciate the views of others as well as integrate learning inside and outside the classroom.

AMST 58 - Cultures of Dissent: American Indians in History, Law, and Literature
Section 1:  Tol Foster
12:30-1:45 TR; 204 Murphey

In September of 2007 the United Nations voted to create a Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  Only four countries – the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – voted against the proposal.  These four countries, despite their democratic legal systems, are all settler-populated colonial governments which have imposed their government over that of the original indigenous inhabitants of the land.  For the United States, a "land of immigrants," American Indians represent perhaps the greatest "problem" for the articulation of the United States as a place of equality and freedom, for unlike other constituents of the country, the validity of the nation's claims depend on the abrogation of those of tribal sovereign nations within its territorial boundaries.

This course focuses in a concentrated way on the experience of American Indians as colonized people under a democracy, with the understanding that they, both as individuals and as sovereign tribal governments, represent a unique challenge for a contractual democracy.  Through a number of texts and examples, drawing heavily from legal documents, histories, documentaries, and critical scholarship, this course will focus on three major fields that dramatize the distinct status of American Indians in the United States: history, law, and literature.

In addition the final and midterm exams, students will provide short responses and will conduct semester-long individual and group projects on Nativewiki and Wikipedia, based on expertise in Native law and history as explored in the class.  Readings will include excerpts and short essays as well as full texts such as American Indians and the Law (Duthu), Tracks (Erdrich),  The Great Father: Abridged Ed. (Prucha), Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (Silko), and American Indians: Answers to Today's Questions (Utter).

AMST 110 - Native North America
Section 6: Kathleen Duval
12:00-12:50 MW; 209 Manning Hall

This course tells the histories of many hundreds of diverse American Indian peoples. We will study their experiences in North America and their encounters with one another, Europeans, and Africans, from early times to the twenty-first century. Along the way, we will use archaeology, anthropology, art, film, and fiction to consider questions ranging from the nature and results of cross-cultural contacts to the concept of history itself. For example: How much can we know about native peoples before they had a written history? What can European sources teach us about the native peoples they encountered? How did the native peoples of North America live before 1492? Does it make any sense to generalize about them? Given that "Indians" include a large number of diverse peoples, how did they define themselves, and how did they get along, or not get along? What did they think about the strangers who arrived from Europe and Africa? What did Europeans and Africans think about American Indians? How did contact with these newcomers (and their diseases and technologies) change native societies? How did native peoples affect Europeans and Africans? Why did native peoples lose ground (literally and figuratively) in the nineteenth century? Do we know more about nineteenth-century Indians than we do about their ancestors, or are we still using white sources to understand them? Do we have alternatives for either period? Why do Native American history classes sometimes stop at the end of the nineteenth century? How have Native Americans experienced and reacted to the changes of the twentieth century? What does it mean to be an American Indian today? How are Indians portrayed in American popular culture? Is Native American history a story of decline? or rise and fall? or fall and rise? or is it more complicated?

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell
11:00-12:15 TR; 204 Murphey

Through literature, film, music, and the pictorial arts this course will seize upon specific moments central to the American experience from the Revolutionary to the modern periods, in order to examine their special issues, themes, and problems.  Of particular interest will be the shifting strata of social class in America, its ethnic and racial divisions, and its vivid popular culture.  In all instances our principal work will be close interpretative reading, watching, and looking, open-minded discussion, and a continuing inquiry into the nature of American civilization.

AMST 231 (HIST 231) - Native America - The East
Section 1: Malinda Maynor Lowery
11:00 TR; 431 Greenlaw

By using culture to analyze Native American history, students will gain a deeper understanding of the oral and spiritual histories of Native people east of the Mississippi prior to the arrival of Columbus, why and how Native nations adapted to the European presence, and how colonial and United States Indian policy developed through the late twentieth century.

AMST 246 - Introduction to the American Indian Literatures
Section 1:  Tol Foster
3:30 - 4:45 TR; 218 Peabody

This survey course will set out the context of Native American cultural and historical life through the exploration of literature in a variety of genres. Native critical terms and concepts, as well as major historical moments in Native history, will be elucidated through oral literature, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, film, and novels, primarily drawn from the twentieth century, and from tribal groups of the continental United States.  Although minor texts and authors will be included, major texts will include Charles Eastman (Indian Boyhood), Leslie Marmon Silko (Storyteller), Pretty Shield (Pretty Shield), Louise Erdrich (Tracks), Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), and Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water). 

AMST 253 - Mamas and Matriarchs: A Social History of Jewish Women in America
Section 1:  Marcie Ferris
2:00-2:50 MWF; 104 Saunders

This course will examine the history and culture of Jewish women in America from their arrival in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the present day. We will explore how gender shaped Jewish women’s experiences of immigration, assimilation, religious observance, home, work, motherhood, family, and feminism. The course will also investigate how factors such as region, race, class, country of origin, and religious denomination influenced the lives of Jewish women in America, and in turn, how Jewish women have shaped the national expression of American Judaism. Texts and discussions consider how these factors have created an American Jewish women’s history that is distinctive from men’s. Students will examine a variety of sources, including diaries, memoirs, letters, film, recipes, organizational records, and artifacts that reveal women’s voices that are absent in more traditional histories. The central goal of the course is to integrate Jewish women into the American past, and thus, fundamentally transform American Jewish history.

AMST 277 - The Nation and National Identity in an Age of Globalization
General Education Credit: GL (Global Issues), NA (North American) Connections
American Studies: major/minor credit, international AMST concentration
Section 1:  Robert C. Allen
9:30-10:45 TR; 0038 Graham Memorial

This course is designed for students from all undergraduate majors who anticipate studying, living, and/or working outside the United States. The course particularly encourages participation by: --American Studies major/minors (especially those pursuing/considering the International American Studies concentration) --BSBA students in the Kenan-Flagler School of Business who anticipate working/living abroad --undergraduates from all fields who plan to participate in a study abroad program within the next year --international exchange students

The course aims to help prepare students to live and learn abroad, regardless of destination or field of study, by exploring the relationship between national and personal identity, particularly as this relationship affects what it means to be and to be perceived as “an American” in the world today. We will cover such topics as: the rise of the nation state; the United States as a case instance of the modern nation state; nationalism; colonialism; social modalities of trans-national travel (the tourist, the immigrant, the alien, the refugee, the guest worker, the student/scholar, the multinational employee); the complex, variable, and dynamic relationship between nation and national identity; contemporary challenges to the nation state (tribalism, transnationalism, regionalism, globalization); changing geographies of place in a globalized world; the influence of American media and culture abroad; and the roots, expression, and implications of anti-Americanism.

We will have a number of teleclass conversations with scholars and students abroad.

The course will be organized around (1) reading and discussion of key scholarly literature on the topics listed above, (2) small group projects exploring dimensions of globalization and national identity, (3) visiting speakers, films, and panel discussions, and (4) an opportunity for individual work on an aspect of the course subject matter of particular interest to each student.

The course will value participation, team work, and thoughtful and informed contributions to class discussion.

AMST 290 -  Girl Talk: Women’s Voices in American Literature, Art, and Popular Culture
Section 1:  Joy Kasson
2:00 TR; 204 Murphey

This course will examine common themes in American literature, art, and popular culture produced by women from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.  We will ask how women writers and artists find their voices and produce works of art that speak to their concerns as women and their historical moment.  Among the figures to be examined will be children’s book writers Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder, poet Emily Dickinson, novelists Toni Morrison and Gish Jen, and artists Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Carmen Lomas Garza.  Our inquiry will proceed through class discussion, student reports, and papers long and short.  (Male students are welcome!)

AMST 378 - Australia/US Comparative History
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN), Global Issues (GL), Historical Analysis (HS) (62H BA Western Historical Perspective) American Studies: major/minor credit; International American Studies Concentration
Section 1:  Robert C. Allen 
6:00 - 8:30 M; 0038 Graham Memorial

In 1788, as the new nation of the United States of America was emerging from its war with Great Britain, the first convict ships arrived from London in what was to become Sydney, Australia.  Some of the soldiers sent to guard the convicts and help establish a new British colony in Terra Australis had spent time in the American colonies.  In some respects Australia and the United States share a common heritage and cultural development: the establishment of both nations involved the forcible displacement of indigenous peoples; both nations share a common language and British cultural links; both are "settler" societies; the frontier has held a special place in the national imagination of both countries.  In other respects, however, Australian nationhood was shaped by quite different forces from those that conditioned the history of the United States.  This course asks, "What can we learn by comparing the social and cultural histories of these two nations?  How are the processes of nation-building in each country similar/different?

We will explore the connections between these two nations through a set of themes, such as continental exploration, war and remembrance, outlaws and heroes, and rock and roll.  We will use a range of materials: historical scholarship, novels, film, paintings, and first-hand accounts.

This course has several special features.  It is linked with a course on the history of Australia at the University of Sydney, taught by Richard Waterhouse, Bicentennial Professor of Australian History.  For approximately 8 weeks, we will have regular teleclass and Blackboard discussions with his students in Australia.

The course is organized around two interconnected historical projects:

--“historical communities”
      the class will be divided into four “communities,” representing Sydney at
      particular moments in its modern (post-1788) history.  Each group will build
      a Wiki site representing life in Sydney at that time
--“historical avatars”
      each student will construct an “avatar” for him/herself who will “live” in the
      historical community of which he/she is a part.  Both the avatars and their
      communities will “age” 20 years over the course of the semester.  Each avatar
      will keep a journal in which life events and reactions to the historical world
      around him/her will be recorded on a regular basis.

The course will involve a significant amount of regularly-produced writing, a significant amount of reading (which must be done in a timely fashion to be useful), and a significant commitment to small-group work.

AMST 387 - Race and Empire in Twentieth-Century U.S. Intellectual History
Section 1:  Jay Garcia
3:30-4:45 TR; 204 Murphey

This upper-level seminar explores twentieth-century writings on race, empire and colonialism by American intellectuals. In a number of genres and in several different contexts, American writers have examined the history of empire, engaging in dialogues with anti-colonial writers from elsewhere in the world. Through commentaries on race and empire in the modern world, American writers have analyzed a wide range of subjects, including the role of the intellectual in society, the rise of fascism, and the relationships between majorities and minorities both domestically and internationally. In turning their gaze outward on various international scenes, many writers revised available perspectives on American society and culture. The seminar also considers select anti-colonial narratives originating in other parts of the world that proved to be influential during particular moments in American intellectual history. Readings will include books and essays by W. E. B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Richard Wright, Alain Locke, Lillian Smith, Frantz Fanon, among others.

AMST 394 - American Studies Seminar: The Role of the University
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
11:00-12:15 M; 39 Graham Memorial

A capstone course and field lab intended for juniors and seniors, this class is multifaceted in its inquiry of the role of the University in America. UNC and area colleges and Universities will be used as case studies in the course and optional field lab. This course is team-taught by faculty members and guest lectures with strong interdisciplinary interests that relate broadly to the University, and specific expertise relating to the role that UNC has played in America in a particular field. All students in the course participate in the Monday plenary session and additionally each student is enrolled in one of the three Wednesday seminar series for a total of 3 units of academic credit.

Fall 2009 the three Wednesday seminar sessions are as follows:

Section 601 : The University and the Community (cross-listed in Public Policy)
Professor Jonathan B. Howes, Special Assistant to the Chancellor, Office of State and Local Relations
11:00-12:15 W; 517 Hamilton

The University of North Carolina and the surrounding communities of Chapel Hill, Carrboro and the Research Triangle region are inextricably linked.  This section will assess the history of relations between town and gown in Chapel Hill, between the development of Research Triangle Park and the area universities, and will explore contemporary issues, including campus master planning, construction and development, transit and parking, development of Carolina North, and the way the University is addressed in  local elections in November.  The objective is to gain an understanding of the role that the University plays in the social and economic development of the community and the state and region.

Section 602: The Engaged Institution
Lynn W. Blanchard, MPH PhD, Director, Carolina Center for Public Service
11:00-12:15 W; 570 Hamilton

During this section students will learn about various methods and trends that define an engaged university; explore how institutions help meet the needs of the community through teaching, research, and service. An optional one-credit hour service learning component will require 30 service hours and count towards the Public Service Scholars requirements.

Section 603: Innovation and Change in Higher Education
Courtney H. Thornton, Ed.D., Research Director, UNC General Administration
11:00-12:15 W; 420 Hamilton

American colleges and universities provide professional homes for some of the most inquisitive, creative, and entrepreneurial individuals in our country.  At the same time, these institutions retain time-honored missions, reward systems, and infrastructures that can undermine flexibility and responsiveness.  While the role of higher education and the individuals within are ever-changing, aspects of university life have remained the same.  In this seminar, students will examine research and technology transfer, entrepreneurism, and engagement as areas where institutions must address the past, present and future balance.  Students will study change efforts of campuses across the country and the national and institutional contexts that either help or hinder these efforts.

AMST394L - Role of the University: Lab
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
11:00-2:50 F;  Location Determined Weekly

The field lab is optional, but concurrent enrollment in AMST 394 is required to enroll in AMST 394L. See http://www.unc.edu/courses/2005fall/amst/094/001/Website/labs.htm for examples of past labs.

AMST397 (099) - Internship
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
TBA; Permission of Instructor Required

AMST 482 - American Landscapes
Section 1:  Kathy Roberts
1:00 – 3:30 R; 306 Peabody

This course invites students to think critically about landscape as a concept and as a physical reality.   The class will explore where the concept of landscape originates for us in a Western context and how this concept informs the way many of us understand our physical environment.  The way we perceive the landscape influences everyday choices, such as where to live, where to travel, and what to look at.   We will also engage with physical landscapes in our midst, such as the university campus, the farm, the factory, the town, the neighborhood, and the front yard.  We will explore what landscapes such as these tell us about human life and work through time.  Ultimately, students will attune themselves to the complexity of American landscapes in this course and learn the empirical and analytical skills to investigate their meaning in a larger socio-cultural context.  

The course will consist of weekly readings (TBA), class discussion led by the instructor and the students, several field trips, a semester field project, and a final exam.

AMST 483 - Visual Culture
Section 1:  Bernard Herman
3:30 - 4:45 TR; 103 Bingham

Visual Culture investigates the ways in which we make and signify meaning through images.  We cross visual genres and critical boundaries looking at objects ranging from the fine arts to advertising to film to comics to websites and more.  This course provides interpretive tools to scrutinize and understand the visual worlds we inhabit.  We live in a time and place that is saturated with images.  We cannot walk down the street, turn on a television, log-on to the internet, open a book, order a meal, call a friend without an unrelenting barrage of images.  There are so many images that we encounter in every waking moment of every day that we tend not to think of them, letting the visual world wash over us without reflection or criticism.  Not only do we live in a visual world--we constantly edit it through a process of selective awareness and cultivated blindness.  Our semester-long conversation addresses three big questions:  why do things look the way they do; what and how do images mean; how do we begin to understand and talk about the universe of images?  Requirements include three exams, three workshops, and discussion.

American Studies 486 - “Shalom Y’all”: The Jewish Experience in the American South
Section 1:  Marcie Ferris
11:00 - 11:50 MWF; 204 Saunders

This course explores ethnicity in the South and focuses on the experience of Jewish southerners. Since the arrival of Sephardic Jews in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, southern Jews have blended their regional identity as Jews and as Southerners. This course explores the “braided identity” of Jews in the South---their relationships with white and black Gentile southerners, their loyalty to the South as a region, and their embrace of southern culture through foodways and religious observance. The course traces the history of Jewish southerners from the colonial era to the present, using film, museum exhibits, literature, and material culture as resources. Throughout the course we consider the question of southern Jewish distinctiveness. Is southern Jewish culture distinctive from Jewish culture in other regions of the country, and if so, why? Is region a significant factor in American Jewish identity? Students will explore these issues through class discussion and a research paper.

AMST 499:  Documentary Writing: Creative Nonfiction Through Fieldwork
Section 1:  Paul Hendrickson
3:30-6:00 W; 204 Murphey

A writing/reading course built entirely around the use of photographs, and the crafting of compelling nonfiction narratives from them. The essential concept will be to employ photographs as storytelling vehicles. So we will be using curling, drugstore-printed Kodak shots from our own family albums. We will be using searing and famous images from history books. We will be taking things from yesterday's newspaper. We may even be using pictures that were made last week by the workshop participants outside the campus gates with a disposable camera from CVS or a sophisticated digital Nikon. In all of this, there will be one overriding aim: to achieve memorable, full-bodied stories. To locate the strange, evocative universes sealed inside the four rectangular walls of a photograph. Those storytelling universes are always there, if you know how to look, if you know how to discover. Writers as diverse as the poet Mark Strand and the novelist Don DeLillo and the memoirist Wright Morris have long recognized the documentary power of a photograph to launch a story in our imaginations. Here, we are going to employ memory and imagination, but most of all we are going to make use of fact—everything that can be found out, gleaned, uncovered, dug up, stumbled upon. Because first and last, this is nonfiction work, this is the art of reported fact, this is documentary digging—sometimes even within our own family histories. So a lot of the course will go forward trying to use the tools and techniques of both journalism and traditional documentary work: good, old-fashioned reporting, research, legwork, observation, listening, thinking, sifting. And then trying to turn all of that into writing gold.

AMST 499 - Early American Architecture and Material Life 
Section 2: Bernard Herman
9:30 TR; 204 Murphey

This course explores through lecture and discussion the experiences of everyday life from 1600 to 1820 through the evidence of architecture, landscape, images, and objects. Our course focuses on houses and their settings with a particular emphasis and how people designed, lived in, negotiated, and understood domestic space. We will examine such topics as the architecture of German settlements from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, sociability and manners in seaport town houses, power and resistance on the Southern plantation, family structure and faith in the Quaker landscapes of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, design and cultural exchange in the American southwest, and the rise of regional design and lifestyle in early New England and the Chesapaeake. Our conversations will focus on two questions: 1) why do buildings, landscapes and objects look the way they do, and 2) what and how do objects communicate about the societies they shape and furnish.

AMST 899 - American Studies Theory and Methods Graduate Seminar
Section 1:  Jay Garcia
4:00-6:30 W; 321 Greenlaw

This seminar examines the emergence and practice of American Studies through readings in cultural and intellectual history, cultural studies and social theory. Alternately described as an interdisciplinary field, a movement, an institution, or a combination of all three, American Studies has long brought together literary studies, historical studies, and the analysis of material culture, media and art. Debates among American Studies scholars today extend to the temporal, spatial and theoretical boundaries of the field itself. Through a range of sources, including primary documents and recent scholarship, the seminar foregrounds competing histories of American Studies and questions that define current work in the field. The seminar is open to students in a variety of departments, including but not limited to English, History, Communications Studies, Art History, and Religious Studies.

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Cherokee Studies Course Offerings Fall 2009 

4:15 - 5:30 MW; 08 Peabody

Cherokee Speaking World is designed to introduce students to the Cherokee language.  In this course, students will develop Cherokee speaking and listening skills, and they will be introduced to the Cherokee writing system using the Latin alphabet.  The course also will provide students with a cultural context for the language.

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Folklore Course Offerings Fall 2009

FOLK 230 - American Indian Societies
Section 1: Valerie Lambert
9:30 - 10:45 TR; 203 Alumni

Broad survey of contemporary American Indian societies and cultures in the U.S. Explores sociocultural and historical diversity of tribes through film, autobiography, literature, current issues, guest speakers, archaeology and history.

FOLK 435 - Consciousness and Symbols
Section 006: James Peacock
11:00 - 12:00 MWF; 519 Hamilton

This course explores consciousness through symbols. Symbols from religion, art, politics and self are studied in social, psychological, historical and ecological context to ascertain meanings in experience and behavior.

FOLK 473 - Body and Subject
Section 1:  William Lachicotte
5:00 - 6:15 MW; 207 Alumni

Anthropological and historical studies of cultural constructions of bodily experience and subjectivity are reviewed, with emphasis on the genesis of the modern individual and cultural approaches to gender and sexuality.

FOLK 485 - Introduction to Folklore
Section 1:  Kathy Roberts
12:00 - 1:00 MW; 101 Greenlaw

An introduction to the study of creativity and aesthetic expression in everyday life, considering both traditional genres and contemporary innovations in the material, verbal and musical arts.

FOLK 571 - Southern Music
Section 1:  William Ferris
8:00 - 9:15 TR; 0038 Graham Memorial

Explores the history of music in the American South from its roots to 20th-century musical forms, revealing how music serves as a window on the region's history and culture.

FOLK 610 - African American Vernacular Music
Section 1:  Glenn Hinson
4:00 - 5:15 MW; 317 Bingham

Explores performance traditions in African American music, tracing development from African song through reels, blues, gospel and contemporary vernacular expression. Focuses on continuity, creativity and change within African American aesthetics.

FOLK 690 - Documentary Writing: Creative Nonfiction Through Fieldwork
Section 1:  Paul Hendrickson
3:30 - 5:50 W; 204 Murphey

A writing/reading course built entirely around the use of photographs, and the crafting of compelling nonfiction narratives from them. The essential concept will be to employ photographs as storytelling vehicles. So we will be using curling, drugstore-printed Kodak shots from our own family albums. We will be using searing and famous images from history books. We will be taking things from yesterday's newspaper. We may even be using pictures that were made last week by the workshop participants outside the campus gates with a disposable camera from CVS or a sophisticated digital Nikon. In all of this, there will be one overriding aim: to achieve memorable, full-bodied stories. To locate the strange, evocative universes sealed inside the four rectangular walls of a photograph. Those storytelling universes are always there, if you know how to look, if you know how to discover. Writers as diverse as the poet Mark Strand and the novelist Don DeLillo and the memoirist Wright Morris have long recognized the documentary power of a photograph to launch a story in our imaginations. Here, we are going to employ memory and imagination, but most of all we are going to make use of fact—everything that can be found out, gleaned, uncovered, dug up, stumbled upon. Because first and last, this is nonfiction work, this is the art of reported fact, this is documentary digging—sometimes even within our own family histories. So a lot of the course will go forward trying to use the tools and techniques of both journalism and traditional documentary work: good, old-fashioned reporting, research, legwork, observation, listening, thinking, sifting. And then trying to turn all of that into writing gold.

FOLK 850 - Folklore Theory
Section 1:  Patricia Sawin
2:00 - 4:45 T; TBD

A systematic overview of the major issues and perspectives informing two centuries of folklore study, including social base, tradition, evolution, diffusion, structure, function, interpretation, performance, feminism and ideology.

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