Spring 2009

Course Descriptions
Spring 2009

AMST 57:  Access to Higher Education
Freshmen only
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
11 TR; 210 Graham Memorial
Access to higher education requires ability, experience, and skills.  Success in application, admission, matriculation, and graduation is a function of numerous other advantages as well.  This APPLES course explores barriers to access to American colleges and universities with a particular focus on disadvantages created through differences in socioeconomic circumstances.  A broad survey of the college admissions process and policies concerning equitable access to higher education will be supplemented with field projects that assist others in obtaining access to colleges and universities.  An active service-learning pedagogy will facilitate the development, implementation, and documentation of the team project.  As a Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative offering, this FYS has an additional goal of developing the social entrepreneurial skills of seminar students.

AMST 101:  The Emergence of Modern America
Section 1:  Joy Kasson
11 MWF (and occasional discussion sections), 103 Bingham
This course traces major themes in American culture as viewed through history, literature, art, film, music, politics, and popular culture, from the American Revolution to the present.  It is not a comprehensive survey but rather an examination of the ways in which history and the arts interrelate as the present emerges from the past.  Topics include American diversity, the natural environment, the rise of the cities, social criticism, the cultural impact of war.  Reading consist of primary sources:  poetry (Walt Whitman), fiction (Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien), and autobiography (Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams).  Each unit will include the work of an artist or photographer, such as Thomas Cole, Matthew Brady, Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange.Topics include the heritage of the American Revolution; slavery, Civil War, and memory; technology and the environment; writers, film-makers, and artists as social critics.

AMST 201:  Approaches to American Studies
Section 1:  Jay Garcia
12:30 TR; 038 Graham Memorial
An introduction to methods and materials in the interdisciplinary study of American society, including theoretical influences upon research in American Studies.  The course explores interpretive practices within the field by focusing on three different historical moments and considering a range of literary and visual artifacts.  Subjects include visions of cultural renewal in the 1910s, the responses of critics in the 1940s to "race" and racialized relations, and narratives about migration, dislocation and war from the 1990s to the present.  Throughout the course we will investigate relevant transnational contexts for understanding developments and changes in American intellectual and cultural life.

AMST 203:  Approaches to American Indian Studies 
Section 1:  Tol Foster
American Indian Studies is an interdisciplinary field that depends on and reflects the particular intellectual perspectives of many different disciplines.  Like tributaries of a river, each discipline contributes a body of knowledge based on unique research methods that when merged contribute to our understanding of Native America.  This course is designed to serve as an introduction to both the many scholars at UNC who compose the faculty of American Indian Studies as well as to the various approaches that comprise the program.  Although American Indian Studies draws on several disciplines, our goal in this course is to show students how to integrate these disciplines so that they can arrive at a more complete and balanced understanding of the histories, cultures, and expressions of American Indian peoples.  American Indian experience, and the course will consider the impact of contact and conflict between different groups as well.

This course will be team taught by faculty involved in the American Indian Studies program in the fields of archeology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and literature.  Professor Tol Foster (AMST) will administer the course, and each faculty member will be leading class meetings in his/her discipline or specialty.  It will meet once weekly; therefore students must attend every session.  Grading will consist of short response papers and a final exam.  Readings will be extensive, broad, and exciting.

AMST 235:  Native America in the 20th Century
Section 1:  Michael Green
2:00 TR; 213 Graham Memorial
Not only is the 20th century one hundred years of complex and interesting Native American history, it forms a discreet unit in the larger history that begins when Europeans arrived in North America.  Beginning with the allotment policy of the 1890s, the 20th century history experience of Native Americas is characterized by the destruction and recreation of tribal societies.  Central to this story is the emergence of national Indian spokesmen and women who, as individuals and in organized groups, articulated visions of cultural distinctiveness, tribal sovereignty, economic development, social identity, and survival.  At bottom, this history is rooted in the problem of making tribalism viable in the modern world.  Its importance lies, in part, in the fact that this history is imbedded in Native America.

AMST 275H:  Documenting American Communities
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
2:00 TR; 213 Graham Memorial
Email Rachel Willis for a description

AMST 290:  Reading American Culture Through Pots, Painting, Poetry, and Prose
Section 2:  Townsend Ludington and Mark Hewitt
W 3:00-5:30; 113 Tate Turner Kuralt
Within historical and aesthetic contexts, the course will examine aspects of American culture through objects, art, and literature.  Students will be asked to examine and make a presentation about a familiar object (a pot, a painting, a poem, for instance) as an expression of cultural values.  Class participation is essential.  Short written and verbal responses will also be called for.

AMST 292:  The South in Black and White
Section 1:  Tim Tyson
T 7:00-9:30 p.m. at Duke
The South in Black and White explores Southern history, politics and culture in the 20th century.  This lecture and discussion course is open to students at Duke, UNC, NCCU and the larger community.  We will constitute a kind of front porch on Southern history and culture, where we will join those whom Zora Neale Hurston called "the big picture talkers" and hear their stories.  We meet in the Hayti Heritage Center at St. Joseph's Church on Fayetteville Street in Durham, just off the Durham freeway.  (Bus transportation may be available.)  There will be live music, poetry, lectures, stories, discussions, oral histories, and dramatic performances.  We will explore a history as rich and complicated, painful and delightful as the South itself.

AMST 335:  Defining America
Section 1:  Larry Griffin
2 TR; 204 Murphey
This course is designed to explore the continuously changing meaning of America and American identity, their ever-evolving definitions and re-=definitions.  America has been called an idea, an ideal, "man's last, best hope," an experiment, a monster, an elephant in a world of ants, the Great Satan, and much more.  But these are slogans, not real definitions, and defining a nation--a culture, or perhaps more accurately, a presupposed unity of many different cultures and peoples territorially bounded and subject to centralized authority--is difficult at best, and we will have to be even more ruthlessly selective than usual in our choice of issues, themes, and readings simply because time precludes us reading about and discussing everything that can possibly be related to the definition of America.  Moreover, there is no one way to define a culture, a people, a nation state.  So I've organized the course around strategies we might use to "define" America from several different perspectives. Via these approaches, I suspect we'll have a much broader and deeper sense of what America is (or, at least, is thought or is advanced to be).  But I also suspect that we might conclude that America means different things to different audiences, that its meaning has varied throughout history and circumstance, and that one important dimension of America's definition is, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the right to contest and challenge anybody else's definition.  The material we cover and the issues we discuss will be sophisticated and the course will be discussion-intense.

AMST 336: American Indians and Film
Section 1:  Michael Green
3:00-5:30 M; 204 Murphey
Hollywood has made thousands of movies about Indians, most of which feature non-Indian actors and repeat the popular stereotypes of the "Noble" or "Ferocious" Savage.  But in recent years, Indian actors, script writers, producers and directors have attempted to change the message.  Refusing to pander to the stereotypical images of the American public, the new wave of Indian movies speak to Indian audiences about issues of concern to contemporary Indian people.  This course explores this transformation in two ways.  During the first half we will watch, read about, and discuss a series of films that can be categorized as "White Indian" movies.  In the second half, we will watch, read about, and discuss films such as Powwow Highway (1980) and Smoke Signals (1998).  Both types of films were made as teaching tools and together they instruct us about what both non-Indian and Native film makers want us, the viewing audience, to believe about Indian history and culture.

AMST 338:  Contemporary American Indian Novels
Section 1:  Tol Foster
9 MWF; 304 Wilson Library (LG)
This course is largely grounded in literature studies and in an exploration of the tensions between Native and non-Native epistemologies.  To do this, we're going to blast through a number of funhouse mirror novels that take on Gnosticism, Mormons, vampires in Indian Country, Indians in L.A., invisible churches, oil drilling in Alaska, and underground kingdoms.  Additionally we will be conducting an investigation of the centrality of the Native American Novel as the canonical and premiere site in which non-Native (and most Native) audiences explore the topic of Native American culture.  Throughout, we will be engaged in what Paul Ricoeur called the "hermeneutics of suspicion," which is a wariness about the "official" or "accepted" story and an attention to the suppressed and surprising, the events and claims that are not often accepted in official or academic discourse.In so doing, we will be following in the footsteps of Native people throughout history, and particularly over the last hundred years, as Native thinkers, writers, and regular citizens articulate and defend their own cultural conceptions of knowledge and truth often against conventional Western claims.  Thus, in the course, everything is open for debate.  Because of this, though the primary focus of the course will be literary, complete with readings in Native American literary studies, we will frequently make gestures outside literary studies to broader Native cultural studies and historical studies. 

AMST 360:  Jewish Writers in American Life
Section 1:  Robert Cantwell
10 MWF; 107 Greenlaw
This course will investigate, through literature, film, and song, the encounter of Eastern European Jews and their descendants with Anglo-Protestant America over four generations.

AMST 375:  Cooking Up a Storm:  Exploring Food in American Culture
Section 1:  Marcie Ferris
11 TR; 202 Wilson Hall
This course examines the cultural history and meaning of food in America.  Through the semester, students explore how food shapes national, regional, and personal identity.  We consider the impact of place, gender, ethnicity, class, race, religion, the media, industrial agriculture, and local and global politics on the food we eat.  We discuss how food is both a source of healing and a source of conflict, and we consider the ways in which it impacts community--from the American family to our "national family."  The obesity epidemic in America, the global food crisis, and recent food scares are central to our discussions regarding industrial and sustainable agriculture in the United States.  Because this is an interdisciplinary topic, students "find the food" in both traditional and non-traditional sources that include manuscript collections, community and commercial cook books, journalism, television, film, literature, art, photography, museum exhibited, oral history, material culture, and web-based sources.

AMST 390:  American Communities and Cultures:  A Photographic Approach
Section 1:  Bill Bamberger
6:00 - 8:30 p.m. R; 204 Murphey
Instructor permission required - contact Debbie Simmons-Cahan to set up an appt.
Theory and practice of documentary photography.  Students will complete a documentary photographic study of a community outside the university. Covers the documentary tradition and classic documentary books while emphasizing photographs produced by students in the course.  Students must have Adobe Photoshop CS3 and a 35 mm film or digital camera.

AMST 390: No Place Like Home:  Material Culture of the American South
Section 2:  Marcie Ferris
2 TR; 103 Gardner
For generations, American southerners have lived and worked in regionally distinctive homes and commercial buildings.  They fill these spaces and the landscapes that surround them with tools, furniture, outbuildings, and art inspired by folk, academic, and popular culture.  In the seminar, students analyze southern material culture in low brow and high brow circles alike, and they consider its role in shaping an American aesthetic.  Students also consider who are the "artisans" of southern material culture.  The semester begins by discussing how scholars study objects and how southern material culture impacts the study of the South.  The seminar extends from Native American and European contact to the post-Katrina material worlds of the contemporary South.

AMST 390:  You Are Where You Live:  The American House in Critical Perspective
Section 3:  Katherine Roberts
2-4:30 W; 204 Murphey
This course is designed to attune students to the complexities of human shelter.  We will begin our journey by studying the development of several national regional housing types in the U.S. and the environmental and socio-political factors that contributed to their formation.  From shotguns to ranches to public housing developments and more, we will learn about how domestic forms in the built environment have contributed to American cultural landscapes--past and present.  In addition, we will explore the social use and meaning of housing and examine the strategies people use to create "homes" out of built forms.  Finally, we consider two case studies that reveal how factors such as race, class and gender affect dwelling patterns in the U.S.  By the end of the course, students should be able to understand the built environment as a form of communication, capable of revealing what we value as individuals and communities and as a nation, and to critically evaluate the ways in which housing mediates power relations in the U.S.

AMST 483:  Visual Culture
Section 1:  Bernard Herman
9:30 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 nterpretive 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.

AMST 499:  Documenting Traditional Music:  Field Recordings and Performance
Section 1:  Alice Gerrard
3-5:30 W
Field documentation of traditional musicians in Durham and beyond.  Students learn field recording techniques, write about traditional music, and experience live performances by old-time, mountain, blues, and gospel musicians. Students learn culture and history as told through music traditions.

AMST 499:  Folk, Self-Taught, and Outsider Arts
Section 2:  Bernard Herman
3:30 - 6:00 T, 204 Murphey
Folk, vernacular, self-taught and outsider are terms applied to a large amorphous body of aesthetic work that occupies and contests the borderlands of contemporary art.  Our course examines current conversations with this often hotly contested and deeply conflicted field.  Among the several themes we will discuss are anxieties of authenticity, the connoisseurship of dysfunction, creative and critical inscription and erasure, aesthetic and identity transgressions, and the representation of outsiders in popular and documentary media.  The class will visit collections and exhibitions. Among the artists to be discussed are the works of Charles Benefiel, Malcolm Mckesson, Thornton Dial, Sr., Mary Lee Bendolph, Philadelphia Wireman, and James Castle.  Genres addressed include works on paper, artists' books, quilts and fiber arts, sculpture and constructions, performance pieces, and installations.  An advanced seminar, the course requires an original research paper, formal class presentation and discussion, and continuous class participation.

AMST 890:  Reading Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon
Section 1:  Jay Garcia
3-5:30 W; 305 New East
This seminar examines the work of two twentieth-century writers:  African American novelist Richard Wright (1908-1960) and the anti-colonial Caribbean critic Frantz Fanan (1925-1961).  The seminar explores key works from each writer's corpus and concentrates, among other things, on how the poetics and figurations that emerge in Wright and Fanon generated historically specific questions and demands.  Additional readings include recent scholarhip in historical, biographical and literary studies on the impact of each writer on the intellectual cultures they encountered and shaped.  Subjects include universalism, racial liberalism, the history of postcolonial thought, and the influence of transnational affiliation on modern letters.