Course Descriptions, Spring 2008

AMST 51:  NAVIGATING AMERICA
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
12:30 TR; 212 Graham Memorial

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.
 ~Lillian Smith

This first year seminar is designed to teach students how to navigate new intellectual terrain and unfamiliar information from a variety of disciplinary perspectives though historical accounts of navigating America and physical travel.  We will emphasize planning to make discoveries, actual journeys of exploration and documentation of lessons that help us navigate the past and the future.  The focus on how economic resources (financial, physical, and human) have transformed exploration will be extended to our journey of scholarship. Students will create and participate in both a class trip and an individual voyage of discovery on the campus or in the surrounding community.  The journey must be physical and chronicled with a documentary journal.  Both journeys will be presented to the class in a medium 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 57:  ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION
Section 1:  Rachel Willis
3:30 TR; 210 Graham Memorial

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”
  ~ Horace Mann

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 58:  CULTURES OF DISSENT: RADICAL SOCIAL THOUGHT IN AMERICA SINCE 1880
Section 1:  Jay Garcia
10 MWF; 212 Graham Memorial
This course examines the history of radical social thought in American history, focusing in particular on examples from "leftist" and "collectivist" traditions. The course emphasizes the many forms radicalism has taken by exploring different radical thinkers' dissenting critiques of dominant political, economic and social arrangements. The course alsoattempts to reconstruct the social visions that animated radical movements by investigating uses of language, imagery and rhetorical styles. Among the topics the course will address are feminism, African American radical thought, the origins of the "Old Left," the emergence of the "New Left," anti-fascism, internationalism and environmentalism. The course content -speeches, novels, short stories, songs, films, among other forms - emphasizes the wide range of sources that offer historical insights into traditions of radical thought in American society.

AMST 101: THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA
Section 1:  Joy Kasson
11 MWF (and occasional discussion sections), Bingham 103
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.  Readings 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
2 MWF; Peabody 216
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. The course examines the effects of the Spanish-American War on the domestic scene, socialist visions of cultural renewal in the 1910s, and narratives about migration, dislocation war and work from the 1990s to the present. Throughout the course we will investigate relevant international contexts for understanding developments and changes in American culture and consider scholarship on "race" and racialized relations in American society.

AMST 235:  NATIVE AMERICA IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Section 1:  Michael Green
12 MWF, Phillips 215
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 277: THE NATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN AN AGE OF GLOBILIZATION
Section 1:  Robert C. Allen
Mon/Wed 6:30-8 pm; Saunders 220
This course is designed for students from all undergraduate majors who anticipate studying, living, and/or working outside the United States.  Priority in enrollment will be given to (1) students who plan to participate in a university-sponsored or recognized international study-abroad, research, or exchange program at some point between May 2008 and May 2009, (2) American Studies majors in their 2nd or 3rd year at the university, (3) BSBA students in the Kenan-Flagler School of Business in their 2nd or 3rd year at the university, especially those who plan to participate in an international program offering, and (4) international exchange students studying at UNC spring term. 

Enrollment is by instructor permission only.  Interested students should send a brief email indicating their relationship with the criteria above to Tamara Johnson, the TA for the course (johnson5@email.unc.edu). 

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 instanc 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 culture abroad; and the roots, expression, and implications of anti-Americanism.  

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:  APPROACHES TO AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES
Section 1:  Mike Green
3:00-5:30; 204 Murphey
This course is one of the two courses required to complete a major in American Indian Studies.  It is organized to introduce students to the methodologies and scholarship of the many disciplines (history, politics and government, culture, literature, archaeology, among others) included in American Indian Studies.

AMST 292:  THE SOUTH IN BLACK AND WHITE
Section 1:  Tim Tyson
Tuesday evenings 7:00-9:30 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 Tuesday evenings 7:00-9:30 in the Hayti Heritage Center at St. Joseph's Church on Fayetteville Street in Durham, just off the Durham freeway.  (Bus transportation 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 293:  LOUISA MAY ALCOTT:  TEXT AND CONTEXT
Section 1:  Anne Bruder
1 MWF; 204 Murphey
This course will explore the life and work of Louisa May Alcott. Though best known for her popular novel Little Women, Alcott wrote in a range of styles and genres, from the rediscovered sensation story to the domestic novel. Using biographical, historical, and cultural approaches, we will consider the full range of Alcott's writings, both in their original nineteenth-century context and in their twentieth and twenty-first century reception in America and abroad. This course will situate Alcott's novels and short fiction in major cultural and historical on texts, including the Civil War, reform movements, children's literature, and early realism. We will read from the other major authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain in order to position Alcott in the larger field of American letters and to consider how her popularity has shaped her critical reception. Examining twentieth-century film, musical, and operatic adaptations of Little Women will provide us with the tools to understand how different generations of readers and viewers have continued to use Alcott's stories to understand themselves, their families, and their country. Readings include Little Women, Hospital Sketches, Eight Cousins, Work, A Modern Mephistopheles, and various short stories.

AMST 293:  AMERICAN COMMUNITIES:  A PHOTOGRAPHIC APPROACH
Section 2:  William Bamberger
6-8:30 p.m. R; 204 Murphey
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 ocumentary books while emphasizing photographs produced by students in the course.

Instructor permission required.
Students must have Adobe Photoshop CS2 and a 35 mm film or digital camera

AMST 335H:  DEFINING AMERICA, PART II
Section 1: Professor John Kasson; Section 2: Professor Timothy Marr. All enrollees meet together on Mondays 10:00-10:50 and Wednesdays 10:00-10:50 in BI 317, and divide into separate sections for most Friday meetings, 10:00-10:50, in BI 317 and GA 009.  IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO HAVE TAKEN PART I.

*SOPHOMORES, JUNIORS, AND SENIORS MAY ENROLL; FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS REQUIRE PERMISSION FROM THE INSTRUCTORS.* "Defining America II" offers an exciting and unusual educational opportunity.  Where else can you work closely with two professors in a single course as you study defining events and writings from America’s emergence as a major industrial power to the present?  This course unites Professor Timothy Marr (American Studies and English), who has taught and written extensively about American literature and culture in a global perspective, and John Kasson (History and American Studies), a cultural historian with deep interests in literature, popular culture, and the visual arts.  Together they will lead a thoroughly interdisciplinary course focusing on a series of defining and controversial historical events.  Although we haven’t made the final cut yet, these events will include most if not all of the following:  the rise of Chicago and  the Haymarket Affair of 1886; the “New South” and  the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906; Margaret Sanger, women’s rights, and struggles surrounding the legalization of birth control beginning around 1914;  the internment of Japanese citizens during the Second World War; Disneyland and the rise of the Sunbelt in the 1950s; Vietnam and the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968; and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and contemporary concerns over terrorism and homeland security.  Linking all these events will be such issues as:  order and violence; security and freedom; patriotism and aliens; the contested elaborations of civil rights from the 14th amendment to the Patriot Act; the expansion of national power from the aftermath of the Civil War to the status of sole superpower; and transformations in expressive media from regional print culture to global virtual networks.  Throughout the course, we will also be concerned with issues of how these histories are variously narrated and preserved, forgotten, or transformed in historical memory and commemoration.

Students will write short papers in response to questions for each of the six units.  As a final exercise, each student will design a hypothetical unit of readings and assignments on an important American instance since 1865 that could be taught as an additional section for this course.

AMST 390:  BACK IN THE USA: BRINGING YOUR INTERNATIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE HOME TO CHAPEL HILL
Section 1:  Robert C. Allen
Mon/Wed. 4-5:30 pm; Graham Memorial Rm. 38
This course is designed for UNC undergraduates who have returned from a study-abroad, exchange, or other international learning experience.  It offers them (1) an opportunity to reflect upon what they learned and experienced living and working outside the U.S. for an extended period of time, and (2) a vehicle for developing and executing a research, creative, or service project that builds on some aspect of their international experience.  All undergraduate majors from all study-abroad destinations and fields of study are welcome.

One goal of this course is to help students place their individual experiences of international travel and study into broaderintellectual frameworks. In a seminar-like setting we will take up such topics as globalization, modes of international mobility (tourism, immigration, cosmopolitanism), anti-Americanism, Americanization and cultural imperialism, and cultural hybridity. 

Another goal of the course is to provide an academic vehicle through which students can “leverage” and extend the benefits of their international experiences in concrete ways through project-based learning.  Students will design and execute projects that link some aspect of their international experience to their work, interests, talents, community involvement, and/or field of academic concentration back at UNC.  Topics and approaches will be “workshopped” in class and developed in consultation with Professor Allen.  Projects might involve one of a variety of modes of inquiry and expression: research of various kinds, creative or non-fiction writing, documentary work, performance, or service learning, among them. Examples of project “deliverables” might include research reports; collections of short stories, poems, or photo-journalism; performance pieces; or development of a service project related to the area of the world visited or to social concerns that grew out of the student’s interational experience.

The activities of this course will be coordinated with those in a parallel course for outward-bound study abroad students:

AMST 390: HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE FORMATION OF CITIZENS
Section 2: Courtney Thornton
3:30-4:45 TR, Graham Memorial 035
Studies repeatedly find that the American public generally associates a college education with knowledge acquisition leading to career opportunities and economic advantages for graduates; yet most American colleges and universities explicitly state goals related to the development of students as responsible, active and contributing members of society.  Interest in citizenship outcomes has ebbed and flowed depending upon public scrutiny of and support for higher education; in light of a nationwide trend of decreased state funding for higher education, citizenship development as a public benefit of higher education has received increased attention in the last two decades.

This course will explore the philosophical, historical, and sociological aspects of the role of higher education in developing students as responsible citizens.  Current scholarship, public commentaries, archived institutional records, and case studies will help students in this course to consider five key dimensions of citizenship development as addressed through higher education: (1) knowledge and support of democratic values, processes and systems, (2) desire and ability to serve a community and its members, (3) the use of skills and knowledge for the express benefit of society, (4) appreciation of others unlike oneself, and (5) issues of personal accountability.  Students will also consider how the idea of responsible citizenship varies in higher education according to institutional type and mission (public, private, denominational, historically minority serving, research extensive, liberal arts, land grant, etc.).

With instructor guidance, students will develop and conduct a group research project related to higher education and student citizenship development.  Students will also be assessed on case write-ups, brief position papers, and class participation through guided prompts and activities.  Students will also write scholarship-based reflections on two collegiate events that they attend, observe, or participate in, each of which must be related to one of the five aforementioned categories of citizenship development. 

AMST 482:  IMAGES OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
Section 1:  Robert Cantwell
11 MWF; Bingham 317
This course will explore a variety of artistic, literary, touristic, and commercial images, ideas, and representations—natural  wonders to strip malls and theme parks—of  the American landscape. We will consider how various pictorial and narrative modes, romantic to postmodern, have mixed with such factors as real estate speculation, the extension of transport, suburbanization and consumerism to shape an environment that visibly records an ongoing struggle over cultural meaning--to create and embody it, to appropriate and exploit it, to preserve and sustain it, to efface and destroy it.

AMST 483:  VISUAL CULTURE
Section 1:  Kathy Roberts
11:00 TR; 202 Wilson Hall
This is a course about the ways that visual culture (photography, architecture, popular culture, and the contexts in which we view them) sheds light on American culture.  We will explore various kinds of visual artifacts and encounter different theories about how to view them and make sense of them.  This is not a systematic study of art in America but an excursion into selected topics relating to American visual culture.  Each study will choose an artifact of visual culture to pursue more deeply in a sustained paper, due at the end of the semester.  This course will use a website, http://blackboard.unc.edu for the exchange of information and viewpoints.  Five short written assignments (40%), and a 10 ? 15 page paper (40%); participation (discussion boards, class activities and discussion, etc.) (10%).  Class attendance and participation are mandatory.

AMST 486:  "SHALOM Y'ALL":  THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Section 1:  Marcie Ferris
11 MWF; Murphey 118
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:  COLLABORATIVE ART IN DURHAM
Section 1:  Brett Cook-Disney
3:00-5:30 W;  This course will meet at Duke
Exploration of progressive educational philosophies, radical democratic theory, and diverse contemplative exercises as applied to the Durham context. Students reflect upon their own identity within Durham's diverse and overlapping communities while creating public artworks and community celebrations that express a variety of social and aesthetic positions. Students explore the history of the larger Durham community and investigate how the community can grow in a positive way. Students examine the implications of working collaboratively and the relationship between process and product. This semester the class will work on the community-based murals in Durham neighborhoods through a project entitled "Face-Up."
 
AMST 499:  ELECTRIFYING ART:  LEARN ABOUT ART & MUSEUMS

Section 2:  Jerry Bolas

3:30-4:45 TR, 204 Murphey

Offered by the Department of American Studies, Electrifying Art will enable students to collaborate with instructor Gerald Bolas, who has directed several art museums, on an exhibition entitled North Carolina Electric that is scheduled for the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem in spring 2008.  The exhibition will feature works of art that utilize light fixtures, motors, video screens, digital components, and other electrical apparatus as expressive media that, like oil paint and stone, convey artistic meaning like oil paint and stone. 

 Students of all backgrounds are well to join in exploring how art museums organize and exhibit works of art, identify audiences, and engage visitors in exhibition galleries and online.  We will pay particular attention to technology-based educational and marketing tools and techniques.  

 In alternation with lectures on art and museums by the instructor and guest speakers, each week students will discuss current events in the world of art and museums.  There will be a written midterm and brief papers associated with the final project.  Field trips to local museums like the Ackland, Nasher Art Museum at Duke, and North Carolina Museum of Art to see art works by artists like Nam June Paik will be required.  For the final project, students will be organized into teams to create a presentation suitable for digital publication in conjunction with North Carolina Electric.  Final projects might include an educational PowerPoint or video for presentation on- or off-site, a marketing video suitable for television production, a prototype website, etc.  For more information visit the American Studies webpage or contact Jerry Bolas at gdbolas@nc.rr.com.         

  
AMST 890:  HERMAN MELVILLE: CULTURE AND CRITICISM
Section 1:  Tim Marr
Wednesdays 2:00-4:50; Murphey 222
This graduate seminar investigates the significance of Herman Melville as a nineteenth-century American author whose works continue to speak with power to different generations of readers. The course aims to place Melville and his compositions in the contexts of his own time as well as how they have resonated through a broad spectrum of evolving critical paradigms.  The course will examine the contemporary place of Melville and his work, especially Moby-Dick and its characters, as central icons of American memory, as shown in recent popular culture and film. Despite being “the very type of the white, male and culturally elite writer,” critic Myra Jehlen has claimed, “Melville has been as interesting and compelling a writer for New Historicists, Feminists, Deconstructionists, and African-Americanists as any other American writer.”  The course will explore central problems such as biography, influence, textual authority, and changing reception, as well as examining cultural approaches that analyze Melville’s engagement with gender, sexuality, race, class, and the politics of the literary marketplace. Texts include Typee; Moby-Dick; Pierre; The Piazza Tales; Billy-Budd, Sailor; and selected poems.  Course readings include historical sources as well as examples of critical responses ranging from popular reviews from the time of publication to contemporary analytical studies from a wide variety of theoretical approaches.