Catalogue 2022-2023 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
American Studies Program
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Director: Lisa Gail Collins;
Steering Committee: Lisa Brawley (Urban Studies and Associate Dean of the Faculty ), Amy Chin (American Studies and Asian Studies), Lisa Gail Collins (Art), Randolph R. Cornelius (Psychology), Eve Dunbar (English), Dustin Frye (Economics), Gordon Hall (Art), Jonathon S. Kahn (Religion), Erin McCloskey (Education), Molly S. McGlennenb (English), Justin Patchb (Music), Hiram Perez (English), Tyrone Simpson, IIa (English), Mallory Whiteduck (Political Science).
Participating Faculty: Carlos Alamo (Sociology and Dean of the College), Lisa Brawley (Urban Studies and Associate Dean of Faculty), Amy Chin (American Studies and Asian Studies), Lisa Gail Collins (Art), Randolph R. Cornelius (Psychology), Eve Dunbar (English), Dustin Frye (Economics), Gordon Hall (Art), William Hoynes (Sociology and Dean of Faculty), Jonathon S. Kahn (Religion), Amitava Kumar (English), Raquel Madrigal (American Studies), Erin McCloskey (Education), Molly S. McGlennenb (English), Justin Patchb (Music), Hiram Perez (English), Allison Puglisi (History), Eréndira Rueda (Sociology), Ashanti Shih (History), Tyrone Simpson, IIa (English), Mallory Whiteduck (Political Science).
a On leave 2022/23, first semester
b On leave 2022/23, second semester
ab On leave 2022/23
American Studies is an interdisciplinary field defined both by its objects of study - the processes, places, and people that comprise the United States - and by a mode of inquiry that moves beyond the scope of a single disciplinary approach or critical methodology. American Studies majors develop a rich understanding of the complex histories that have resulted from the conflict and confluence of European, Indigenous, African, and Asian cultures throughout the Western Hemisphere, and explore U.S. nation-formation in relation to global flows of American cultural, economic and military power. An individually designed course of study, which is the hallmark of the program, allows students to forge multidisciplinary approaches to the particular issues that interest them.
The American Studies program offers both core program courses and cross-listed electives via the following inter-related rubrics:
The United States in a global context: the role of the United States outside of its national borders, the flow of peoples, ideas, goods and capital both within and beyond the United States; explorations of historic and contemporary diasporas; contexts and cultures of U.S. militarism and anti-militarism.
Spaces, places, and borders: explorations of particular places and processes of place-making in the U.S.; focus on borders and borderlands as contested geographical and figurative spaces of cultural, political, and economic exchange.
U.S. cultural formations: investigations of literary, visual, audio, and performance cultures, and their interaction; U.S. popular culture, music and media.
Identity, difference & power: the contest to extend the promises of abstract citizenship to the particular experiences of embodied subjects; shifting politics of U.S. immigration; explorations of the production, representation and experience of race and ethnicity in the U.S., including structural dimensions of race and racism; investigations of the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, and other systems of difference.
U.S. Intellectual traditions and their discontents: explorations of American religious, cultural and political thought; traditions of social and political protests; discourses of sovereignty, liberty, federalism, individualism, rights.
The program also offers a correlate sequence in Native American Studies which enables students to examine Indigenous cultures, politics, histories, and literatures, in a primarily North American context. Students electing the correlate sequence are trained in the methodology of Native American Studies as a means to critically assess colonial discourses, examine the many ways Native peoples have contributed to and shaped North American culture, and analyze and honor the autonomy and sovereignty of Indigenous nations, peoples, and thought.
The American Studies program values close faculty-student interaction. Courses utilize a range of collaborative learning strategies; mentored independent senior work is an integral component of the major.
Major
Correlate Sequence in Native American Studies
Approved Courses
American Studies: Required Courses
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AMST 100 - Introduction to American Studies Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course reveals and challenges the histories of the categories that contribute to the definition of “America.” The course explores ideas such as nationhood and the nation-state, democracy and citizenship, ethnic and racial identity, myths of frontier and facts of empire, borders and expansion, normativity and representation, sovereignty and religion, regionalism and transnationalism as these inform our understanding of the United States and American national identity. One goal of the course is to introduce students to important concepts and works in American Studies. Either AMST 100 or AMST 102 or AMST 105 satisfies the 100-level core requirement of the American Studies major. Topics vary with expertise of the faculty teaching the course.
Topic for 2022/23a: The American Secular. (Same as RELI 100 ) Is there a distinct realm in American politics and culture called the secular, a space or a mode of public discourse that is crucially free of and from the category of religion? This class considers the sorts of theoretical and historical moments in American life, letters, and practice that have, on the one hand, insisted the importance and necessity of such a realm, and on the other hand, resisted the very notion that religion should be kept out of the American public square. We ask whether it is possible or even desirable—in our politics, in our public institutions, in ourselves—to conceive of the secular and the religious as radically opposed. We ask if there are better ways to conceive of the secular and the religious in American life, ways that acknowledge their mutual interdependence rather than their exclusivity. Jonathon Kahn.
Open to first-year students and sophomores only.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 102 - Introduction to Asian American Studies Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 102 Why are Asians in America? What does it feel like to be Asian in America? Who counts as Asian in the first place? Asian American scholar Victor Bascara argues that “we are here because you were there” referring to the long history of empire, militarization, and war that “brought” Asians to America. This introduction to Asian American Studies traces the logics of power that shape Asian migration, racialization, and resistance in America through the lens of empire. We focus on sites of encounter–the plantation, the internment camp, the military base, the interrogation room, the refugee camp, the orphanage, the spa, and the protest–where the meeting of bodies, labor, and ideologies can reveal how modes of difference-making emerge and endure within and across local contexts. Students engage in texts, archives, podcasts, film and poetry to understand how the experiences of Asians in America are tied to larger historical systems of power and the ways in which Asians have grappled with their experiences on their own terms. Amy Chin.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 105 - Introduction to Native American Studies Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course is a multi-and interdisciplinary introduction to the basic philosophies, ideologies, and methodologies of the discipline of Native American Studies. It acquaints students with the history, art, literature, sociology, linguistics, politics, and epistemology according to an indigenous perspective while utilizing principles stemming from vast and various Native North American belief systems and cultural frameworks. Through reading assignments, films, and discussions, we learn to objectively examine topics such as orality, sovereignty, stereotypes, humor, language, resistance, spirituality, activism, identity, tribal politics, and environment among others. Overall, we work to problematize historical, ethnographical, and literary representations of Native people as a means to assess and evaluate western discourses of domination; at the same time, we focus on the various ways Native people and nations, both in their traditional homelands and urban areas, have been and are triumphing over 500+ years of colonization through acts of survival and continuance. Either AMST 100 or 105 will satisfy the 100-level core requirement of the American Studies major. Molly McGlennen.
Open to first-year students and sophomores only.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 250 - Critical Approaches to American Studies Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
In this course, students explore the history and present state of American Studies as a field and interdiscipline. Central to the course is its analysis of the logics of difference and the ways they have produced, sustained, challenged, and unmade the United States and its mythologies. We examine how indigeneity, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and disability act as critical interventions of normative understandings of the nation-state and its definitions of citizenship. Importantly, we learn to situate primary texts within the tensions and trajectories of historical moments; curate archives of heuristic categories via a of variety of genres, as well as disciplinary and methodological approaches; and practice reading against the grain to map out the historiographical and epistemological meanings of American Studies topics. Finally, the course works to understand the transnational and global dynamic of “American” influence and culture, as it contends with the settler colonial and racialized bedrock of the United States and its institutions. Raquel Madrigal.
Required of students concentrating in the Program. Generally not open to Senior Majors.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 302 - Senior Thesis Intensive Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Required of students concentrating in the program. Lisa Collins.
The senior thesis intensive is graded Distinction, Satisfactory, or Unsatisfactory.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 313 - Multidisciplinary Research Methods Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course explores the challenges of conducting multi- and interdisciplinary inquiry within the field of American Studies. Drawing on key texts and innovative projects within the field, the course examines the ways in which varying disciplines make meaning of the world and puts specific modes of inquiry into practice. Students learn how to seek, produce, and evaluate different forms of evidence and how to shape this evidence in the direction of a broader project. Specific forms of inquiry may include: interpreting archival documents, conducting interviews, making maps, crafting field notes, analyzing cultural texts, among others. Raquel Madrigal.
Prerequisite(s): or co-requisite: a discipline-specific methods course appropriate to the student.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 316 - Senior Project Lab Intensive Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This workshop is designed to help students embarking on the program’s senior project to identify a compelling research problem, locate appropriate critical resources, and deepen their engagement with the disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods appropriate to their focus within the major. Alongside the focus on individual projects, the participants in the workshop also identify a common research problem and discuss ways to approach it, by collectively building a syllabus and archive. Lisa Collins.
Course Format: INT
American Studies: Core Courses
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AMST 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 203 ) This course examines the various forms of journalism that report on the complexity of contemporary American lives. In the past I have said that this course, in a plain sense, is an investigation into American society. And, of course, that a part of the aim of the course is to acquire the basic craft of journalistic practice. The other main aim of the course has been that we examine different models of writing, especially in longform, that have defined and changed the norms of reportage in our culture. But in honor of the decisive contributions to American life made over the last several years by the previous president, I want to make #fakenews also a focus of our course. How do we pay attention to, how do we produce, and how do we give compelling form to facts? Amitava Kumar.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 207 - Commercialized Childhoods
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 207 ) This course examines features of childhoods in the U.S. at different times and across different social contexts. The primary aims of the course are 1) to examine how we’ve come to the contemporary understanding of American childhood as a distinctive life phase and cultural construct, by reference to historical and cross-cultural examples, and 2) to recognize the diversity of childhoods that exist and the economic, geographical, political, and cultural factors that shape those experiences. Specific themes in the course examine the challenges of studying children; the social construction of childhood (how childhoods are constructed by a number of social forces, economic interests, technological determinants, cultural phenomena, discourses, etc.); processes of contemporary globalization and commodification of childhoods (children’s roles as consumers, as producers, and debates about children’s rights); as well as the intersecting dynamics of age, social class, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in particular experiences of childhood.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 236 - Native North America
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 236 ) Native Americans have been in North America for at least the last 10,000 years. From the earliest archaeological record we can see how they farmed in the scorching desert, hunted in the frozen tundra, and traded resources over thousands of miles. From the more recent record, we can see how homelands relate to reservation lands and how lifeways changed but culture persists. Now, indigenous archaeologists and community archaeology programs are changing how archaeology is done, who it is done by and for, and what questions are asked of the past. This course surveys the archaeology of two distinct geographical culture areas, the Southwest and the Northeast. This contrast allows us to examine how knowledge of the past is constructed by archaeologists, museum professionals, descendant communities, and public interest.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 262 - Native American Women
1 unit(s)
(Same as WFQS 262 ) In an effort to subjugate indigenous nations, colonizing and Christianizing enterprises in the Americas included the implicit understanding that subduing Native American women through rape and murder maintained imperial hierarchies of gender and power; this was necessary to eradicate Native people’s traditional egalitarian societies and uphold the colonial agenda. Needless to say, Native women’s stories and histories have been inaccurately portrayed, often tainted with nostalgia and delivered through a lens of western patriarchy and discourses of domination. Through class readings and writing assignments, discussions and films, this course examines Native women’s lives by considering the intersections of gender and race through indigenous frameworks. We expose Native women’s various cultural worldviews in order to reveal and assess the importance of indigenous women’s voices to national and global issues such as sexual violence, environmentalism, and health. The class also takes into consideration the shortcomings of western feminisms in relation to the realities of Native women and Native people’s sovereignty in general. Areas of particular importance to this course are indigenous women’s urban experience, Haudenosaunee influence on early U.S. suffragists, indigenous women in the creative arts, third-gender/two-spiritedness, and Native women’s traditional and contemporary roles as cultural carriers.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 265 - Decolonizing the Exhibition: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Indigenous Art
1 unit(s)
This course consists of two areas of inquiry: the study of the impact and importance of Indigenous art from a Native American Studies perspective and the research and exhibition of Inuit works on paper from the Edward J. Guarino Collection at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. We begin by exploring Indigenous art through culturally and tribally specific perspectives in order to challenge the ethnographic lens that has traditionally examined and catalogued Native artists. Through a Native American Studies framework, we approach Indigenous art not through western categories of artifact or craft, but as artworks that stress the continuance of Indigenous peoples in direct conversation with the non-Indigenous world. From this understanding, the class constructs an exhibition to be installed in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at the end of the semester. Students research and interpret Inuit works from the collection, design the exhibition installation, write the exhibition catalogue and create the accompanying website.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 290 - Community-Engaged Learning Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Permission of the director required.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 297 - Readings in American Studies
0.5 unit(s)
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: OTH -
AMST 298 - Independent Study Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Permission of the director required.
Course Format: OTH -
AMST 352 - Indigenous Literatures of the Americas
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 352 and LALS 352 ) This course addresses a selection of creation narratives, historical accounts, poems, and other genres produced by indigenous authors from Pre-Columbian times to the present, using historical, linguistic and ethnographic approaches. We examine the use of non-alphabetic and alphabetic writing systems, study poetic and rhetorical devices, and examine indigenous historical consciousness and sociopolitical and gender dynamics through the vantage point of these works. Other topics include language revitalization, translation issues, and the rapport between linguistic structure and literary form. The languages and specific works to be examined are selected in consultation with course participants. They may include English or Spanish translations of works in Nahuatl, Zapotec, Yucatec and K’iche’ Maya, Quechua, Tupi, Aymara, and other indigenous languages of Latin America.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 365 - Racial Borderlands
1 unit(s)
Borders have been made to demarcate geographic and social spaces. As such, they often divide and separate national states, populations, and their political and cultural practices. However, borders also serve as spaces of convergence and transgression. Employing a comparative and relational approach to the study of American cultures, this seminar examines concepts, theories and methodologies about race and ethnicity that emerged along the U.S. racial borderlands between the 18th and 20th centuries. We also consider the historical and contemporary ways in which discourses about race have been used to define, organize, and separate different social groups within the U.S. racial empire state. Throughout the semester we ask the following questions: How does race emerge as an idea in the U.S. political and social landscape? What is the relationship between race, gender and empire? What are the relational and historical ways in which ideas about race have been used to arrange and rank distinct social groups in the U.S. imperial body? How have these hierarchies shifted across space and time and how have different groups responded to these racial formations? Lastly, this seminar considers the future potential and limits of solidarity as a practice organized around ideas about race and exclusion for different marginalized populations within the U.S. empire state.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 385 - Seminar in American Art
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 385 )
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 399 - Senior Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Permission of the director required.
Course Format: OTH
American Studies: Electives
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AMST 110 - Gender, Social Problems and Social Change
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 110 and WFQS 110 ) This course introduces students to a variety of social problems using insights from political science, sociology, and gender studies. We begin with an exploration of the sociological perspective, and how social problems are defined as such. We then examine the general issues of inequalities based on economic and employment status, racial and ethnic identity, and gender and sexual orientation. We apply these categories of analysis to problems facing the educational system and the criminal justice system. As we examine specific issues, we discuss political processes, social movements, and individual actions that people have used to address these problems.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
This class is taught at the Taconic Correctional Facility for Women to a combined class of Vassar and Taconic students.
One 3-hour period.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 160 - Visual Art and Storytelling Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 160 ) Stories and storytelling reside at the heart of human experience; they have the power to shape–and shift–our understandings, actions, and imaginations. How do visual artists, makers, and other cultural workers draw on the power of storytelling to deepen seeing and knowing and enable emergent stories and realities? Focusing on generative twentieth and twenty-first century creative projects in the U.S., this first-year writing seminar–a community of practice and care–explores critical arts and acts of storytelling. Lisa Collins.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 208 - Demilitarizing the Pacific Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 208 ) The Pacific euphemistically called “America’s Lake” has been a site of US empire building and Indigenous and Asian resistance against US military expansion. This course examines demilitarization movements in the Pacific through visual and material culture. We analyze historical and ongoing processes of military basing, nuclear testing, tourism, sex work and logistics industries among others to better understand the relationship between demilitarization and decolonization in the Pacific. Through different forms of visual representation and material objects, this course engages oceanic indigenous voices, island feminism, bomb survivor narratives and global demilitarization activism. Students grapple with how militarism becomes invisible in American daily life, the colonial foundations in which this invisibility is produced through American and Asian imperialisms, and how demilitarization movements are reimagining what genuine security and safety can look in our world without militarism as a governing ideology. Amy Chin.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 214 - History of American Jazz
1 unit(s)
(Same as MUSI 214 ) An investigation of the whole range of jazz history, from its beginning around the turn of the century to the present day. Among the figures to be examined are: Scott Joplin, “Jelly Roll” Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Thomas “Fats” Waller, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis.
Prerequisite(s): One unit in one of the following: music, studies in American history, art, or literature; or permission of the instructor.
Not offered in 2022/23.
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AMST 216 - Language Revitalization Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 216 and LALS 216 ) This Intensive focuses on language revitalization and documentation efforts of endangered languages, and also of languages that are undervalued or discriminated against by majority populations. Students can develop their own project, or work with the instructor in an ongoing digital humanities project that focuses on Mesoamerican languages. David Tavarez.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 1-hour period.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 218 - Spiritual Seekers in American History & Culture 1880-2008
1 unit(s)
(Same as RELI 218 ) This course examines the last 120 years of spiritual seeking in America. It looks in particular at the rise of unchurched believers, how these believers have relocated “the religious” in different parts of culture, what it means to be “spiritual but not religious” today, and the different ways that Americans borrow from or embrace religions such as Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. We focus in particular on unexpected places of religious enchantment or “wonder” in our culture, including how science and technology are providing new metaphors for God and spirit.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
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AMST 219 - Queer of Color Critique Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 219 and ENGL 219 ) “Queer of Color Critique” is a form of cultural criticism modeled on lessons learned from woman of color feminism, poststructuralism, and materialist and other forms of analysis. As Roderick Ferguson defines it, “Queer of color analysis…interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” This course considers what interventions the construction “queer of color” makes possible for queertheory, LGBT scholarship and activism, and different models of ethnic studies.We assess the value and limitations of queer theory’s “subjectless critique” (in other words, its rejection of identity as a “fixed referent”) in doing cultural and political work. What kind of complications (or contradictions) does the notion “queer of color” present for subjectless critique? How might queer of color critique inform political organizing? Particular attention will be devoted to how “queer” travels. Toward this end, students determine what conflicts are presently shaping debates around sexuality in their own communities and consider how these debates may be linked to different regional, national or transnational politics. Throughout the semester, we evaluate what “queer” means and what kind of work it enables. Is it an identity or an anti-identity? A verb, a noun, or an adjective? A heuristic device, a counterpublic, a form of political mobilization or perhaps even a kind of literacy? Hiram Perez.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 222 - The Politics of Borders Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 222 and LALS 222 ) This course interrogates the normative construction of nation-state borders and the meaning of nation-state borders. We do so from the United States/Mexico border, and utilize a comparative approach, relating Latinx Studies to critical Indigenous feminist perspectives. While focused mainly on the United States landmass the course also critically foregrounds Native/Indigenous land and sovereignty to reconceptualize the United States as a settler colonial, imperial state. Utilizing the knowledges of Latinx and Indigenous thinkers, students trace the construction of modern borders and productively reframe assumptions around immigration/migration, citizenship, nationalism and indigenismo/Indigeneity. Raquel Madrigal.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 231 - Native American Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 231 ) This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere, and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of written and oral traditions, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the various theoretical debates that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework acknowledges Indigenous literatures as the cultural and creative labor of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities, as well as how the literatures are necessarily entangled with the on-going legacy of settler colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Tommy Pico, among other Native theorists, performance and fine artists, and filmmakers. Molly McGlennen.
This course satisfies the Regs requirement for the English major.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 232 - Asian American Women’s Oral History Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 232 ) This course examines the methodology of oral history as employed by Asian American women and oral histories of Asian American women. It expands what we understand to be traditional oral history to include, testimonies, political speeches, speaking tours, lullabies, pop music and podcasting. We use sound and story as an object to study subaltern methods of capturing and articulating these stories. Students are able to conduct an oral history project of their own that is digitally archived in the library. It also accompanies a class reading list we collectively build to strengthen the Asian American subject guide at the Vassar library.
Amy Chin.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 233 - Museums, Collections, Ethics
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 233 ) Collecting Native American objects and human remains was once justified as a way to preserve vanishing cultures. Instead of vanishing, Native Americans organized and asked that their ancestors be returned, along with their sacred objects. Initially, museums fought against the loss of collections and scientists fought against the loss of data. Governments stepped in and wrote regulations to manage claims, dictating the rights of all parties. Thirty years after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) repatriation remains a controversial issue and few are satisfied with the process. This course examines the development of American museums and the ethics of collecting cultures to anchor our study of repatriation. Perspectives of anthropology, art, history, law, museum studies, Native American studies, philosophy, and religion are considered. Recent U.S. cases are contrasted with repatriation cases in other parts of the world, for repatriation is not just a Native American issue.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 240 - Italy and its Migrations: Stories of Italian Emigration and Immigration
1 unit(s)
(Same as ITAL 240 ) This course follows the waves that shape and change Italian culture from the time of Unification, in 1861, up through today. We learn about the experiences, dreams, memories and politics of Italian emigration and immigration through a careful study of novels, poetry, cinema, and theater, as well as letters and media coverage. We consider the ways different narrative styles reflect the historical realities of the times, and take a critical analysis approach to the question of how public attitudes towards immigrants have shaped Italian national and diasporic sentiment. Beginning with the first major waves of emigration to the United States in the 1880s, this course provides a unique look at a moment of significant transition in Italian history and the makings of Italian-American Culture; we read literary texts, personal letters detailing the immigrant experience of cross the Atlantic at the turn of the century and of crossing the Mediterranean today, news coverage of significant events like the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and cinematic renditions of past and current migrant experiences. We look at this cultural material in relation to the specific historical context in which it was produced, reflecting on the impact and legacy of things like the U.S. Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the Italian Race Laws of 1938. As we read and discuss narratives of migration, we also examine the ways gender, sexuality and social roles determine and are determined by movement through space and time, reflecting critically on the exclusion of women’s voices from early accounts of migration.
This course is offered in English; Italian majors please see ITAL 340 .
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 241 - Asian American Women and Gender History Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 241 and HIST 241 ) This course focuses on Asian American women as key historical actors and the use of gender analysis to re-examine major themes in Asian American history: immigration, labor, communtiy formation, cultural representations, feminist political organizing, sexuality, and marriage and family life. We also touch on the “queering” of Asian American history, as well as ideas of masculinity and the intersections of sexuality and racialization for Asian American men. Course materials emphasie Asian American women’s voices and include memoirs, poetry, film, oral histories, and artwork in addition to traditional academic texts. Students explore different types of archives and methodologies to evelop a final reserch project of their choice. Ashanti Shih.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 248 - The Book in America Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 248 ) This course examines the history and influence of books and printing in American society from earliest times to the present. We touch on a range of topics, including the place of books in the colonial era and the new republic, the spread of printing technologies in the 19th century, the emergence of large publishing houses and rising rates of literacy, the role of libraries, bookstores, and book clubs, modernist publishing, the rise of the paperback, the work of private presses, artist’s books, and the effect of recent technologies on reading. Along the way we consider questions relating to the production, dissemination, and reception of texts. The Archives & Special Collections Library serves as a laboratory for the course. Guest speakers and one or more field trips enhance our study of key topics. Ronald Patkus.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 249 - Encounter and Exchange: American Art from 1565 to 1865
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 249 ) This course provides a survey of the visual arts made in the United States (or by American artists living abroad) until 1865, beginning with the first European representations of Native Americans in the 16th century and ending with Alexander Gardner’s images of death and destruction on the battlefields of the U.S. Civil War. It emphasizes the significance of cross-cultural encounter and international exchange to the creation and reception of artworks produced in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and prints. Our approach will be both chronological and thematic, considering topics such as the role of art in the construction of national identity; the origins of the U.S. art market; and the tensions of class, gender, race, and ethnicity in early American art.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 , or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 251 - American Art from Colonial Encounters to the Harlem Renaissance
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 251 ) How can we encounter the histories of America in works of art? Why should we care about encountering them? This course explores such questions by surveying some of the most compelling paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, and decorative arts produced in the United States—from the first encounters between indigenous peoples of this land to New York City’s Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Whenever possible, course meetings are held at the Loeb Art Center, and an optional class trip to New York City art museums is organized. In these class lectures and discussions, our goal is to articulate together how works of art from the past shape and construct our sense of American history, and how art continues to matter today. Artists covered include John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, William Sydney Mount, Mato-tope (and other Mandan artists), David Drake, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and Jacob Lawrence, among many others.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 or a 100-level American Studies course, or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 257 - Reorienting America: Asians in American History and Society
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 257 and SOCI 257 ) Based on sociological theory of class, gender, race/ethnicity, this course examines complexities of historical, economic, political, and cultural positions of Asian Americans beyond the popular image of “model minorities.” Topics include the global economy and Asian immigration, politics of ethnicity and pan-ethnicity, educational achievement and social mobility, affirmative action, and representation in mass media.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 264 - Apocalypse Now: Finding Agency and Hope in a Deteriorating World Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENST 264 ) The course is an exploration of how humans must confront the challenges of global climate change and the collateral hazards associated with it, e.g., the climate refugee crisis, the spread of new diseases that may be worsened by climate change, the disruption of governmental and other institutions, etc., not with dread or denial, but with a sense of hope and the realization that these are challenges that may be ameliorated if we move swiftly to confront them. The course does not shy away from taking a hard look at both the enormity of the problem of climate change and the little time left we have to do something about it. But its focus is on climate resilience and how humans have always been able to adapt to such problems and what we must do today to both adapt to them and to mitigate their effects. Randolph Cornelius.
Prerequisite(s): Any First-Year Writing Seminar.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 266 - Art, Urgency, and Everyday Life in the United States Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 266 and ART 266 ) What is this thing called socially-engaged, social practice, activist, and/or community-centered art? Where does it come from, who makes it, who is it for, how does it work, and what can it do? What are some of the ways this interdisciplinary practice–often woven within struggles for justice and healing–is defined and deployed? And how might its success be assessed? Dwelling together on these questions by way of dynamic case studies, we consider how a range of U.S. based creators are grappling with urgent issues of our time. Lisa Collins.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 or coursework in Africana Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 273 - Critical Ethnic Studies Curricula for Secondary Schools Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 273 and EDUC 273 ) In this intensive, Vassar students work with the professor on developing curricula for a new Grades 9-14 AAPI Digital Textbook that is being produced and published by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. The larger textbook uses AAPI history and experiences as a lens to understand American history, emphasize understanding the world through multiple perspectives, and demonstrate the ability to collaborate and resolve conflicts across many facets of difference and diversity towards shared goals for the common good. Chapters in the textbook are organized around the four foundational themes: Global Capitalism and Migration; Empire and War; Community Foundations and Activism; Race, Power and Identity. Our group is tasked with developing accompanying lesson plans and activities for the chapter on Chinese garment workers in New York. As well, we consider developing curricula for a similar nascent project on SWANA studies for high schoolers. Students are expected to travel to NYC for meetings with the historians writing the chapter. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 274 - Reading and Writing American Memoir Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 274 ) On the first page of Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon writes, “I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir. I wanted to write a lie.” This course asks students to consider what it means to write an American memoir, particularly from perspectives historically excluded from mainstream publishing and prestigious literary journals. Keeping Laymon’s words in mind, we might ask how marginalized voices engage the presumed transparency of the memoir form to render lies (or mythologies) that arguably consolidate the US as a nation. How does the American memoir write from and to the nation?
This course centers students’ voices. We learn about memoir (and memory) from reading selected memoirs and criticism, but also from our own life writing, which we share in a workshop setting. Our reading selections provide us with a variety of models for transforming memory into story, including the braided essay, lyric forms, flash, the hermit crab essay, and epistolary, among others. Authors may include Kiese Laymon, Deborah Miranda, Melissa Febos, Doris Cheng, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Hilton Als, among others. Hiram Perez.
Two hours every other week.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 276 - How to Write a Black Memoir
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 276 and ENGL 276 ) This intensive is an exercise in critical reading and creative writing. I would like students to read the work of a particular memoirist and develop their own sense of what the writer has accomplished and achieved. I would then invite the writer for a zoom presentation wherein the writer teaches a “skill” or technique that begets good life writing. Students perform that technique in class and revise/refine what they have written and submit the piece in the class to follow. The goal is for the student to write an autobiographical narrative of at least 20 pages in length.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor and 200-level classes in English/Africana Studies/American Studies.
One 3-hour period.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 284 - Global Indigenous Film Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 284 and MEDS 284 ) This intensive acquaints students with some of the documentary, experimental, and narrative films/videos of indigenous filmmakers from North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Screenings include films by Rachel Perkins, Tracey Moffatt, Sherman Alexie, Victor Masayesva, Alanis Obamsawin, and Zacharias Kunuk. Discussions of films engage the notion of visual sovereignty, and the use of film/video to document indigenous lives and concerns, and to reframe stories told about them and to tell new stories. Colleen Cohen.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
First six-week course.
One 2-hour period plus outside screenings.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 287 - American Empire: The Nineteenth-Century West Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 287 and GNCS 287 ) This intensive invites students to explore a theme in the United States’ creation of a trans-Mississippi empire between the 1840s and the 1940s.Those themes include violence, war, and dispossession of native peoples; trans-Pacific immigration; encounters with Western environments; railroads and raw materials; politics and grassroots movements; women and families; and the mythology of conquest. After shared readings on each theme, students choose directions for individual projects. Conditions permitting, the course includes a field trip to a museum in New York City. Rebecca Edwards.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 296 - Art and an Archive
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as ART 296 ) The Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art claims to be “the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.” Its vast holdings include original materials such as diaries, scrapbooks, letters, manuscripts, financial records, preliminary sketches, photographs, films, and recordings. The Archives also boasts the largest collection of oral histories anywhere on the subject of art. Its Oral History Program has sought and sustained the distinctive voices and memories of artists and other cultural workers in more than 2,300 oral history interviews since its establishment in the 1950s; and this program persists. Collection specialists continue to seek sources that document the stories at the heart of artmaking in the US; two recent oral history initiatives include the Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project (2016-18) and the Pandemic Oral History Project (2020). In this collaborative, project-based workshop, we immerse ourselves in the Archives’ online resources, paying particularly close attention to the in-depth oral histories, life stories, and other firsthand accounts by visual artists. Together, we closely analyze sources, freshly interpret artwork, piece together stories, and engage key questions of interpretation, evidence, and the limits and possibilities of an archive.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Second six-week course.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 314 - History of Asian American Social Movements Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 314 and HIST 314 ) This seminar uses primary and secondary sources to explore the history of social movements by and for Asian Americans. After brief discussion of early forms of resistance and organizing, the course focuses primarily on social movements during and after the “Asian American movement” arose in the long 1960’s. Topics include struggles for ethnic studies. Yellow Power and recognition for “Brown Asians,” antiwar, Redress (reparations for Japanese American WWII incarceration), fair working conditions, Asian American feminisms, gay marriage, environmental justice, and anti-Asian violence and #StopAsianHate. Throughout the course, we ground Asian American activists and their ideas in their transnational dimensions,including Third World Liberation and anticolonial ideaologies, and we explore their solidarities with other liberation movements such as Civil Rights, Black Power, and Indigenous sovereignty. For the final project, students work together to create our own archive and interpreation of Asian American student activism at Vassar College. Ashanti Shih.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 317 - Museums in a Time of Change
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 317 ) The current environment creates challenges to ways museums carry out their missions, sometimes forcing institutions to affirm or reimagine how to build better versions of themselves. Through a critical historical survey of the evolution of art museums, we examine their purpose in times of crises. How can we better connect audiences and objects? How do we describe the impact we want to make? If we can’t be all things to all people, how do we determine which of our museum’s “products” to retain, embellish, or drop? From difficult times come opportunities and new habits and ways of thinking.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 329 - American Literary Realism Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 329 and GNCS 329 ) Exploration of the literary concepts of realism and naturalism focusing on the theory and practice of fiction between 1870 and 1910, the first period in American literary history to be called modern. The course may examine past critical debates as well as the current controversy over realism in fiction. Attention is given to such questions as what constitutes reality in fiction, as well as the relationship of realism to other literary traditions. Authors may include Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather.
Topic for 2022/23b: American Literary Realism and Naturalism: A Reading of Major American Novels Written Primarily Between 1870 and 1910. After the Civil War, the U.S. experienced increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth of industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population due to immigration, and a rise in middle-class affluence, which provided a fertile literary environment for writers interested in explaining these rapid shifts in culture. A grand explanatory narrative directs the plot and action of these novels. Authorial intentions give way to a set of laws or principles derived from the dominant ideologies that supported America’s maturation into a super-power: Social Darwinism, the Gospel of Efficiency (new Protestant work ethic), or Imperialism (new Manifest Destiny). Surprisingly, the myth of American ‘progress’ is tested and found wanting in almost every book on the syllabus. In seeking scientific objectivity, writers plied a representational strategy focused on ‘hard facts’ and minute detail, which as often as not found the protagonist at odds with his or her environment. Though post-war, the terrain we cover is embattled: race riots, strikes, downward economic mobility, criminality, and homelessness. Shut out of the canon by reason of changing fashions in literary tastes, the less familiar authors on the syllabus belong to the emerging protest novel. Authors include: Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Frank Norris, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Thorstein Veblen, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Wendy Graham.
This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 360 - Memory Work Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Toni Morrison describes, what we would call memory work, as “a kind of literary archeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” This undergraduate seminar focuses on the process of this reconstruction through major works in memory studies concerning the politics of remembering and forgetting, narrative and form, and philosophical and cognitive aspects of memory as well as recent interventions in the phenomenology of memory, the industry of memorialization, hauntology, indigenous protocol, and ruin as methodology from a global perspective. Students engage these topics through texts, visual culture, digital archives, and sound to gain a deeper understanding of the functions and purposes of memory. Finally, students are asked to grapple with and put into practice course material through a personal memory work project. Amy Chin.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: OTH -
AMST 366 - Art and Activism in the U.S. Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 366 , ART 366 , WFQS 366 ) Topic for 2022/23b: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining Anew. Vital recent examples of creative activism sited in the U.S.–particularly by artists of color–ask us to honestly reckon with the past, understand our present, and envision new futures. In this shared interdisciplinary seminar, we immerse ourselves in some of these essential artistic pursuits, studying the forms they take, the languages they use, and the critical interventions they make. Centering catalytic social works that create and hold space for brave reckoning and imagining anew, we ultimately ask: What is art capable of? Lisa Collins.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
AMST 374 - Ideas, Sound, and Story: Podcast Production
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 374 and PHIL 374 ) This is a course on narrative audio production that focuses on the study and production of various nonfictional genres in the American podcasting landscape, including audio documentaries, investigative reporting, confessionals, art pieces, storytelling for academic purposes, and others. Students learn the craft of audio production from getting tape, tape-logging, writing for audio, story and tape-editing, and sound-tracking. Students complete various technical assignments, and submit a final 10-minute piece, with regular progress graded throughout. In order to model the highly competitive nature of the podcasting production space today, students must be highly-motivated, highly-organized, and grading is very rigorous, with the highest of standards and strict deadlines.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 1-hour period.
Not offered in 2022/23.
Course Format: INT -
AMST 380 - English Seminar Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 380 and ENGL 380 ) Topic for 2022/23b: Then Whose Negro Are You?: On the Art and Politics of James Baldwin. When interviewers sought out some sense of James Baldwin’s ambition, the artist often responded, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” The forces constellated around Baldwin’s career made this hardly a simple declaration. The issue of becoming a writer was an arduous task in itself, so much so that Baldwin felt he had to leave the United States, particularly his adored Harlem, to do so. Getting in the way of his artistry was the nation’s troubled negotiation with its own soul: the US was trying to figure out what it wanted to be—an apartheid state? A nuclear dreadnought? A den of prudish homophobes? An imperial power? A beloved community? A city on the Hill? This course looks at all things Baldwin, or at least as many things as we can over a four-month period. It certainly indulges his greatest hits-his essays, Notes of A Native Son; his novel, Giovanni’s Room; his play, Blues for Mr. Charlie’s–and several other writings both published and unpublished. It does so with an eye toward understanding Baldwin’s circulation as a celebrated author and a public intellectual both in the mid-twentieth century and the present day. Tyrone Simpson.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
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