Prerequisites: Application required. See American Studies website.

What historical, political, and social factors have given rise to the way we understand disability in contemporary American culture? How have philosophers, policy makers, authors and artists framed the political and ethical debates surrounding the status of disability? How have imaginative representations in literature, film, and the visual arts contributed to and/or challenged those understandings? Given that nearly every one of us will be disabled at some point in life, these questions could not be more important. This course seeks to address them by considering a broad array of texts, including philosophical debates about morality and ethics, history, and literary, filmic, and visual representations.

Prerequisites: Application required. See American Studies website.

This course will examine the impact of Wall Street on American life from the time of the American Revolution through the dot.com boom of the 1990s, its collapse at the turn of the millennium, and the current financial meltdown. Class discussions and readings will range widely to explore the ways the Street has been integrated into the country�s economic, political, and cultural affairs, and examine how Americans have handled their fundamental ambivalence about whether the Street has been a force for good or evil. We will focus on some of the principal iconic representations of the Street as they have appeared in cartoons, political tracts, movies, economic treatises, sermons, novels, histories, and other cultural artifacts.

Prerequisites: Application required. Please see American Studies website.

In this seminar we trace the growing crisis over slavery and disunion as the United States moved toward war against itself. Readings include fiction, poetry, memoirs, political discourse, and journalism by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Jacobs, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, and Herman Melville. We consider the perspectives of slaves and slavemasters, North and South, men and women, committed partisans and neutral observers-- in an effort to understand what was at stake in the rising discord during the decade that preceded Civil War.

Inquiry into the values and cultural expressions of the people of the United States. Through an examination of literature, history, social thought, and the arts--with a special emphasis on film--we will explore how modern Americans have understood and argued about their country's promise and perils. Lecture, discussion sections, and weekly film screenings.Discussion Section Required.

Prerequisites: Application required. Please see American Studies website.

This seminar explores the history of American gender in the last one hundred years through American film. Motion pictures have played a unique role in shaping and reflecting new ideals and images of womanhood and manhood in the modern United States. Throughout the twentieth century, movies and their stars have born a complex relationship to transformations affecting the lives of American men and women. We will examine motion pictures and movie stars as primary sources that, when juxtaposed with other kinds of historical evidence, indicate changes in the gendering of work, leisure, sexuality, family life, and politics. Additionally, we will consider how the changing institutional history of American film production during the twentieth century connected to the gendered images it sold. For much of the period under review, Hollywood used specific genres to target particular audiences and movies were not afforded the protection of free speech. This made films and movie stars peculiarly reflective of, and vulnerable to, the nation�s changing fantasies and fears regarding sexuality and gender roles. Students will write several short papers and complete a research project on a film of their choice. */Please note: /*A weekly class screening of a film is required for seminarians.*/ /*

Prerequisites: Application required. See American Studies website.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, the group of writers known as the New York Intellectuals--many, though not all of them, first generation American Jews--created a new style of intellectual discourse in America: politically radical but independent of party dogmas, committed to experiment and complexity in literature, and highly personal even when dealing with abstract issues. In this seminar we will read the major works, in several genres, of the leading New York Intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Clement Greenberg, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling; and discuss some of the central themes and debates that energized their work, including Communism and anti-Communism, the relation of the avant-garde to the mass audience, the promise of American liberalism, and the influence of Jewishness on the intellectual's vocation.

Prerequisites: Application required. See American Studies website.

This course will examine the influence of race and poverty in the American system of confronting the challenge of crime. Students will explore some history, including the various purposes of having an organized criminal justice system within a community; the principles behind the manner in which crimes are defined; and the utility of punishment. Our focus will be on the social, political and economic effects of the administration of our criminal justice system, with emphatic examination of the role of conscious and unconscious racism, as well as community biases against the poor. Students will examine the larger implications for a community and culture that are presented by these pernicious features. We will reflect on the fairness of our past and present American system of confronting crime, and consider the possibilities of future reform. Readings will include historical texts, analytical reports, some biography, and a few legal materials. We will also watch documentary films which illuminate the issues and problems.