Introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies by examining concepts such as culture, identity, cultural practices, and globalization, as well as theories underlying these concepts. Engages key themes, especially constructions of difference and identity, cultures of everyday life, and America and the world.

An introduction to American popular culture, its historical development, and its role as a reflection of and influence on our culture and society.

Historical survey of American material culture. Ways of describing and interpreting accumulated material evidence (e.g., buildings, town plans) introduced by stressing relationship between artifact and culture.

Examines the construction, operation, and meaning of cultural mainstreams and margins in a range of contexts, spaces, and times in the U.S. Using a variety of primary sources, research methods, and interdisciplinary scholarship, we will explore how Americans make and assign meaning to cultural mainstreams and margins. We will examine how and why cultural margins and mainstreams shift over time and what their consequences have been for social policies, laws, power relations, and national identity.

Key concepts and theories in Native American Studies beginning with an overview of the field and some of its foundational readings and history, then will move into an understanding of Native American identity and representation and a discussion of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. The course will outline past and present genocidal practices that seek to eliminate Native people and Indigenous responses to those structures such as the concept of survivance, Native feminisms, and theories of Indigenous resurgence. The course seeks to move students through an understanding of past and present structures affecting Native American people in the United States and Canada and move into readings that highlight Native articulations of present and future agency. While the focus of the course is Native peoples with the United States and Canada, understanding Indigenous histories and concepts always includes a hemispheric and transnational analysis.

Explores how Asian Americans have historically been represented in the U.S. by Hollywood, and in turn, how independent and Hollywood Asian American filmmakers have represented themselves. It covers the history of racial, gendered, and sexualized representations of Asian Americans in Hollywood, as well as Asian American filmic responses within and outside Hollywood. It also introduces how four basic tools of film analysis mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound work together to create meaning in moving images. It examines how these elements are put together in three different types of films by Asian American filmmakers: narrative, documentary, and experimental. How films function in society to circulate ideas that reproduce and challenge stereotypes about Asian Americans.

Students devise and carry out a research program using the collections at the Smithsonian Institution or some other cooperating museum, working under joint supervision of a museum professional and a university faculty member.