Global Arc

Bob Dylan is one of the finest musical artists America has produced. Over a career that spans more than half a century, he has composed lyrics that estimable critics put on the same level as the work of Byron or even Shakespeare. His words and melodies have proved how art of the highest intelligence can also win wide commercial appeal. And his performances as well as his songs are deeply rooted in American experience and myth. This seminar will closely examine Dylan's work, and assess the claims made about it, while tracing its many circuitous connections to American history and culture.

Why did three American genres become classics in the same twenty-year period, 1936-1956? Part of the answer lies in global disruptions that unsettled codes of behavior. Part lies in film innovations that altered cinema itself. But more than this intersection of social and formal transformations, the decisive answer lies in a handful of directors who reconfigured gendered relations in three generic forms. The surprising correspondences that emerge among these classic films, if also the obvious divergences even within single genres, that will focus our discussion.

This course will explore U.S. performance in the 1960s, from Broadway to the avant-garde to community and political theaters, in the context of the decade's social, cultural and intellectual politics. We'll examine production practices and artists' intentions, scripted and unscripted "texts," and critical and public reception of these works. Our goal will be to construct a complex and nuanced "thick description" of performance and politics during this remarkable period, while also questioning the value and limitations of decade-oriented historiography.

Over the past three and a half centuries Jewish immigrants have described America both as "the promised land" and "the land of impurity." This course examines these conflicting descriptions as it explores developments in Jewish life in America from the mid seventeenth century through the late twentieth century.

In this seminar, we will explore the relationship between race, racism and politics throughout twentieth-century America. Topics will include segregation; immigration and assimilation; the role of racial politics in World War II and the Cold War; the civil rights movement and white massive resistance; Black Power and the white backlash; and contemporary politics up to the election of Barack Obama.

This seminar will explore how we negotiate the distance between ourselves and others through text messages. Texts sustain an ambient intimacy that is increasingly redefining borders that range from the interpersonal--via anonymous mental health support--to the international--via reporting platforms for immigrant communities. What technical and social expectations of privacy do we operate with when sending a point-to-point message? How do novelists incorporate text messages into works of fiction? What does it mean that Frank Ocean can sing, "you text nothing like you look"?

This seminar will explore the many meanings of suburbia in modern American history. First, we will examine the onset of the urban crisis and the attendant rise of suburbia as an attractive alternative for many. We will then focus on the ways in which the movement to suburbs intersected with the civil rights movement. Finally, we will examine how a diverse array of social and political movements of the postwar era -- from liberal causes like feminism and environmentalism to the mobilization of modern conservatism -- sprang from suburbia.

This seminar explores how writers and artists--alongside scientists and activists--have shaped American environmental thought from 1980 to today. The seminar asks: How do different media convey the causes and potential solutions to environmental challenges, ranging from biodiversity loss and food insecurity to pollution and climate change? What new art forms are needed to envision sustainable and just futures? Course materials include popular science writing, graphic narrative, speculative fiction, animation art, documentary film, and data visualization along with research from anthropology, ecology, history, literary studies, and philosophy.

An examination, first, of the place of slavery and opposition to slavery in the framing and ratification of the Constitution in 1787-88, and, second, of how the constitutional politics surrounding slavery led to the Civil War and Emancipation.

Song. Dance. Man. Woman. These are the basic components of the Broadway musical theatre. How have musical theatre artists, composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and designers worked with these building blocks to create this quintessentially American form of art and entertainment? This course will explore conventional and resistant performances of gender and sexuality in the Broadway musical since the 1940s. Why are musicals structured by love and romance?