Global Arc

This course examines changes in Americans' understanding of and response to death from the Puritans through the post-modern era, with special attention to how ethnicity impacts traditions and stories surrounding death. We will examine both elegies and gothic literature about the "undead," particularly the grim reaper, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, and zombies. We will study the material culture related to death, including cemeteries and places where the dead are prepared for burial or cremation. The timid should beware, as we will take a field trip to the Princeton cemetery to do iconographic and seriation studies.

This seminar explores the understandings of the US through an analysis of race, class, gender, and national identity in films and TV series. It questions the role of authenticity in film and TV representation, focusing on works that examine how Americans define themselves and each other. Students screen, discuss, and write about recent films and TV series made by Americans who intervene in simplistic narratives of their own diverse cultures. Through the creation of their own essay films, students compare these contemporary works with earlier media to investigate the ways American culture(s) has evolved onscreen, and how far it still must go.

How do indigenous cosmologies intersect with American literary histories and archives? This course disrupts familiar accounts of American origins on the eastern seaboard through creation stories and oral literature from the Pacific Coast of North America. Through course readings, we travel from Hawaii to Alaska. We also travel to Juneau, Alaska over spring break. We think about the Indigenous cosmologies present in American archives through a conceptual vocabulary that includes ecologies, beach crossings, oral histories, and diasporas.

This course looks at the religious traditions as a source of what Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) calls survivance, the active presence, continuance of stories, and renunciation of dominance by indigenous peoples. Our comparative approach will examine the pre and post contact traditions of the Mexicas in the Valley of Mexico followed by the Algonquian communities of early New England (e.g. Wampanoag, Mohegan, Narragansett, Pequot, et al). Sources will include the wide range of ways religion was preserved and augmented including rituals, texts, oral tradition, and material culture.

From charismatic criminals to flawed freedom fighters, villains and antiheroes often blur together in ways that both disturb and fascinate us. This course explores the morally ambiguous figures who captivate the American imagination across film, television, politics, and social media. Focusing on the antihero--a character who defies conventional morality while still drawing our empathy--we'll trace how these figures reflect, reject, and distort American ideals. Through screenings, readings, and discussion, we'll explore how they unsettle our sense of right and wrong.

This class looks at the contribution of Jews to historical development of the genre and techniques of the Graphic Novel in the United States. Reading of graphic novels would be contextualized within postmodernism and the changes in the notions of childhood, heroism, gender, and Jewishness in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture.

This course offers a survey of the Native American novel in its historical and critical context. Beginning with the publication of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1975), we read novelistic form as a counternarrative to US origins stories. We explore the political context of the American Indian movement in relation to its literary renaissance. We revisit the past, including the nineteenth-century Indian Boarding School system and the "Reign of Terror" in the Osage Nation. We also consider the Native American novel in relation to film and poetry to think holistically about the arts from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This seminar traces the "ghetto" and the Holocaust as central concepts in Jewish and Black historiography. In comparative perspective, U.S. Black ghettos from World War II to the present will be studied, as well as other urban areas that have been characterized as ghettos such as gay neighborhoods, Chinatowns, and barrios.

This course explores Hollywood's fascination with imagining the end of the world. From Cold War mushroom clouds to submerged cities, zombie pandemics, and even the occasional meteor, Hollywood has dramatized the apocalypse in ways that reveal American society at the end of its rope. This course examines how apocalyptic films and series reflect political tensions, technological fears, religious narratives, and climate anxieties in different historical moments in the United States. Students will analyze works that span disaster blockbusters, speculative sci-fi, climate allegories, "slow violence" dramas, and documentary realism.

Through a set of American Studies lenses, this course examines histories of collecting and displaying American art and culture in Northeast American art museums. Utilizing the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, students will engage with the ways aspects of American history and culture are portrayed, expressed, and shaped by art and in art collections. Notably, students will also consider the experiences of museum-goers and the impact of American art on its contemporary audiences.