Global Arc

This course engages critically with the artifacts and archives of contemporary American culture, inviting students to view, read, and create these artifacts with an eye toward what they tell us about how the United States represents itself and its citizens through various genres including theatre, musicals, film, TV, music, graphic and written novels, games, and the internet. Who are the heroes and villains in contemporary U.S. pop culture? How are family, work, and romance represented across races, genders and sexualities? How are economics and social class portrayed? Do the narratives we consume still promise an American Dream?

This course studies how the environment has related to the construction of race and racism. By focusing on case studies around the globe, we will learn about the racial politics of waste, food consumption, energy, and climate change in diverse social and cultural contexts. Since the course moves chronologically through different historical periods, students will learn how dominant ideas about race and the environment have evolved over time. They will also examine how capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism have recreated environmental racism as a structure and a technology of power.

In Education and Inequality, students examine the relationship between inequality and public schooling in the United States. Students explore the educational practices and organizational structures through which inequality is produced and reproduced inside schools and how social class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other social differences shape educational outcomes. Additionally, we consider students' different experiences in schools and the ways in which individuals and groups respond to inequality. With a few exceptions, the focus is on K-12 public education with emphasis on urban schools in low-income communities.

This course considers how environmental racism shapes urban inequality. We will discuss how racial and gender bias have conditioned proposals for the future of cities and the planet. We will also address how people who have experienced racial and gender marginalization have formed relationships with land, water, and non-human life in response to crisis. We will address environmentalist work in geography, critical race studies, city planning, queer and trans theory, and disability studies along with novels, journalism, and film to analyze how ideas of race and gender and questions of urban and planetary futures have informed one another.

In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. How have Sondheim's musicals conversed with American history and American society since the mid-20th century? How do Sondheim's musicals represent America and Americans, and how have various productions shaped and re-shaped those representations? We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.

An analysis of the written and oral literary traditions developed by Native Americans. American Indian and First Nation authors will be read in the context of the global phenomenon of indigeneity and settler colonialism and in dialogue with each other. Through readings, discussions, and guest speakers, we will consider linguistic, historical, and cultural approaches. This course offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people.

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 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 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.

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?