Department of American Studies

This course uses changes in the American family over the past century as a way of understanding larger processes of social change. Honors version available.

This course uses archaeological and historical scholarship to consider the histories of the Southern Indians from the Mississippian period to the end of the 18th century.

This course explores birth and death as essential human rites of passage that are invested with significance by changing and diverse American historical, cultural, ethnic, and ethical contexts. Honors version available.

This course examines 20th-century American Indian art within the context of critical topics in the field such as sovereignty, colonialism, modernity, modernism, gender, and representation.

This research seminar provides a grounding in American Indian law, history, and literature. Students will conduct research for presentation on Wikipedia.

This seminar looks at the culture, history, memories, and meanings of mobility for a diverse range of people in southern cultures. In particular, students will read and discuss books and articles by scholars on roads, cars, access, and diverse southern cultures.

Students will develop their own sense of Black feminist thought and practice through exploring the lives and works of several key Black feminist figures with ties to North Carolina: Harriet Jacobs, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, Nina Simone, Jaki Shelton Green, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Students will put these figures in context of Black feminist thought and will do hands-on activities that reflect Black feminist practices including poetry, dance, and painting.

The linguistic landscape of the United States in historical and contemporary perspective: American English dialects, language maintenance and shift among Native American and immigrant groups, language politics and policy.

This course examines how food representations establish, reproduce, and also counter cultural and social assumptions about individuals and communities. We will consider the impact of the history of advertising in America on our national food habits and practices, the issue of authenticity in food and its intersection with the American immigrant food experience, the complicated gender politics of resistance baking movements, and the literary voices that shape ideas about American food politics and ethics.

Special topics course. Content will vary each semester. Honors version available.

Interdisciplinary examination of two centuries of American culture, focusing on moments of change and transformation.

Examines the role of memory in constructing historical meaning and in imagining the boundaries of American cultural communities. Explores popular rituals, artifacts, monuments, and public performances. Previously offered as AMST 384.

An interdisciplinary introduction to Native American history and studies. The course uses history, literature, art, and cultural studies to study the Native American experience.

Introduction to food studies covering a variety of topics including how food was consumed over history, land use and aquaculture, food in the arts, food and culture in the American South, food politics, and nutrition science. Previously offered as ANTH 175.

A study of interdisciplinary methods and the concept of American Studies with an emphasis on the historical context for literary texts.

A study of interdisciplinary methods and the concept of American studies with an emphasis on historical and cultural analysis.

Introduces students to the disciplines comprising American Indian studies and teaches them how to integrate disciplines for a more complete understanding of the experiences of American Indian peoples.

An examination of both the mythical and real American South and its diverse peoples through the study of the region's archaeological, geographical, and environmental history integrated with the study of the region's sociology and its economic, political, intellectual, and religious history.

An examination of Southern cultural identity, literary imagination, and sense of place with an emphasis on the fiction, folklore, foodways, art, architecture, music, and material culture of the American South.

This course is an introduction to "animal studies," through animal rights, animal welfare, food studies, and the human/animal distinction in philosophical inquiry. We will read work from dog and horse trainers, and explore the history of the American racetrack. This course builds a moral and ethical reasoning skill set.

This course explores the history of the death penalty in America between the colonial era and the present.

This course explores the historical, sociocultural, and legal significance of 20th- and 21st-century comedy in the United States. We will consider comedy as public voice; examine how humor constructs and disrupts American identities; and discuss the ethics of the creative process, performance, and reception. Honors version available.

Students will learn and practice the art of stand up comedy via structured assignments, group workshops, live performances and conversations that build on topics introduced in AMST 225. Class size is limited to 15 students. Instructor permission required.

Covers the histories of American Indians east of the Mississippi River and before 1840. The approach is ethnohistorical.

Deals with the histories of Native Americans living west of the Mississippi River. It begins in the pre-Columbian past and extends to the end of the 19th century.

This course introduces students to a tribally specific body of knowledge. The tribal focus of the course and the instructor change from term to term. Honors version available.

This course deals with the political, economic, social, and cultural issues important to 20th-century Native Americans as they attempt to preserve tribalism in the modern world.

Offers a historically, politically, and culturally contextualized examination of Native America through oral, written, and visual storytelling. Covering a wide range of genres, including oral narratives, novels, and visual arts, this introductory course showcases the fluidity of Indigenous artistic forms and their continuing centrality in Native America.

The first goal of this super course is to give students real tools for how to address multiple modes of difference and identity formations like race, gender, class, and sexuality.

A survey of the Jewish experience in the United States from colonial times to the present, that examines connections and disjunctures with the experiences of Jews in the Americas more broadly. Topics include the social patterns and communal constructs of the various Jewish immigrations; modes of political engagement; and the diverse cultural practices through which American Jews have shaped their identities.

This course examines the diversity of Muslims in America and the variety of creative expression created throughout this long history of transcultural involvement.

This course examines the history and culture of Jewish women in America from their arrival in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the present and explores how gender shaped this journey.

This course examines a broad range of topics (race, class, sexuality, gender, and/or disability for example) that focus on power in the United States. We will move across a range of interdisciplinary sources and historical moments to understand who and what we are to one another in our national landscape.

We remember the 1950s as a period of relative tranquility, happiness, optimism, and contentment. This course will consider a handful of countertexts: voices from literature, politics, and mass culture of the 1950s that for one or another reason found life in the postwar world repressive, empty, frightening, or insane and predicted the social and cultural revolutions that marked the decade that followed.

Investigates the significance of Herman Melville as a representative 19th-century American author. Includes issues of biography, historical context, changing reception, cultural iconography, and the politics of the literary marketplace.

Examines how representations of captivity and bondage in American expression worked to construct and transform communal categories of religion, race, class, gender, and nation.

Explores the significance of tobacco from Native American ceremony to the Southern economy by focusing on changing attitudes toward land use, leisure, social style, public health, litigation, and global capitalism.

What aesthetics and politics do Black people produce when their gaze is turned inward? This course examines representations of the inner lives of African American people in media such as film, visual art, and music to understand the Black private sphere. This survey course is intended for intermediate level undergraduate students.

Examines the relationship between cinema and culture in America with a focus on the ways cinema has been experienced in American communities since 1896.

Interdisciplinary examination of the married condition from colonial times to the present. Themes include courtship and romance, marital power and the egalitarian ideal, challenges to monogamy.

In this course, we will explore the ways in which food shapes the politics and ethics of individuals and communities and is an increasingly important marker of social and cultural identities. Lessons for this course focus on the symbolic functions of food in the construction of personal, cultural, political, and community identity.

This course will take students on a journey through some of the key moments in "American" food studies and its beginnings across a range of disciplinary homes: the study of nutrition and food security; the study of food systems and the vocabularies that subtend them.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this course explores the historical role and implications for the US and other nations with respect to transnational environmental issues including climate change, sustainability, and migration.

This course explores the social history and culture of crime, deviant behavior, and punishment in America between the pre-revolutionary period and today. It traces the history of longstanding institutions; examines elements of American history from a criminal justice perspective; and seeks historical origins and continuities for contemporary problems.

This course investigates how we make and signify meaning through images, ranging from art to advertising to graffiti, and provides the critical tools to understand the visual worlds we inhabit.

Introduces students to how legal education is conducted in the United States by mimicking the "1L" experience, or first year in law school. It is broken into units that represent classes every law school teaches in the first year: contracts, property, torts, criminal law, civil procedure, and constitutional law.

This course examines Jewish American literary works in various genres from the nineteenth century to the present day. Together, we will interpret and critique the aesthetic and moral "worldview" of each work while simultaneously situating these works in the historical and cultural contexts in which they were created.

Special topics in American studies.

An interdisciplinary seminar in American studies addressing ethical issues in the United States.

Topics in American history in American studies. Honors version available.

Topics in arts and literature from the perspective of American studies.

This course explores crucial challenges to privacy by changing technological, governmental, and corporate practices of surveillance. We will explore how technological and biometric tools are employed to capitalize upon and control populations. We will examine constitutional rights and privacy laws as well as practices and protections that can enable us to become more ethical citizens in the digital age.

An interdisciplinary approach to the history of adoption and related practices in the United States, employing the provisions society has made for the welfare of children deemed to be orphans as a powerful lens into changing values and attitudes toward childhood, race, class, gender, reproduction, parenthood, and family.

This course will move through prevalent critical theories in American Studies. Students will come away with advanced understanding of theoretical concepts and be able to ascertain both the advantages and pitfalls of their landscapes. Students will become familiar with critical race (postcoloniality and settler-colonialism, for example), feminist, "queer" theories, historical materialism, new materialism, political economy, just to name a few. Previously offered as AMST 420.

This course focuses on the contemporary art and social change movement. We will learn how to use site-specific and performative art interventions to make invisible borders, boundaries, and other issues visible and innovatively to create engaged and sustained dialogue.

Through the examination of a variety of song cultures and its artistic and cultural expressions, we explore the interdisciplinary methods of American studies and contemporary approaches to the study of American society and cultures, with an emphasis on musical performance. In partnership with Carolina Performing Arts, students will learn about the sociocultural, aesthetic, and critical components of song cultures associated with social change, exploring identity, diversity, privilege, cultures, and justice while participating in community service.

This course is about Hollywood's portrayal of Indians in film, how Indian films have depicted Native American history, and why the filmic representation of Indians has changed over time.

This course seeks to understand how American Indian individuals and communities survived a century that began with predictions of their disappearance. To answer that question, we take a broad view of politics and activism, exploring everything from the radical protest to art and everyday forms of resistance.

This course examines this art form's development by indigenous writers as a mode of storytelling that explores the continuing effects of settler colonialism upon indigenous peoples and foregrounds indigenous notions of land, culture, and community.

An interdisciplinary exploration of Native America during the "long 1960s" (1954-1973), this course focuses on how American Indian experiences intersected with and diverged from those of non-native groups via topics such as the youth movement, women's rights, nationalism, civil rights, radical protest, and creative expression.

Analyzes material culture created by Native artists throughout the United States and portions of Canada. Examines the role of art and artists and how material culture is studied and displayed. Students study objects, texts, and images, exploring mediums such as painting, sculpture, basket making, beadwork, and photography.

This is a project-based course that explores settler colonial appropriations of American Indian knowledge. Students then use new technologies as a means of engaging in the digital re-representation and return of this knowledge. Instructor and topics vary.

This course will explore the Indigenous world in various settler colonial contexts. We will come to understand the communities who claim Indigenous status, commonalities among Indigenous peoples, and differences that create important distinctions in places like the U.S. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. We will also learn how Indigenous peoples around the world continue to respond to various aspects of colonialism, including but not limited to law and policy, representation, art, and human rights.

The course addresses the history and sociology of Asian immigration and experience in the United States, as well as the formation of diasporic identities among Asian Americans.

Drawing from Asian American Studies and Asian Studies, the course explores the political histories and lived experiences of Southeast Asians and Southeast Asian Americans in North Carolina. Students will consider issues relevant to NC Southeast Asian communities such as food justice, labor organizing, mental health support, anti-racism work, transnational connections, etc. Course materials will include both written academic works and first-person narrative accounts from local community members.

This course will survey Asian American graphic form: written and/or drawn works from the late 1900s to present. We will begin by considering orientalism in both American popular culture and modernist aesthetics. We will then examine works by Asian American writers and artists in a range of mediums including graphic memoir and novels, comics, animation, manga and anime, illustrated books, zines, textual art, and visual poetry.

Traces the origins of detective fiction and major developments in the history of the genre with a focus on women authors and protagonists. Examines literary texts including fiction and film, with close attention to historical and social contexts and to theoretical arguments relating to popular fiction, genre studies, and gender.

An interdisciplinary seminar that explores stylistic choices and representational modes available to LGTBQ artists in the United States since 1950. We will relate shifts in cinematic and literary representations and aesthetic strategies to developments in political, social, and economic life.

Students explore, analyze, and research the politics and ethics of major food debates in contemporary American culture, including the history of the National School Lunch program, the proposed Universal Basic Income's effect on the restaurant business, and public food/body shaming. Studying, discussing in depth, and forming their own opinions on these debates allows students to apprehend the myriad ways in which food is embedded in local, regional, national, and global narratives and identities. Restricted to Food Studies Minors and American Studies majors.

Seminar in American studies topics with a focus on historical inquiry from interdisciplinary angles.

How the language, ideas, and cultural products of religious outsiders responded to and influenced mainstream ideas about what American religious communities could and should look like in terms of gender, race, economics, and faith-based practices.

Permission of the department. Directed reading under the supervision of a faculty member.

Explores history and theory of volunteerism and service learning in America. Includes a weekly academic seminar and placement in a service learning project.

We will engage such topics as race, immigration, cultural tourism, and memory to consider conceptions of the South. Students will research a subject they find compelling and write a 20- to 25-page paper.

This course examines how indigenous artists have negotiated, shaped, and pursued markets and venues of display ranging from "fine" art markets, galleries, and museums to popular markets associated with tourism.

This course explores the relation of American Indian poetry and music in English to the history and culture of indigenous communities and their relation to the United States.

Covers the definition and documentation of communities within North Carolina through research, study, and field work of communities. Each student produces a documentary on a specific community. Previously offered as AMST 275. Honors version available.

Examines the ways in which visual works - paintings, photographs, sculpture, architecture, film, advertising, and other images - communicate the values of American culture and raise questions about American experiences.

This course explores ethnicity in the South and focuses on the history and culture of Jewish Southerners from their arrival in the Carolinas in the 17th century to the present day.

This course explores, through lecture and discussion, the experiences of everyday life from 1600 through the early 19th century, drawing on the evidence of architecture, landscape, images, and objects.

A reading seminar that examines multiple critical perspectives that shape the reception and interpretation of objects, with a particular emphasis on things in American life.

Permission of the department and the instructor. Internship. Variable credit.

Graduate or junior/senior standing. Examines American civilization by studying social and cultural history, criticism, art, architecture, music, film, popular pastimes, and amusements, among other possible topics.

This course gives an introduction to the American government's law and policy concerning tribal nations and tribal peoples. We examine a number of legal and political interactions to determine how the United States has answered the "Indian problem" throughout its history and the status of tribal peoples and nations today.

This course explores the history of Native interaction with the American legal system in order to understand how the law affects Native peoples and others today. Students are encouraged (but not required) to take AMST 510 before enrolling in this course.

This class will explore the intersection between race and American law, both in a historical and contemporary context. It will ask how both of these major social forces have informed and defined each other and what that means for how we think about race and law today.

Introduces the theory, politics, and practice of historical work conducted in public venues (museums, historic sites, national parks, government agencies, archives), directed at public audiences, or addressed to public issues.

Directed independent research leading to the preparation of an honors thesis and an oral examination on the thesis. Required of candidates for graduation with honors in American studies who enroll in the class once permission to pursue honors is granted.

Directed independent research leading to the preparation of an honors thesis and an oral examination on the thesis. Required of candidates for graduation with honors in American studies who enroll in the class once permission to pursue honors is granted.

Provides an introduction to speaking, listening, reading, and writing in the Cherokee language. This course is part of an ongoing effort to revitalize Cherokee--an endangered language indigenous to North Carolina. Students will acquire basic conversational Cherokee and learn to read and write the Sequoyah syllabary.

This course expands on skills from CHER 101. We will begin reading longer texts in the Cherokee syllabary and learn to produce more complex narrative structures. Students will move toward discussing others around them, with an eye toward discussing the general world.

This course reviews and deepens grammatical knowledge from CHER 101 and 102. We will increase extemporaneous speaking and produce new written texts in the Cherokee syllabary. Students will discuss the world around them in addition to the self and others.

This course completes the study of basic Cherokee grammar. We will polish conversational fluency and proficiency, read and create new texts in the Cherokee syllabary. Students will discuss current events and offer opinions.

Introduction to linguistics; the Cherokee sound system from a phonetic and allophonic view; grammatical categories, morphology, syntax.

What are the roots of hip-hop's masterful rhymes and tongue-tripping flow? This seminar explores hip-hop's poetic prehistory, looking to the rhyming and oral poetics that have long defined African American experience. In so doing, we'll uncover hidden histories of everyday eloquence and explore spoken/sung poetry's role in marking cultural identity. Honors version available.

Special topics course. Content will vary each semester.

Theories and examples of how Caribbean people live, act, and see themselves within various cultural, social, economic, and political contexts across time. Attention to North American views of the Caribbean.

An introduction to the study of creativity and aesthetic expression in everyday life, considering both traditional genres and contemporary innovations in the material, verbal, and musical arts.

A study of selected past geographies of the United States with emphasis on the significant geographic changes in population, cultural, and economic conditions through time. Previously offered as FOLK/GEOG 454. (GHA)

A study of fairy tales as historical artifacts that reveal the concerns of their times and places, as narrative structures capable of remarkable transformation, and as artistic performances drawing upon the expressive resources of multiple media, intended to challenge conventional presuppositions about the genre.

This cross-cultural study of art focuses on the forms, images, and meanings of paintings, drawings, and carvings produced by the Diyin Dine'é (Navajo), the Dogon (Mali, West Africa), and the Haida, Kwagiutl, Tlingit, and Tshimshian (northwest coast of North America).

A journey into hidden worlds of southern meaning, exploring the region from the experiential lens of African Americans and the South's indigenous peoples, as a way of rethinking the question, "What does it mean to be a Southerner?" Students will explore focused issues each semester through intensive, group-based field work projects.

Permission of the instructor. An introduction to the diversity of African American beliefs, experiences, and expressions from the colonial era to the present. Exploration will be both historical and thematic.

In this Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) class, students will explore the legacy of racial terrorism in North Carolina. Students will search archival sources to discover the family histories of lynching victims, tracing those families to the present, interviewing their descendants, and working with communities to build public awareness of - and perhaps public memorials to - the victims of racial violence.

Students explore, analyze, and research the politics and ethics of major food debates in contemporary American culture, including the history of the National School Lunch program, the proposed Universal Basic Income's effect on the restaurant business, and public food/body shaming. Studying, discussing in depth, and forming their own opinions on these debates allows students to apprehend the myriad ways in which food is embedded in local, regional, national, and global narratives and identities. Restricted to Food Studies Minors and American Studies majors.

This course explores rituals, festivals, and public cultural performances as forms of complex, collective, embodied creative expression. As sites of popular celebration, conflict resolution, identity definition, and social exchange, they provide rich texts for folkloristic study. We consider how local and global forces both sustain and challenge these forms.

Religion studied anthropologically as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon in the works of classical and contemporary social thought. Honors version available.

The formation and transformation of values, identities, and expressive forms in Southeast Asia in response to forms of power. Emphasis on the impact of colonialism, the nation-state, and globalization.

Integration of data from ethnographic and archaeological research with pertinent historic information. Familiarization with a wide range of sources for ethnohistoric data and practice in obtaining and evaluating information. Pertinent theoretical concepts will be explored.

This course examines cultural understandings of health, illness, and medical systems from an anthropological perspective with a special focus on Western medicine.

This seminar examines Jewish stories, humor, ritual, custom, belief, architecture, dress, and food as forms of creative expression that have complex relationships to Jewish experience, representation, identity, memory, and tradition. What makes these forms of folklore Jewish, how do source communities interpret them, and how do ethnographers document them? Previously offered as FOLK 380/FOLK 505/JWST 380/JWST 505.

Anthropological and historical studies of cultural constructions of bodily experience and subjectivity are reviewed, with emphasis on the genesis of the modern individual and cultural approaches to gender and sexuality.

What is the relationship between distinctive features of urban environments and the expressive forms found in those settings? This course explores the impact of the urban setting on folk traditions. We examine how people transform urban spaces into places of meaning through storytelling, festival, ritual, food, art, music, and dance.

Explores performance traditions in African American music, tracing development from African song through reels, blues, gospel, and contemporary vernacular expression. Focuses on continuity, creativity, and change within African American aesthetics. Previously offered as FOLK 610/AAAD 432.

What makes an object "Jewish"? This seminar examines how we think about, animate, repurpose, and display "Jewish" objects in the public realm, cultural institutions, religious spaces, and the home. We consider how makers and users negotiate objects' various meanings within the domains of prayer, performance, entertainment, and exhibition. The class curates a final group exhibition of Jewish material culture based on original fieldwork.

Study of cultural variation in styles of speaking applied to collection of ethnographic data. Talk as responsive social action and its role in the constitution of ethnic and gender identities.

Oral storytelling may seem old-fashioned, but we tell true (or possibly true) stories every day. We will study personal narratives (about our own experiences) and legends (about improbable, intriguing events), exploring the techniques and structures that make them effective communication tools and the influence of different contexts and audiences.

Topics vary from semester to semester.

Research at sites that vary.

Permission of the department. Topic varies depending on the instructor.

An examination of Babylonian, Canaanite, Egyptian, Hittite, and Sumerian texts from the prebiblical era, focusing on representative myths, epics, sagas, songs, proverbs, prophecies, and hymns. Honors version available.

Examines the culturally and historically variable ways in which individuals constitute themselves as cis- or transgendered subjects, drawing upon extant expressive resources, modifying them, and expanding options available to others. Performance of self as the product of esthetically marked or unmarked, everyday actions.

This course combines readings and field work in oral history with the study of performance as a means of interpreting and conveying oral history texts. Honors version available.

Explores the history of music in the American South from its roots to 20th-century musical forms, revealing how music serves as a window on the region's history and culture.

An issue-oriented study of Southern folklore, exploring the ways that vernacular artistic expression (from barns and barbecue to gospel and well-told tales) come to define both community and region.

Introduces students to the uses of interviews in historical research. Questions of ethics, interpretation, and the construction of memory will be explored, and interviewing skills will be developed through field work.

Intensive study and practice of the core research methods of cultural and social anthropology.

Permission of the instructor. Exercises (including field work) in learning to read the primary modes of public action in religious traditions, e.g., sermons, testimonies, rituals, and prayers.

Topic varies from semester to semester.

Permission of the instructor. For honors candidates. Ethnographic and/or library research and analysis of the gathered materials, leading to a draft of an honors thesis.

Writing of an honors thesis based on independent research conducted in FOLK 691H. Open only to senior honors candidates who work under the direction of a faculty member.