American Studies

Professors
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Elizabeth Alexander (on leave), David Blight, Jon Butler, Hazel Carby, George Chauncey, Edward Cooke, Jr., John Demos, Michael Denning, Wai Chee Dimock, Kathryn Dudley, John Mack Faragher, Glenda Gilmore, Langdon Hammer, Dolores Hayden, Jonathan Holloway, Amy Hungerford, Matthew Jacobson, Daniel Kevles, Lisa Lowe, Joanne Meyerowitz, Charles Musser (on leave), Alexander Nemerov, Patricia Pessar (Adjunct), Stephen Pitti (on leave [Sp]), Sally Promey, Joseph Roach, Michael Roemer (Adjunct), Stephen Skowronek, Robert Stepto, Harry Stout, John Szwed, John Harley Warner, Michael Warner, Laura Wexler (on leave)

Associate Professors
Susan Lederer (on leave [Sp]), Mary Lui (on leave), Alicia Schmidt Camacho (on leave), Michael Veal (on leave)

Assistant Professors
Seth Fein, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Diana Paulin, Caleb Smith, Kariann Yokota (on leave)

Fields include American literature, history, the arts and material culture, philosophy, cultural theory, and the social sciences.

During the first two years of study students are required to take twelve term courses; at least two of these each year must be in American Studies. The student’s program will be decided in consultation with the adviser and the director of graduate studies. In each of the two years, the student should take at least one seminar devoted to research or requiring a substantial original paper, and must achieve two grades of Honors, with an average overall of High Pass. Students will be required to show proficiency in a language other than English by conducting research in that language as a component of one of the courses taken during the first two years. Upon completion of course work, students in their third year of study are required to participate in a yearlong prospectus workshop (AMST 902 a&b). Open to all students in the program, the workshop serves as a forum for the discussion of selecting a dissertation topic, refining a project’s scope, organizing research materials, and evaluating work in progress. Intended to complement the work of the prospectus committee, the workshop is designed as a professionalization experience that culminates in students’ presentation of the dissertation prospectus at their prospectus colloquium. The workshop meets once a month.

Students should schedule the oral qualifying examinations in four fields, in the fifth term of study. Preparation, submission, and approval of the dissertation prospectus should be completed by the end of the sixth term, with a final deadline at the end of the seventh term with permission from the DGS. Students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. at the end of the third year, upon completion of all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus. Students in American Studies teach in the third and fourth years of study.

The American Studies Program also offers, in conjunction with the Department of African American Studies, a combined Ph.D. in American Studies and African American Studies. This combined degree is most appropriate for students who intend to concentrate in and write a dissertation on any aspect of African American history, literature, or culture in the United States and other parts of the Americas. For further details, see African American Studies.

The Department of American Studies also offers, in conjunction with the Program in Film Studies, a joint Ph.D. in American Studies and Film Studies. For further details, see Film Studies. Applicants to the joint program must indicate on their application that they are applying both to Film Studies and to American Studies. All documentation within the application should include this information.

M.Phil. See Degree Requirements.
M.A. (en route to the Ph.D.). The M.A. is granted upon the completion of six term courses (two grades must be Honors and the other four grades must average High Pass), and the successful completion of the language requirement. It can be petitioned for in the term following completion of the requirements. Candidates in combined programs will be awarded the master’s degree only when the master’s requirements for both programs have been met.
Master’s Degree Program. The basic requirements for this terminal degree are six term courses, including a special writing project, and the successful completion of the language examination. The project involves the submission of substantial written work either in conjunction with one course or as a tutorial that substitutes for one course. Students must earn a grade of Honors in two of their courses and an average grade of High Pass in the others.

For further information, see the American Studies Web site: www.yale.edu/amstud.

AMST 600a, American Scholars. Matthew Jacobson.
W 9.25–11.15
“What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body.…The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1837

A half-century ago American studies was a movement; now it is an institution. But it remains an anomaly in the academy, with neither method nor discipline: a modest program—not a department—that immodestly claims the space between disciplines, beyond disciplines, and perhaps encompassing disciplines.
In the early days, American studies was imagined as a home for Emerson’s American scholar; these days Emerson’s scholar is apt to be eyed more skeptically. Nevertheless the “philosophy of the street” and the “meaning of household life” continue to be “the topics of the time,” and American studies remains an oddly Emersonian place for nurturing intellectuals.

To explore the various kinds of American scholars and American studies, the American Scholars colloquium meets weekly on Wednesday mornings. Each week, we ask a member of the American Studies faculty: What are the key works that shape your intellectual project? What works pose the crucial issues? What works engage “what [you] would…really know the meaning of”? Each speaks briefly and leads a discussion of the works chosen. This course is restricted to American Studies graduate students, and first-years are required to register for the colloquium and to attend regularly. There is no writing assignment, and students receive a credit for participating.

AMST 610a, Reading and Reckoning Histories of Loss. Lisa Lowe.
T 3.30–5.20
In our seminar we consider the problems of legibility, recovery, and reckoning with respect to the histories of loss that are the conditions for U.S. modernity, yet often occluded by modernist notions of nation, history, text, author, and period. To avoid such pitfalls, some critics have elaborated “haunting” as a conceptual tool for understanding the unwritten aftermaths of war, conquest, coercion, and slavery, while others develop “mourning,” “memory,” and “redress” as generative hermeneutic activities after the failures of emancipation, reform, and enfranchisement. Some mobilize figures of the “witness” and the “survivor” for ethical or political representations of historical destruction and dispossession. We review the psychoanalytic notion of trauma in literary and historical studies, yet place alongside it the work of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Avery Gordon, Judith Butler, and Achille Mbembe as alternative theoretical models for conceiving the conditions and the aftermath of collective historical loss. Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories, Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s MeXicana Encounters, Lisa Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and essays in Loss (D. Eng and D. Kazanjian, eds.), Haunted by Empire (A. L. Stoler, ed.), and Perilous Memories (T. Fujitani et al., eds.) offer situated engagements with the capacity and limits of “national” history and subjectivity. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, John Sayles’ Lone Star, and other texts provide cultural media for examining different instances of haunting, mourning, and memory in modern imagination.

AMST 622a/623b, Working Group on Globalization and Culture. Michael Denning.
M 1.30–3.20
The Working Group on Globalization and Culture is a continuing collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory,” that has been running since the fall of 2003. The group is made up of graduate students and faculty from several disciplines. The working group meets regularly to discuss common readings, to develop collective and individual research projects, and to present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. There are a small number of openings for second-year graduate students. Students interested in participating should contact michael.denning@yale.edu.

AMST 641a, African American Poets of the Modern Era. Robert Stepto.
T 1.30–3.20
The African American practice of poetry between 1900 and 1960, especially of sonnets, ballads, sermonic, and blues poems. Poets studied include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. The classes include sessions at Beinecke Library for the inspection and discussion of original editions, manuscripts, letters, and other archival materials. Also AFAM 596a, ENGL 947a^u.

AMST 643a, Theorizing the Racial Formation of the United States in the Early Twenty-First Century. Jonathan Holloway.
T 1.30–3.20
A designated core course for students in the joint Ph.D. program; also open to students in American Studies and History. The interdisciplinary seminar includes readings from the fields of critical legal studies, cultural studies, literary history, history, politics, and sociology. Also AFAM 505a, HIST 772a.

AMST 645a, Caribbean Diasporic Intellectuals. Hazel Carby.
W 1.30–3.20
This course examines work by writers of Caribbean descent from different regions of the transatlantic world. In response to contemporary interest in issues of globalization, the premise of the course is that in the world maps of these black intellectuals we can see the intertwined and interdependent histories and relations of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Thinking globally is not a new experience for black peoples and we need to understand the ways in which what we have come to understand and represent as “Caribbeanness” is a condition of movement. Literature is most frequently taught within the boundaries of a particular nation, but this course focuses on the work of writers who shape the Caribbean identities of their characters as traveling black subjects and refuse to restrain their fiction within the limits of any one national identity. We practice a new and global type of cognitive mapping as we read and explore the meanings of terms like black trans-nationalism, migrancy, globalization, and empire. Diasporic writing embraces and represents the geopolitical realities of the modern, modernizing, and postmodern worlds in which multiple racialized histories are inscribed on modern bodies. Also AFAM 723a, CPLT 949a.

AMST 648b, Transnational Imaginaries. Hazel Carby.
W 1.30–3.20
We traverse the boundaries of conceptual, disciplinary, historical, and theoretical imaginings of the transnational. How the transnational has been imagined is posed as a series of questions rather than as a fixed definition: for example, what constitutes the transnational; how do we think the transnational; why should we think in terms of the transnational; and what is the relation or difference among the transnational, the cosmopolitan, and globalization? We consider creative responses to the consequences of the unquenchable, demonic thirst of European and American powers for the control of trade, land, and resources, attempts to render visible what Amitav Ghosh refers to as “the results of the five hundred years of pure, undistilled violence and terror unleashed in the name of modernity.” We analyze the spatial, temporal, and historical dimensions of the creation of literary and visual narratives which seek to represent the displacement of peoples, the formation of diasporas, the invention and reinvention of subjects and subjectivities, and the politics of knowledge and power. Final paper. Also AFAM 749b, WGSS 735b.

AMST 662b, Research Topics in American Literature. Wai Chee Dimock.
T 9.25–11.15
A broad survey of genres and methods in the field, with equal attention to historical processes (war, migration, modernization) and to salient analytic terms (race and gender; word, image, and music; nation and globe). Authors include Anne Bradstreet, Olaudah Equiano, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Leslie Silko, Octavia Butler.

AMST 674b, Black Travel and Transnationality. Naomi Pabst.
Th 1.30–3.20
This course examines literary and critical writings on African American and black diasporic travel and transnational movement. Emphasizing issues of representation and narrative strategy, we will explore the history of black transnational border-crossing and its influence on the cultural, political, and ideological parameters of black identity. Course establishes the forms, varieties, conflicts, and dilemma’s of black transnational movement, travel, and tourism transhistorically. Also AFAM 726b.

AMST 675b, Performativity. Diana Paulin.
T 1.30–3.20
What does it mean to perform identity? The graduate seminar addresses this question through the study of theories of performance and performativity in order to come to a working definition of these terms and to apply this critical framework to multiple sites of cultural production (both historical and contemporary), including the stage, the page, the screen, the street, and the courtroom. Racial performance, because of its inextricable link with the body, serves as a point of entry to this study, since performativity and performance highlight both bodily conditions and discursive systems that construct and produce racial identity, simultaneously. We consider how race is performed in and through its intersection with other categories of identity, such as sexuality, gender, and nation. Along these lines, we evaluate how the lens of performance and performativity might aid in the process of critiquing, reconfiguring, and resisting restrictive formulations of race and identity, as well as generate space for more productive possibilities. Authors include Judith Butler, Rachel Lee, Anna Deveare Smith, Harry Elam, Jose Munoz, Sadiya Hartman, Joseph Roach, and Karen Shimakawa. Also AFAM 747b.

AMST 700a, Introduction to the Historiography of the United States. John Mack Faragher.
TTh 9.25–11.15
Readings and discussion of a scholarly work on U.S. history from the settlement era to the present. Members of the department faculty visit the class on a rotating basis. Also HIST 700a.

AMST 705b, Readings in Religion and American History, 1600–1990. Harry Stout.
M 9.25–11.15
This introductory graduate readings course assesses interrelations between religion and American society from 1600 to 1990. Concentration on religion’s successes and failures in shaping American society from the Puritans to modern neoconservative fundamentalism. Readings in primary and secondary sources; development of bibliographical skills. Also HIST 720b, RLST 705b.

AMST 709b, Research in Twentieth-Century United States Political and Social History. Glenda Gilmore.
Th 3.30–5.20
Projects chosen from the post-Civil War period, with emphasis on twentieth-century social and political history, broadly defined. Research seminar. Also AFAM 709b, HIST 736b.

AMST 714a, Readings in Twentieth-Century United States Political and Social History. Glenda Gilmore.
Th 1.30–3.20
Recent trends in American political history from the 1800s, with an emphasis on the social analysis of mass politics and reform. Also AFAM 706a, HIST 735a.

AMST 715a, Readings in Nineteenth-Century American History, 1820–1877. David Blight.
T 1.30–3.20
This course explores recent trends and historiography on several problems through the middle of the nineteenth century: sectionalism; expansion; slavery and the Old South; northern society and reform movements; Civil War causation; the meaning of the Confederacy; why the North won the Civil War; the political, constitutional, and social meanings of emancipation and Reconstruction; violence in Reconstruction society; the relationships between social/cultural and military/political history; problems in historical memory; the tension between narrative and analytical history writing; and the ways in which race and gender have reshaped research and interpretive agendas. Also AFAM 764a, HIST 715a.

AMST 722b, Research Seminar in Nineteenth-Century United States History. David Blight.
W 1.30–3.20
Students in any field of American history are welcome. Some class sessions focus on matters of craft: research techniques; styles of writing narrative and analysis; judging scholarly work; and philosophical dimensions of doing history in the early twenty-first century. Primary focus of the course is for each student to complete his or her own major research paper. Also AFAM 757b, HIST 722b.

AMST 734a, American Art in the Democratic Age, 1830–1860. Alexander Nemerov.
W 1.30–3.20
How did democracy and capitalism affect American visual culture of the mid-nineteenth century? How did artists portray the market revolution and the place of art within it? What was the relation between American art of that period and kitsch? Is there a poetic complexity to kitsch, or is it truly a nullity? Considering questions like these, we reassess the cultural significance of painters such as William Sidney Mount and sculptors such as Hiram Powers. Period writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, and Poe provide some guidance. Also HSAR 734a.

AMST 737a, Craft and Design in Post-World War II America. Edward Cooke, Jr.
W 3.30–5.20
In the two decades following World War II, economic prosperity and cultural optimism led to the golden age of American industrial design and the expansion of craft education programs in the universities. The term “designer/craftsman” was a respected label. Yet, by the 1970s, crafts, design, and art were three separate spheres. This seminar draws on period writings and artifactual examination to explore the interconnections of craft and design in the 1950s, their subsequent fragmentation, and recent attempts to build connections. Also HSAR 737a.

AMST 738b, Readings in Western and Frontier History. John Mack Faragher.
W 9.25–11.15
An introduction to classic and recent work on the history of North American frontiers and the region of the American West, focusing on relations between indigenous and invading peoples, the formation of settlement societies, state formation in the context of colonization, and post-colonial reverberations. Also HIST 738b.

AMST 746b, Research in Sociocultural Anthropology: Ethnographic Writing and Representation. Kathryn Dudley.
W 1.30–3.20
This course examines the representational practices that inform the doing and making of ethnography, broadly construed as the depiction of social life in the past and present. We consider classic and contemporary approaches to ethnography as a literary form as well as explore precedents and possibilities in the visual and performing arts. Also ANTH 502b.

AMST 765a, Race and Rights in the Twentieth Century. Stephen Pitti, Jonathan Holloway.
M 1.30–3.20
This research seminar explores topics in U.S. history related to demands for political rights by African Americans, Latinos, and others, and to the broader articulations and social movements linked to race and ethnicity in the twentieth century. Also AFAM 767a, HIST 766a.

AMST 770b, Research on Gender and Sexuality. George Chauncey, Joanne Meyerowitz.
Th 1.30–3.20
Students conduct research in primary sources and write original monographic essays on the history of gender and sexuality. Readings include key theoretical works as well as journal articles that might serve as models for student research projects. Also HIST 770b, WGSS 750b.

AMST 777a, Research in U.S. International and Transnational Histories. Seth Fein.
T 7–8.50 P.M.
Emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches to researching and writing the history of the United States outside the United States and the history of other nations within the United States. Term project is a publishable, article-length essay. Also HIST 758a.

AMST 778a, Reconstruction from the Right. Daniel Kevles, Michael Graetz.
W 2.30–4.20
Research seminar. Centering on the 1970s, an examination of changes in policy and society that moved the United States from the liberalism of the Kennedy-Johnson years to the conservatism of the Reagan era. Topics to be considered include the backlash against the women’s and the civil rights movements; deregulation; tax and economic policies; the rise of the religious right; the federalization of crime; the new immigration and regional migrations; the emergence of the personal computer, biotechnology, and reproductive technologies industries; and energy, environment, and globalization. Also HIST 778a, LAW 20460, PLSC 814a.

AMST 786a, Readings in the History of Gender. Joanne Meyerowitz.
W 1.30–3.20
Selected topics in women’s and gender history with emphasis on U.S. history. Themes include changing conceptions of sex, gender, womanhood, manhood, femininity, and masculinity; the language of gender as a constitutive part of various social hierarchies; class, racial/ethnic, regional, and national differences; and gendered participation in religion, labor, politics, war, and social reform movements. Readings, writing assignments, and classroom discussions address recent historical literature, historiographic trends and debates, and theoretical and methodological approaches. Also HIST 744a, WGSS 744a.

AMST 790a, Narrative and Other Histories. John Demos.
W 7–8.50 p.m.
An exploration through readings and discussion of the recent “literary turn” in historical scholarship. Reading include history, fiction, and some theory. In addition, a month-long practicum focuses on writings by course participants. Also HIST 790a.

AMST 796a, Capitalism and Culture. Jean-Christophe Agnew.
W 9.25–11.15
This is a reading-intensive seminar that explores the historical intersections between capitalism and culture in the United States and elsewhere. Subjects include the history of political economy; the slave trade, the family, and the invention of “free labor”; the corporation and the invention of “free enterprise”; gender and the place of the invisible economy; managerialism, virtualism, hypercapitalism, and the experience economy. Theoretical readings range from Marxist and neomarxist treatments of capitalism, commodification, and culture to more recent contributions by scholars associated with feminist criticism, the new economic criticism, the new economic anthropology, and the new economic institutionalism. Also HIST 796a.

AMST 798a, The Culture of the Gilded Age. Cynthia Russett.
W 1.30–3.20
Although the politics of the Gilded Age may seem somewhat jejune (who today has lively memories of Chester A. Arthur or James Garfield?), its society and culture were undergoing dramatic and challenging developments. Industrialization and urbanization brought new immigrants to our shores; labor unions grew and flexed their muscle in a series of major strikes. In the world of thought the impact of Darwinism was still being absorbed, especially in the new academic disciplines of the social sciences: sociology, economics, and psychology. Some important names from the period: William James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry George, Andrew Carnegie, W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, Edward Bellamy, Samuel Gompers (and, of course, many more). Research seminar. Also HIST 726a.

AMST 809b, Reading the Visual Culture of American Religions. Sally Promey.
Th 3.30–5.20
This introductory graduate readings course invites critical engagement with scholarship concerning the visual cultures of American religions. The course is organized to consider multiple practices, experiences, and expressions of religion in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present, and to elicit examination of objects as well as texts.

AMST 818a^u, Masters of Documentary: Errol Morris. Charles Musser.
W 2.30–4.20, screenings T 7 p.m.
Focuses on the work of one of America’s foremost documentary filmmakers, with a systematic viewing and analysis of his films. Situating his work in relationship to contemporary filmmakers whose work he evokes as exemplary. Also FILM 723a^u.

AMST 851b, Problems of Secularism. Michael Warner.
W 9.25–11.15
This course is both theoretical and historical. Over the past ten years, a debate has opened up about the nature of secularism. It focuses on the viability of secular governance in the current conditions of globalization and violence. How closely is secular governance tied to the Christian culture from which it emerged? Or to the liberal frameworks that are its dominant justification? To what extent is it colonial in nature? This question has led to a reassessment of the Euro-American history as well, renewing basic methodological problems. How do we know “religion” when we see it? How did it come to be possible for people in Europe and America to understand themselves as outside of Christendom? What role is played in this history by modern disciplines of knowledge, including literary cultures of critical reading? Our theoretical discussion is guided by a reading of a major new book by Charles Taylor, to be titled The Secular Age. Some of our case studies are geared to texts he discusses. Others focus on the anomalous history of secularism and Christian nationalism in the United States, from the development of an evangelical public sphere in the eighteenth century through the vicissitudes of the “godless Constitution,” the prophetic dimension of abolition, and the postchristian projects of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Students are strongly encouraged to take part in two major conferences at Yale in April: one devoted to Taylor and The Secular Age, the other to violence and religion in colonial America. Also ENGL 854b.

AMST 883a, Race and Medicine in America, 1800–2000. Susan Lederer.
T 1.30–3.20
An examination of race and medicine in America, primarily but not exclusively focused on African Americans’ encounters with the health care system. Topics include slavery and health; doctors, immigration, and epidemics; the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the use of minorities as research subjects; and race and genetic diseases. Also HIST 761a, HSHM 637a^u, WGSS 725a.

AMST 884a, The Cultures of American Medicine since 1800. John Harley Warner.
T 1.30–3.20
Reading and discussion of recent scholarly literature on medicine in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Themes include the moral, social, political, aesthetic, and epistemological grounding of orthodox and alternative cultural authority; the role of the marketplace in shaping professional identities and patient expectations; gender, ethnicity, race, religion, class, and region in the construction and management of illness and in the production and circulation of medical beliefs; interplay between lay and professional understandings of the body; nationalism, citizenship, and colonialism; and representations of medical institutions, practitioners, and practices in visual media, including film. May be taken as a research seminar with permission of the instructor. Also HIST 925a, HSHM 740a.

AMST 899b, Research Seminar: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Langdon Hammer.
W 1.30–3.20
This course provides a broad overview of twentieth-century poetry in English and an introduction to research in the field. In addition to reading and discussing influential works of literary criticism and theory from Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era and Harold Bloom’s A Map of Misreading to recent statements on lyric poetry by Allen Grossman, Susan Stewart, and Mutlu Blasing, students plan individual archival projects on specific literary magazines, poetic movements, and poets, using the Beinecke and other libraries, and share their research in workshop-format meetings. We discuss Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens in the first weeks of the term; poets studied later depend on student choices. Also ENGL 901b.

AMST 902, Prospectus Workshop. DGS.
M 12–1:30
Upon completion of course work, students in their third year of study are required to participate in a yearlong prospectus workshop. Open to all students in the program, the workshop serves as a forum for the discussion of selecting a dissertation topic, refining a project’s scope, organizing research materials, and evaluating work in progress. Intended to complement the work of the prospectus committee, the workshop is designed as a professionalization experience that culminates in students’ presentation of the dissertation prospectus at their prospectus colloquium. The workshop meets once a month.