American Studies

231 Hall of Graduate Studies, 432.1186
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Jean-Christophe Agnew

Director of Graduate Studies
John Mack Faragher (230 HGS, john.faragher@yale.edu)

Professors
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Richard Brodhead, Jon Butler, Hazel Carby, Edward Cooke, Jr., Nancy Cott, Michael Denning, Wai Chee Dimock, Kai Erikson, John Mack Faragher, Glenda Gilmore, Dolores Hayden, Matthew Jacobson, Vera Kutzinski, Charles Musser, Alexander Nemerov, Michael Roemer (Adjunct), Stephen Skowronek, Robert Stepto, Harry Stout, John Szwed, Alan Trachtenberg, John Harley Warner, Bryan Wolf

Associate Professors
Kathryn Dudley, Joshua Gamson, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Thomas Otten, Patricia Pessar (Adjunct), Jace Weaver, Laura Wexler

Assistant Professors
Elizabeth Dillon, Jonathan Holloway, Amy Hungerford, Guillermo Irizarry, Robert Johnston, Mary Lui, Sanda Lwin, Diana Paulin, Stephen Pitti, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Steven Stoll, Willie Strong, Michael Trask, Vron Ware, Kariann Yokota

Lecturers
Wes Davis, David Musto

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

Special Admissions Requirement
A writing sample of reasonable length is required with the application.

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
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, one each year a designated "core" course. 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 either proficiency in one language tested in two successive stages, or proficiency in two languages each tested once. After completing both parts of the language requirement, a student should schedule the oral qualifying examinations in four fields, in the fifth term of study. Preparation, submission, and approval of the dissertation prospectus are completed by the end of the sixth term, with a final deadline at the end of the seventh term. Students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. upon completion of all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus.

Combined Ph.D. Program: American Studies/African American Studies
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.

Master's Degrees
M.Phil. See Graduate School 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 first part of the language requirement. It can be petitioned for in the term following completion of the requirements.

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 first stage 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/.

Courses
AMST 606a, The Figure of "The Indian" in American Literature and Culture. Alan Trachtenberg. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
The seminar examines interpretations of the native peoples of North America in writing, thought, art, and popular culture in the United States from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Against a background of the history of contact and conflict between European Americans and Indians, the class considers how changing conceptions and images of native peoples have played a formative role in the making of an "American" literary tradition. Reading and discussion, and research in Beinecke collections. Also ENGL 899a.

AMST 640a, Problems in the Study of African American Literature. Elizabeth Alexander. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
This seminar examines both nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literary texts, and while students gain a comprehensive understanding of the breadth of the field, we focus on several key issues or "problems" central to the study of African American literary history. We read variously from slave narratives, autobiographies, poetry, novels, nonfiction essays, and ANTHologies, joining close readings of literary texts with the interdisciplinary contexts of history, cultural criticism and theory, and other art forms. Also AFAM 595a, ENGL 940a.

AMST 641a, Twentieth-Century African American Poetry. Robert Stepto. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
The Afro-American practice of poetry between 1900 and 1960. Poets include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden. Also AFAM 596au.

AMST 643a, Theorizing the Racial Formation of the United States in the Late Twentieth Century. Hazel Carby. Monday 1.30-3.20
This interdisciplinary seminar includes readings from the fields of anthropology, critical legal studies, cultural studies, literary history, history, politics, and sociology. Also AFAM 505a.

AMST 644b, Race and Memory. Alicia Schmidt Camacho. Thursday 1.30-3.20
A seminar in critical theory and methods for studying social movements and popular, vernacular cultures. Issues of modernity and "development," racialization, class formation, sexual and gender difference in the Americas through readings in subaltern studies, postcolonial theory, and ethnic studies. The course pairs primary texts with secondary, critical texts. We address the evocations of collective, popular memory by communities to recall or contest the condition of subaltern status. The course focuses on the Americas and U.S. imperial projects dating from the nineteenth century to the current moment. Also AFAM 632b.

AMST 652b, Research Seminar in Twentieth-Century U.S. Cultural Studies and Cultural History. Michael Denning. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
Seminar members develop and present a substantial essay in twentieth-century U.S. cultural studies or cultural history. Readings are drawn from contemporary scholarship in fields seminar members are researching; particular attention is paid to the forms of cultural studies writing and the relation between textual interpretation, historical narrative, and archival research.

AMST 663a, Problems in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Wai Chee Dimock. Wednesday 10.30-3.20
This course, a broad survey of nineteenth-century American literature, is also an introduction to the vocabularies and strategies of reading. Focusing on the phenomenal world of each text as a linguistic construct, we examine its constellation of words through a variety of critical lenses, from racial and gender politics to narrative form, semantic resonances, and literary genealogies. Works by Emerson, Melville, Stowe, Douglass, Hawthorne, Whitman, James, Twain, Wharton. Each primary text is read in conjunction with at least one critical essay. Also ENGL 851a.

AMST 672a, Race and Representation in U.S. Literature and Culture. Diana Paulin, Sanda Lwin. Thursday 3.30-5.20
This seminar introduces theories of difference through the lens of Asian American and African American literary and cultural productions. We draw form theoretical readings in fields such as gender studies, performance/theater studies, postcolonial studies, and legal studies. This comparative approach interrogates conventional black/white paradigms that tend to dominate inquiries on race in American Studies. By reading foundational texts in critical theory alongside theories of difference, we look at subject formation in relation to the intersecting categories of race, national, gender, sexuality, and class. Topics considered may include racial/sexual minorities, history and memory, alliances across racial and national boundaries, and the politics of inclusion/exclusion. Also AFAM 746a, ENGL 942a.

AMST 680au, Reading Race and Gender. Vron Ware. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
An exploration of feminist writing that demonstrates how race and gender are constituent of each other. Comparative examples from the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Themes include: theories of race and gender formation; gender and white supremacism; sex and race; and class, ethnicity, and domestic service. Also SOCY 528au.

AMST 700a, Introduction to the Historiography of the United States. Nancy Cott. Tuesday 12.30-4

AMST 701a, Race and Races in American Studies. Matthew Jacobson. Friday 1.30-3.20
This reading-intensive seminar examines influential scholarship across the discipline on "the race concept" and racialized relations in American culture and society. Rather than attempting vainly to cover the field exhaustively, the focus here is upon selected themes, approaches, methods, debates, and problems in a variety of scholarly genres. Major topics include the cultural construction of race; race as both an instrument of oppression and an idiom of resistance in American politics; the centrality of race in literary, anthropological, and legal discourse; the racialization of U.S. foreign policy; "race mixing" and "passing," vicissitudes of "whiteness" in American politics, the centrality of race in American political culture; and "race" in the realm of popularly cultural representation. Writings under investigation include classic formulations by scholars like Winthrop Jordan and Ronald Takaki, as well as more recent efforts by Cheryl Harris, Kevin Gaines, Tomas Almaguer, and Louise Newman. Seminar papers give students an opportunity to explore in depth the themes, periods, and methods which most interest them. Also AFAM 687a, HIST 751a.

AMST 703au, Introduction to Jazz Studies. John Szwed. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
An overview of the music and its cultural history, with consideration of the influence of jazz on the visual arts, dance, literature, and film; an introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies. Also AFAM 557au, ANTH 681au.

AMST 704a, Religion and Modernity in Europe and America, 1850-2000. Jon Butler. Tuesday 10.30-12.20
Examines the confrontation of religion with the modern in both Europe and America from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Readings concentrate on the meaning of modernity for religious belief and practice and on the implications of urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of technocratic society for sustaining religious faith. Among issues concerned are the fate of miracles, religion and modern politics, ethnicity, gender, "therapeutic" religion, and religion's apparent persistence despite the advance of secularization, at least in America, and its potential to assess the alleged uniqueness of "modernity." Also HIST 750a, RLST 523a.

AMST 706b, Readings in African American History to Emancipation. Jennifer Baszile. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
This seminar surveys classic and recent scholarship on the African diaspora in North America. Topics include regional and temporary varieties of slavery and freedom, gender, religion, race, work, resistance, and emancipation. Attention to urban and rural communities. Also AFAM 758b, HIST 708b.

AMST 709b, Research in Twentieth-Century American Political and Social History. Glenda Gilmore. Wednesday 10.30-12.20
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 710bu, Autobiography in America. Robert Stepto. Monday 1.30-3.20
At least a dozen North American autobiographies, mostly from the "American Renaissance" to the present, studied. Discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship. Slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence, relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation. Also AFAM 588bu, ENGL 948bu.

AMST 714a, Readings in Twentieth-Century American Political and Social History. Glenda Gilmore. Thursday 10.30-12.20
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 723b, Language and Landscape: Rhetorics of American Painting 1848-1870. Alexander Nemerov. Thursday 1.30-3.20
In the middle of the nineteenth century, American landscape painters sublimated the dark energies of earlier artists, notably Thomas Cole. They also helped make landscape a "national" art ostensibly more expressive of the country than, say, the genre painting of the late 1830s and 1840s. This sublimated imagery-of smooth fields, sunny days, and distant mountains-grew in tandem with the era's bourgeois art criticism, and more broadly with the middle-class American novel in these years. This course studies not just the interrelation between landscape and language in mid-nineteenth-century American painting-the role of Ruskin, of The Crayon, and of art criticism generally-but more precisely whether or not the era's paintings may be felt to be "written" or "spoken." Did mid-century landscape painters understand the structures of their paintings in terms of the era's smooth, polished, and unperturbed prose? Did they see painting mountains instead of saloons or pumpkin patches as an avoidance of "dialect" in favor of polite middle-class speech? If so, what to make of paintings that speak in both tongues, that use the language both of the cabin and the grand sublimatory view out the cabin's window? Also HSAR 723b.

AMST 730a, The Home Front: American Visual Culture 1941-1945. Alexander Nemerov. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
During the war years, Hollywood made many propaganda films, and painters made many pictures aiming to benefit the war effort; in this seminar, however, we examine films and paintings which manifestly have little to do with the war-films such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Shadow of a Doubt, The Ghost Ship, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Body Snatcher; paintings such as Gorky's Liver is the Cock's Comb and One Year the Milkweed-in order to understand something of a "home front culture": a culture of diversions and distractions that is yet haunted by a pathos, a deep awareness, of the bloodshed all around. Also HSAR 730a.

AMST 738a, Reading and Research in Western and Frontier History. John Mack Faragher. Wednesday 10.30-12.20
An introduction to recent work on the history of North American frontiers and the region of the American West, and original work in primary materials. Held in the Beinecke Library, the seminar examines documents from Yale's outstanding collections of Western Americana. Students elect to produce a substantial research essay or a dissertation prospectus. Also HIST 738a.

AMST 739b, Approaches to Native American Studies. Jace Weaver. Tuesday 3.30-5.20
Examination of the variety of approaches to the field of Native American studies with special attention to its development. Readings and methods from anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and religious and cultural studies discussed.

AMST 740a, Native American Law and Policy. Jace Weaver. Thursday 4-6
Understanding United States laws and policies toward Native Americans is fundamental to any understanding of Native/non-Native relations in this country. This course examines such laws and policies from the colonial period to the present. Attention is also given to tribal justice systems.

AMST 741au, Apocalyptic Religion in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Jace Weaver. Thursday 1.30-3.20
This course examines millennial and "end-time" beliefs in a variety of cultures around the world. Attention given to Jewish and Christian texts as well as Native American traditions, African and Pacific Islander movements, and modern manifestations such as Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, and Heaven's Gate.

AMST 749a, Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Kathryn Dudley. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
Through an examination of contemporary controversies in anthropology-Mead/Freeman, Sahlins/Obeyesekere, Chagnon/Tierney-this course explores the range of representational, methodological, and theoretical issues involved in the practice of ethnography.

AMST 763bu, The Anthropology of Sound. John Szwed. Thursday 1.30-3.20
The socially mediated nature of sound, and the cultural consequences of technologies of sound transmission, modification, and recording. Topics include the pre- and postindustrial soundscapes; audio ethnography; the art of noise; synaesthesia; problems of originality and plagiarism (covers, sampling, mixing, machine music, etc.); world music; audio imperialism and terrorism; musical utopias; imaginary soundscapes. Also ANTH 587bu.

AMST 767b, Magic Realism in the Americas. Vera Kutzinski. Monday 10.30-12.20
This seminar focuses on remappings of the subject within twentieth-century counterrealist writing from different parts of the Americas. Authors include Isabel Allende, Robert Antoni, Erna Brodber, Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Janet Frame, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville, Juan Rulfo, and Lawrence Scott. Also AFAM 759b, CPLT 854b, ENGL 922b.

AMST 790b, Narrative, and Other, Histories. John Demos. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
An exploration, through readings and discussion, of the recent "literary turn" in historical scholarship. Readings include history, fiction, and some theory. In addition, a month-long "practicum" focuses on writings by course participants. Also HIST 790b.

AMST 793b, Power: Historical and Theoretical Approaches. Jean-Christophe Agnew. Thursday 10.30-12.20
An introduction to the widely different ways in which power and its correlative concepts (domination, coercion, oppression, authority, legitimacy, hegemony, resistance, etc.) have been treated by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political theorists. Case studies test the various approaches in different contexts. Also HIST 793b.

AMST 812bu, American Documentary Film and Photography. Charles Musser, Laura Wexler. Wednesday 3.30-5.20, screenings Tuesday 7
Examination of a series of historical moments in which documentary plays a significant cultural role. Topics include the relationship between photographic and cinematic practices and theories generated by makers and critics; filmic constructions of gender, race, class, and national identity in the twentieth century; and changing conceptions of photographic truth.

AMST 814a, Problems in Film History. Charles Musser. Tuesday 3.30-5.20, screenings Monday 7
Engages a range of historiographical issues in film studies, including the roles of technology, exhibition, and spectatorship as well as topics such as intermediality, and intertextuality. Through a focus on international early cinema and American race cinema of the silent period, a range of methodological approaches are considered. Particular attention is give to the interaction between scholars and archives.

AMST 827a, Executive Politics and the Presidency. Stephen Skowronek. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
An examination of the structure and operations of the American presidency. Topics include the political development of the presidential office, the politics of leadership, relations with Congress and the Court, and the exercise of political power within the EOP. Also PLSC 820a.

AMST 828b, American Political Development. Stephen Skowronek. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
Examination of the broad patterns of political change and institutional development in American national government from 1789, with particular attention to recurrent problems of party-building and state-building. Also PLSC 828b.

AMST 841b, Transatlantic Print Culture and the Early American Novel. Elizabeth Dillon. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
An examination of the relation between the form of the novel and conditions of colonialism and postcolonialism in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century. Rather than reading early American novels as allegories of nation foundation, we consider these texts in relation to the transatlantic print public sphere in which they circulated, and the transatlantic economy in which many of the characters in these novels circulate as well. Readings include a range of theoretical works concerning the rise of the novel, the emergence of the print public sphere, and the development of colonialism, as well as novels from both sides of the Atlantic by Behn, C. B. Brown, W. H. Brown, Cooper, Defoe, Edgeworth, Foster, Richardson, Rowlandson, Rowson, Scott, Tenney, and Tyler. Also ENGL 841b.

AMST 842b, American Theory: Cultural Criticism and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. Michael Trask. Wednesday 10.30-12.20
Focus on the theory-function in modern U.S. culture, with particular emphasis on the decades between the Great War and Vietnam. We look at both critical and literary texts that actively take up the cause of theory, including those of Bourne, Mencken, Wilson, Rahv, Trilling, Howe, Dos Passos, Hurston, Ellison, Mailer, Friedan, Arendt, McCarthy, Bellow, Marcuse, Goffman, and Ginsberg; and at contemporary theorists of theory, including Jameson, Anderson, and Giddens. Topics include the place of "America" as an object of critical inquiry and the dominance of liberalism in American political thought. Also ENGL 917b.

AMST 860b, Modernity and Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture. Bryan Wolf. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
This course examines the relationship between "liberal culture," visuality, and modernity. It considers the privileged role played by seeing in the modern world, looking both at paintings and literary texts organized around questions of perception. In particular, the seminar focuses on the "dream of transparency," the way that seeing works ideologically to affirm the tenets of liberal belief; we examine both the construction and "deconstruction" of this dream. Topics include visuality and the public sphere; landscape and "depoliticized speech"; genre and hegemony; race and identity; managerial culture and disembodied vision. Painters examined include: Wright of Derby, Copley, Cole, Durand, Church, Mount, Bingham, Homer, Eakins. Writers include: Wheatley, Irving, Emerson, Poe, Douglass, Hawthorne, H. Wilson, Chestnutt. Methodological sessions are devoted to Barthes, Foucault, and Jameson. Also ENGL 951b.

AMST 869a, Research Colloquium in Women's and Gender Studies. Laura Wexler.
An interdisciplinary research seminar investigating contemporary theory and methods in Women's and Gender Studies. Requirements include a research paper, works-in-progress presentations, peer reviews, and reviews of the critical literature in a variety of humanities and social science fields.

AMST 870bu, Photography and Images of the Social Body. Laura Wexler. Thursday 7-8.50
Examination of different sets of photographic images-documentary, medical, and digital images; family snapshots; stereotypes and anti-stereotypes of race and gender; portraiture; advertising; industrial images; and art-in light of major writings on photographic representation. Study of how different ways of making and displaying images of the body invest it with culturally specific and historically informative meanings.

AMST 921a, Ralph Ellison in Context. Robert Stepto. Thursday 10.30-12.20
This seminar pursues close readings of Ralph Ellison's essays, short fiction, and novels, Invisible Man and Juneteenth. The "in context" component of the seminar involves working from the Benston and Sundquist volumes on Ellison to discern a portrait of the modernist African America Ellison investigated, with at least Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Romare Bearden also in view. The texts include Ellison, The Collected Essays, Flying Home and Other Stories, Invisible Man, Juneteenth; K. Benston, Speaking for You; E. Sundquist, Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; A. Nadel, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Also AFAM 563a, ENGL 921a.

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