American Studies

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

Chair
Jean-Christophe Agnew [F] (231 HGS, 432.1186, jean-christophe.agnew@yale.edu)
John Mack Faragher [Sp] (231 HGS, 432.1186, john.faragher@yale.edu)

Director of Graduate Studies
Wai Chee Dimock (231 HGS, 432.1186, wai.chee.dimock@yale.edu)

Professors
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Richard Brodhead, Jon Butler, Hazel Carby, Edward Cooke, Jr., John Demos (on leave [Sp]), Michael Denning, Wai Chee Dimock, Kathryn Dudley, John Mack Faragher (on leave [F]), Glenda Gilmore (on leave), Dolores Hayden (on leave [Sp]), Matthew Jacobson, Vera Kutzinski, Charles Musser (on leave [Sp]), Alexander Nemerov, Michael Roemer (Adjunct), Stephen Skowronek, Robert Stepto (on leave [F]), Harry Stout, John Szwed, John Harley Warner, Laura Wexler

Associate Professors
Thomas Otten, Patricia Pessar (Adjunct), Stephen Pitti

Assistant Professors
Jennifer Baszile (on leave), Elizabeth Dillon, Jonathan Holloway, Amy Hungerford, Guillermo Irizarry, Mary Lui (on leave), Sanda Lwin (on leave), Diana Paulin, Alicia Schmidt Camacho (on leave), Steven Stoll, 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. 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 normally 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. 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.

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 622a and 623b, Working Group on Globalization and Culture.   Michael Denning. M 1.30 and TBA
A continuing collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory,” inaugurated in the fall of 2003, for which first- and second-year students receive course credit. Through regular meetings throughout the year, we develop a program of reading, collective and individual research, dialogues with invited speakers, and a Web journal in which the work of the group is published. The general theme for the working group is culture and globalization, with three principal aspects: (a) 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; (b) 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; (c) 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, expertises, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. Initial organizing meetings: Monday at 1.30, others to be arranged.

AMST 640b, Problems in the Study of African American Literature.  Robert Stepto. M 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 595b, ENGL 940b.

AMST 643a, Theorizing the Racial Formation of the United States in the Late Twentieth Century.  Paul Gilroy. T 9.30–11.20
This interdisciplinary seminar includes readings from the fields of anthropology, critical legal studies, cultural studies, literary history, history, politics, and sociology. Also AFAM 505a, SOCY 644a.

AMST 648b, The Global Imaginary.  Hazel Carby. T 1.30–3.20
This interdisciplinary seminar discusses what is meant by globalization and the new world order. If globalization is a process currently dominated by the United States as empire, how do critical and dissenting intellectuals imagine alternative structures of citizenship and belonging? Final paper. Also AFAM 749b.

AMST 673b, Theorizing “Black” and “Asian” Intersectionalities in the United States.   Diana Paulin. W 1.30–3.20
This graduate seminar approaches racial formation and racial representation through the lens of Asian American and African American literary and cultural production. We read theoretical and primary texts from various fields, including performance studies, literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, in order to construct a critical apparatus for understanding race relationally rather than as strictly defined categories of identity that have, traditionally, been studied in segregated disciplines (such as black studies, whiteness studies, Asian and Asian American studies). We address the following topics: performance of identity, racial/sexual minorities and the politics of inclusion/exclusion, alliances across racial and national boundaries, diasporic identities, history and memory. We consider how a comparative approach might produce new methodologies for thinking about Asian American and African American representation comparatively. In doing so, we interrogate conventional black/white paradigms of race by looking at intersectionalities that unsettle binaries. Along these lines, we also account for the ways in which race intersects with other categories of identity, such as sexuality, gender, nation, and class. We study works by authors/artists such as Judith Butler, David Eng, Claudia Tate, Vijah Prashad, Jose Muñoz, Franz Fanon, Homi Bhaba, Kobena Mercer, Mira Nair, and Anna Deveare Smith. Also AFAM 722b.

AMST 674a, 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 explore the history of black transnational border-crossing and its influence on the cultural, political, and ideological parameters of black identity. The course establishes the forms, varieties, conflicts, and dilemmas of black transnational movement, travel, and tourism trans-historically. Also AFAM 726a.

AMST 700a, Introduction to the Historiography of the United States.  Jon Butler. TTh 10.30–12.20
Readings and discussion of 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 701a, Race and Races in American Studies.  Matthew Jacobson. W 10.30–12.20
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 713b, Race Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States.   Jonathan Holloway, Stephen Pitti. Th 10.30–12.20
This course examines a range of civil rights movements as they have been developed and articulated since 1919. Readings in the course pay particular attention to the contested nature of such movements, their multifaceted nature, and the deep social fissures they reveal along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Primary and secondary sources cover a range of methodological perspectives. Readings and discussion. Also AFAM 714b, HIST 754b.

AMST 715a, Readings in Nineteenth-Century American History, 1820–1877. David Blight. W 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 HIST 715a.

AMST 716a, Film and the Transformation of Theatrical Culture.  Charles Musser. T 3.30–5.20
Explores the transformation in American theater that resulted from the introduction of motion pictures. Cinema is examined as a theatrical form of entertainment that restructured both the theatrical world and spectatorship between 1895 and 1930. The unfolding interactions between stage and screen are considered through a variety of films and texts (plays, critical and theoretical writings). Adaptation is employed as a crucial lens for exploring this historical dynamic. Works by Belasco, Wilde, O’Neill, Porter, Griffith, Lubitsch, DeMille, and Micheaux. Also FILM 728au.

AMST 717a, Readings in Twentieth-Century American Political and Social History.  Jennifer Klein. Th 1.30–3.20
Readings in American social and political history from the late nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on political economy. Major topics include changing relationship between the state, economy, and communities over time; the role of social movements of the Left and Right in political, social, and economic transformations; definitions and boundaries of citizenship; development of social policy, labor policy and politics, and the “New Deal Order”; America’s rural and urban economies in regional, national, and international context. Also HIST 735a.

AMST 722b, Research Seminar in United States History.  David Blight. W 1.30–3.20
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/her own major research paper. Students in any field of American history are welcome. Also HIST 722b.

AMST 729b, American Furniture 1600 to the Present.  Edward Cooke. W 3.30–5.20
In-depth analysis of American furniture made over the past four centuries. Methodologies for the analysis of furniture are reviewed and developed through reading and close examination of objects in the Art Gallery collection. Such topics as materials, techniques, style, use, and market are stressed. Also HSAR 729b.

AMST 732b, Material Culture in Historical Research.  Kariann Yokota. W 3.30–5.20
The material objects people produce and consume provide rich texts for historical analysis. This seminar explores how the cultural meanings of objects have been analyzed and understood from various perspectives. Readings are interdisciplinary, including works by historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, sociologists, postcolonial scholars, writers, museum curators, and archaeologists. Topics of discussion include the role of material culture in the formation of national, ethnic, gender, and class identities. Also HIST 783b.

AMST 733b, Art, Sex, and the Sixties.  Jonathan D. Katz. M 3.30–5.20
Using the work of Andy Warhol as our ur-text, this graduate seminar maps the development of increasingly cool and ironic modes of art making against the heated and ideologically loaded social and political developments of the 1960s. Its central query concerns why a set of aesthetic practices that seemingly celebrated normative values (i.e., Pop art) were nonetheless elevated to dominance ahead of a range of more confrontational and oppositional strategies in line with the tenor of the times. Sexuality, its liberation and its suppression figure prominently in this inquiry into the paradoxical engendering of opposition through the citation of normative forms. Also HSAR 703b, WGST 730b.

AMST 738b, Reading and Research in Western and Frontier History. John Mack Faragher. T 10.30–12.20
An introduction to recent work on the history of North American frontiers and the region of the American West. Also HIST 738b.

AMST 748a, Field Methods and Research Design.  Kathryn Dudley. W 1.30–3.20
The course offers critical evaluation of the nature of ethnographic research. Research design includes the rethinking of sire, voice, and ethnographic authority. Also ANTH 501a.

[AMST 767b, Magic Realism in the Americas.]  

AMST 775a, Culture in U.S. International and Transnational Histories.  Seth Fein. M 11.30–1.20
Reading seminar that examines interdisciplinary approaches to the study of “culture” in relations between, within, and among the United States and other nations (mainly since 1900). Discussions and papers focus on comparing methodologies, using theory, doing research, writing history. Topics include globalization, Americanization, transnationalism, and hybridity; gender, national identity, international relations, and state formation; imperialism, postcolonialism, hegemony, and resistance; mass culture, political economy, foreign policy, and postmodernity. Also HIST 757a.

AMST 780b, American Legal History, 1880–1980.  Robert Gordon. MW 2.10–3.25
Selected topics in the modern history of American law, legal thought, legal institutions, and the legal profession. Examination, with an option (open to a limited number of students) to write a research paper based on primary sources. Also AFAM 760b, HIST 760b, Law 21063.

AMST 790a, Narrative, and Other, Histories.  John Demos. W 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 790a.

AMST 796b, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the History of Capitalism and Culture.  Jean-Christophe Agnew. W 10.30–12.20
A reading-intensive seminar that explores the historical intersections between capitalism and culture in the United States and elsewhere. Subjects range from the cultural construction of credit and risk, to cultural capital and class formation, gift and commodity exchange, law and the corporation, gender and the “invisible economy,” virtualism and the “experience economy.” Readings include both canonical treatments of capitalism and culture and more recent contributions by scholars associated with feminist criticism, the New Economic Criticism, and economic anthropology and sociology. Also HIST 796b.

AMST 864b, American Romanticism, 1799–1826.  Alexander Nemerov. Th 1.30–3.20
This course focuses on American visual and literary production in the Early Republic. Artists, writers, and other figures to be discussed include the Peale family, John Vanderlyn, Charles Brockden Brown, Benjamin Rush, William Rush, and Benjamin West. Attention throughout the course is on close analysis of paintings, sculpture, and literature. A term paper and a major in-class presentation are required. Also ENGL 864b, HSAR 735b.

AMST 870bu, Visuality and Violence.  Laura Wexler. W 7–8.50
(Formerly Photography and Images of the Social Body.) 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. Also WGST 750bu.

AMST 877a, Readings in the History of American Medicine.  John Harley Warner. M 1.30–3.20
An examination of the variety of approaches to the social and cultural history of medicine and public health, taking as a focus nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Readings are drawn from recent literature, sampling writings on health care, illness, experiences, and medical cultures in the United States. Topics include the role of gender, class, ethnicity, race, region, and religion, in the experience of sickness and health care: the multiple meanings of science in medicine, the intersection of lay and professional understandings of the body, and the role of the marketplace in shaping professional identities and patient expectations. Also HIST 932a, HSHM 719a.

AMST 897b, Postmodern Fiction, Postmodern Theory.  Amy Hungerford. F 10–11.50
Study of novels and theoretical works of the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on the conjunction of belief and meaninglessness in literary and critical practice. Novelists (about three-quarters of the syllabus) include Flannery O’Connor, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Edgar Wideman, and Myla Goldberg. Theorists (one-quarter of the syllabus) include W.K. Wimsatt, Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp, Richard Rorty, David Tracy, and others. Also ENGL 897b.

[AMST 914b, Built Environments and the Politics of Place.]  

[AMST 922a, Gender, Territory, and Space.]  

AMST 923a, Cities, Suburbs, and the Culture of Sprawl.  Dolores Hayden. T 1.30–3.20
In 2000, more Americans lived in suburbs than rural areas and central cities combined. The seminar explores the changing meanings of “city” and “suburb” in the American metropolitan landscape and considers definitions of “sprawl.” The process of building and marketing suburbia has been influenced by political coalitions promoting urban growth and by federal subsidies for real estate development. Examining architecture and land use, we survey seven suburban configurations: the “borderlands” of the 1820s, the picturesque enclaves of the 1840s, the dense streetcar suburbs of the late nineteenth century, the mail-order house boom of the 1920s, the mass-produced bedroom communities of the 1950s, the mall-centered “edge cities” along highways of the 1970s, and the rural fringes of the 1980s. A research paper of approximately twenty pages is required. Enrollment is limited to twelve. Also ARCH 925a.

AMST 925a, American Literary Globalism.  Wai Chee Dimock. W 10.30–12.20
What is the relation between American literature and world culture? How important are cross-time translations, and what does it mean for Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and W. S. Merwin to be practitioners in this genre? How important are global roots to authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Silko? This course explores “globalism” as the broadest possible frame for American literature, bringing together authors across centuries, across racial divisions, and across the customary division between poetry and prose. Also CPLT 529a, ENGL 925a.

AMST 926a, Promised Lands: Slavery, Literature, and Modernity in Russia and the United States.  John MacKay. T 1.30–3.20
Close, comparative, contextualized examination of literary and other forms of cultural production associated with U.S. slavery and Russian serfdom. Special attention is paid to the relation between bondage and national, cultural, and personal identity; the role of bondage in definitions of “aesthetic experience” in the pre- and post-emancipation periods; the relation between literacy and the literary; literature of protest in the two countries; and connections between geographical and subjective space within cultures of enslavement. We examine works by Pushkin, Aksakov, Gogol, Simms, Cooper, Crèvecoeur, Radishchev, Karamzin, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Kennedy, and the “plantation novelists,” Stowe, Melville, Turgenev, slave and serf autobiographers, freedman’s textbooks, Fet, Lanier, Page, Chesnutt, and Bunin; historical treatments by Kolchin, Genovese, and others; theoretical works by Said, Jameson, Saidiya Hartman, Bakhtin, and others. Requirements: in-class presentations; research paper. No knowledge of Russian required. Also CPLT 571a, RUSS 675a.

Next: Anthropology