Courses
Fall 2009 Courses
Spring 2009 Courses
Fall 2008 Courses
Spring 2008 Courses
Fall 2007 Courses
Spring 2007 Courses
Fall 2006
Courses
Spring 2006 Courses
Fall 2005 Courses
Spring 2005 Courses
Graduate students may not take courses below the 500 level
for credit.
Required Courses for Ph.D. Students
GRS AM 735 Studies in American Culture, Sewell.
Prereq: AM 736 or consent of instructor. Introduction to the handling
of primary materials from a number of disciplines in order to develop
an American Studies perspective. Spring.
GRS AM 736 Literature of American
Studies, Schulman. Stamped approval required for graduate
students outside of AMNESP. Introduction to classic problems in
the interpretation of American society and culture. Fall.
American Studies
Electives
CAS AM 501 Topics in American Studies:
Four American Masters of the Short Story, Carney.
An in–depth analysis of four masters of the short
story form representing four different periods in American art and
culture: Nathaniel Hawthorne (stories from 1830–1850); Henry
James (stories from 1890–1910); Eudora Welty (stories from
1930–1950); and Joyce Carol Oates (stories from 1980 to the
present). What can these artists tell us about our culture and ourselves?
Spring.
CAS AM 502 Topics in American Studies: Popular Culture,
TBA. Stamped approval required. This course introduces the major
approaches contemporary scholars use to study and analyze popular
culture and surveys some of the major substantive issues in the
field today. Required texts include both academic and journalistic
studies of expressions of popular culture, but students will also
be expected to do in-depth analyses of their own through assignments
based on popular culture artifacts of their own choosing. The subject
matter of this course will range from 19th century popular novels
to hip hop music, with special emphasis on music and performance.
One major goal is to examine not only the producers and texts of
popular culture, but its audiences as well. The main objective is
to develop a new vocabulary for studying popular culture which draws
from, but is not limited by, language borrowed from other academic
disciplines. Spring.
CAS AM 524 New England Cultural Landscapes,
Dempsey. This course examines the historic forces that have shaped
our distinctive regional landscape and catalogues the changing forms
that make up that landscape. Beginning in the early colonial period,
the course moves chronologically to consider how human activity
affects the natural as well as the cultural environment and how
each new development interacts with the existing landscape, preserving
some features while altering and destroying others. Within each
historic period, the course considers landscapes large and small
and associated with home, work, and public life. Readings will be
selected from the fields of social and cultural history, cultural
geography, and architectural history, giving students an opportunity
for interdisciplinary reading, discussion, and research. TBA.
AM 765 Readings in American Vernacular Architecture,
Dempsey. This seminar provides an opportunity to examine influential
interpretive frameworks employed in the study of American buildings
and the historic landscape, examples of the approach known as vernacular
architecture. This approach emphasizes social and cultural forces
in the production, use, and understanding of the built environment
and examines innovative and interdisciplinary studies that have
resulted in a reinterpretation of the forms and meanings of the
American landscape. Each semester the course focuses on recent scholarship
to examine how a number of authors have contributed to changing
definitions, methods, and theories. TBA.
GRS AM 867 American Material Culture, Sewell.
This course introduces the theory and practice of the study of material
culture, the physical stuff that is part of human life. Material
culture includes everything we make and use, from food and clothing
to art and buildings. We will read a wide range of contemporary
scholarship on material culture from a range of disciplines, including
anthropology, history, sociology, art and architectural history,
and cultural studies. The course focuses particularly on American
material culture and on material culture in the context of mass
consumption but places it in a larger context of international studies
in material culture and material culture in all times and places.
Fall.
Courses Offered by Affiliated Departments
at Boston University
Please consult the current semester's listing above and/or each department's respective website.
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