For the most up-to-date information about courses offered through Saint Louis University’s Department of American Studies, consult the
Undergraduate Courses: Fall 2024
Instructor: TBD
Lectures Mon/Wed 1:10–2:00pm
Discussion-section options Fridays at 12:00, 1:10, & 2:10pm
What does it mean to be “American”? Who decides, and who is included or excluded? Is “America” a nation-state, a geographical entity, or a citizenship status? Or is it a set of ideas like “democracy,” “capitalism,” or “the frontier”? How do race, gender, sexuality, and class shape American identity and culture? These are the central questions of this course, which are at the heart of the field of American Studies. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to exploring these questions, examining a wide variety of sources such as fiction, poetry, plays, films, music, photographs, advertisements, television, political debates, and much more. Required for ASTD majors and minors.
Fulfills Aesthetics, History, & Culture and Identities in Context for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Film & Media Studies Elective credit for the Film & Media Studies minor.
Instructor: Mary Maxfield
Tues/Thurs 11:00am–12:15pm
This course, cross-listed into American Studies from its home department in Women’s and Gender Studies, examines the lived practices, social meanings, and cultural representations of human sexuality. This introduction to the interdisciplinary field of sexuality studies samples a variety of intellectual approaches in examining sexuality as a source of personal and community identity and as contested political and ideological terrain.
Fulfills Identities in Context for the University Undergraduate Core, and Electives credit for ASTD majors and minors.
Instructor: TBD
Tues/Thurs 12:45–2:00pm
Scholars and observers have long noted the important roles that apparently marginalized or “outsider” groups play in creating an American nation and culture. Whether looking at religious outsiders, racial and ethnic minorities, or other social categories of difference and identity that define American experience, this course asks we consider this often complicated and even misleading dynamic between margin and center, community and nation, insider and outsider.
Fulfills Aesthetics, History, & Culture and Identities in Context for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Identities for the ASTD major’s Breadth Requirement.
Instructor: Flannery Burke
Tues/Thurs 9:30–10:45am
This is a big country! Is it one country? A patchwork quilt of ecologies and cultures? Is it divided into a North and a South? An East and a West? City and country? How do the different regions of North America see one another? How did they develop their reputations and images? Using literature, food, history, and geography this class will explore how different regions of North America have represented themselves and have been represented by others. We will apply tools developed by ecologists, historians, literary critics, and ethnographers to explore whether the whole of North America is greater than the sum of its parts.
Fulfills Aesthetics, History, & Culture and Identities in Context for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Contexts for the ASTD major’s Breadth Requirement.
Instructor: TBD
Mon/Wed 3:10–4:25pm
This course examines the intersection of gender and race with other categories of analysis (such as class, religion, sexuality, and nation) in historical and contemporary social justice movements in the United States. Topics include the role of race in movements for gender equality, as well as the impact of gender on movements for racial justice.
Fulfills Social & Behavioral Sciences and Dignity, Ethics, and a Just Society for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Identities for the ASTD major’s Breadth Requirement.
Instructor: Ben Looker
Tues/Thurs 11:00am–12:15pm
This course explores culture of the early Cold War era in the U.S. Participants examine how Cold War domestic and international conflicts shaped American society in areas ranging from shifting gender configurations to new forms of youth culture, artistic ideologies to the transformation of urban and suburban space, civil rights struggles to the politics of mass culture. Study of these intersections is grounded each week in close work with a range of cultural texts from the period: Hollywood films, advertising, manifestos, magazine journalism, jazz music, science fiction, radio melodramas, poetry, TV sitcoms, and more.
Fulfills Aesthetics, History, & Culture for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Contexts for the ASTD major’s Breadth Requirement.
Instructor: Nathan Martel
Mon/Wed/Fri 11:00–11:50am
Music is an essential component in formations of identity, community, and culture. This American Studies course (cross-listed by Music) investigates the impact music has on the culture of the U.S., examining how artists, listeners, and thinkers have shaped the reception and meanings attached to music as a lived experience. This course will explore how music is a social activity, what it means to the individual, and how we make sense of the world through the consumption of music. Actively engaging the work of musicians such as Jim Sullivan, Frank Ocean, De La Soul, Lee Hazelwood, and a host of others, the course demonstrates the function music plays in formations of identity, memory, and meaning. Through study of albums, songs, concerts, and recorded media, participants consider the power music has to shape our social worlds and contours of experience.
Fulfills Aesthetics, History, & Culture and Identities in Context for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Practices for the ASTD major’s Breadth Requirement.
Instructor: Kate Moran
Tues/Thurs 2:15–3:30pm
From the earliest days of the penitentiary, through the current era of mass incarceration, religious people, institutions, and ideas have played a major role in American carceral history. Religious activists and reformers have shaped U.S. institutions and policies of confinement, and incarcerated people—adults and children—have shaped religious practices and institutions. In this course we will examine scholarship on American religion and incarceration, along with a wide variety of primary sources, to understand the U.S. history and current reality of religion and imprisonment. In the process, we will explore how imprisoned people have been depicted, how they have depicted themselves, and how these forms of expression can help us understand the carceral cultures in which we live.
Fulfills Aesthetics, History, & Culture and Identities in Context for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. and either Social Science or 3000-level Theology for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Identities for the ASTD major’s Breadth Requirement.
Instructor: Torrie Hester
Tues/Thurs 2:15–3:30pm
This course, cross-listed into American Studies from its home department in History, seeks to explore the ideas and experiences of women in the United States, from the 1600s through the end of the twentieth century. Our goal will be to understand not just what women have done but also how many fundamental moments and issues in US history—including the formation of the early republic, religious revival movements, reform crusades, slavery, war and race relations—have hinged on certain notions of gender. The course also gives attention to the experiences of less privileged women and women of color who have had significant effects on shaping the American past.
Fulfills Aesthetics, History, and Culture and Identities in Context for the University Undergraduate Core, Cultural Diversity in the U.S. for the old Arts & Sciences Core, and Identities for the ASTD major’s Breadth Requirement.
Instructor: Ben Looker
Times vary based on internship
Designed to enable students to make intellectual connections between American Studies academic training and its applications in workplace, community, and institutional settings. Students work with local non-profit organizations, public history and arts institutions, government agencies, activist and neighborhood groups, media outlets, and foundations. They develop projects consistent with American Studies concerns and methods of reflection, while preparing final reports that position them to apply their skills in related areas following graduation. Internships may be paid or unpaid. For further information, see the American Studies Internship Handbook.
Fulfills Reflection in Action for the University Undergraduate Core, Community Engagement for the ASTD major, and elective credits for the ASTD minor.
Graduate Courses: Fall 2024
Instructor: Heidi Ardizzone
Wednesdays 4:15-7:00
This introductory graduate seminar offers a survey of major theoretical and methodological frameworks for the interpretation of American culture over time. In this course, first-year graduate students examine the intersection of history, text, and theory in the interdisciplinary study of the American experience, consider the historical development of American Studies as an academic field of inquiry, and engage with readings in areas such as Marxism, feminism, semiotics, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, cultural studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. Participants will leave the seminar with a strong understanding of selected major texts that have shaped the contemporary practice of American Studies and related disciplines.
Instructor: Ben Looker
Thursdays 4:15-7:00
The goal of this course is to prepare students to become practicing members of the interdisciplinary humanities community, whether inside or outside the higher-education industry, and to enable them to engage thoughtfully and critically with the forces currently reshaping the various institutions in which humanities labor takes place. The class sessions, readings, and exercises are divided between two emphases. The first aims to develop the practical, ethical, and theoretical forms of knowledge required in order to embark on careers in academia and the public humanities. As part of this process, students will practice a variety of skills, in areas ranging from teaching and publishing to grant-writing and job applications, while also cultivating a broadened awareness of the range of professional options available to them. The second is designed to acquaint students with the historical development of the humanities and the modern university, while bringing into focus contemporary debates over an array of issues in higher education, including academic freedom, institutional governance, labor practices, the casualization of academic work, evolving curricular imperatives, and political engagement. Here, the university will be analyzed not as a place apart, but rather as an institution thoroughly embedded in the broader structures of American social, political, and economic life. Finally, students will be challenged throughout the course to situate their own professional goals and experiences within the institutional, economic, and cultural frameworks that define the world of the humanities in the twenty-first century.
Instructor: TBD
Time: TBD
Designed to enable students to make intellectual connections between American Studies academic training and its applications in workplace, community, and institutional settings. Students work with local non-profit organizations, public history and arts institutions, government agencies, activist and neighborhood groups, media outlets, and foundations. They develop projects consistent with American Studies concerns and methods of reflection, while preparing final reports that position them to apply their skills in related areas following graduation. Internships may be paid or unpaid.
Instructor: Flannery Burke
Tuesdays 4:15-7:00
Over the past century, the United States has been riven by debates in which intellectuals and their ideas have played starring roles. This seminar will explore such debates in the United States, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Topics will include: debates about the relationship between the self, the community, and the state; about the future of the nation in a globalizing world; about the intersections between religious and secular authority; about the politics of difference and the discourse of rights; and about the very definition of intellectual work itself. This course will focus in particular on new scholarship.
Instructor: Kate Moran
Mondays 4:15-7:00
This graduate seminar will engage in the interdisciplinary study of imprisonment and
prison abolition in US history and culture, though a survey of important theoretical
and scholarly work and prison writing, including work produced by imprisoned people
themselves. Related topics include religion, race, class, gender, sexuality, disability,
colonialism, and the body.