Today, amid what has been dubbed the “urban millennium,” the unprecedented scale and speed of urbanization has generated radically new experiences, imaginaries, and relationships to urban environments. From post-industrial landscapes to concrete jungles where niches of beetles, racoons, and hawks thrive, the natural world is being critically remade by contemporary urbanism. In the process, however, new hybrid natures are also shaping humans and their environments in important ways.

The aim of this course is to introduce the ways that medical anthropologists understand illness, suffering, and healing as taking shape amidst a complex interplay of biological, psychological, social, political-economic, and environmental processes.

Considering a natural world radically remade by industrialization, this course explores the shifting relationship between humans and their environment. How do different social groups imagine, identify, and experience environmental change? Why does this matter for our collective environmental futures?

How do various kinds of people in various societies worldwide define and pursue happiness? How do they deal with aspects of everyday life that affect their physical and psychological health? How does one’s gender, age, country, sociocultural background, and socioeconomic status shape the ways in which one might pursue health and happiness?

Spring semester. The Department.

How to handle overenrollment: null

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: independent research, critical analysis, close reading, and extended writing.

This course is designed to provide American Studies majors, as well as other interdisciplinary majors, with a methodological grounding to conduct interdisciplinary research. Students will have the opportunity to conduct research on a topic of their own choosing and develop a research prospectus.

(Offered as AMST 368, BLST 368 and ENGL 368) History has long valorized passive, obedient, and long-suffering African American women alongside assertive male protagonists and savants. This course provides an alternative narrative to this representation by exploring the ways in which African American female characters, writers, and artists have challenged ideals of stoicism and submission. Using an interdisciplinary focus, we will critically examine transgression across time and space in diverse twentieth- and early twenty-first century literary, sonic, and visual texts.

(Offered as AMST 361, BLST 361, and ENGL 276) Through a close reading of texts by African American authors, we will critically examine literary form and technique alongside the representation of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Coupled with our explication of poems, short stories, novels, and literary criticism, we will explore the stakes of adaptation in visual culture. Students will analyze the film and television adaptations of twentieth-century fiction. Authors will include Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor.

Offered as EDST 352, AMST 352 and SOCI 352

(Offered as AMST-269 and EDST-269) Adolescents in maximum security prisons? Immigrant families separated and children incarcerated in detention centers? How did we get here? This course explores the history of state intervention into indigenous, Black, and Latinx households from the mid-nineteenth century until the present day. We focus on the experiences of Native American children in residential boarding schools, African American and Latinx children in Jim Crow youth reformatories, and Latinx children in immigrant detention centers.