This course will focus on 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and culture through the critical lens of food: as medium of representation, crucible of memory, site of labor, and material trace of history. Through analyses of pop culture, literature, film, and cultural history, we will examine the intimate association of Asian American subjects with food, eating and cooking, as well as food's relationship to anti-immigrant sentiment, cultural assimilation, multiculturalist celebration, and U.S. empire.

We examine the writing of major nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century theorists, such as Marx, Nietzche, Freud, Dubois, Arendt, Fanon, Foucault, Butler, and others through the lens of embodiment. Rather than read theory as an abstract entity, we explore how theory itself is an embodiment of actual lives in which human beings experience life as precarious. What are the social conditions that create vulnerable bodies? How do thinkers who lived or are living precarious lives represent these bodies?

Introduces critical analysis of science and technology by tracing the historiography of the Scientific Revolution. The significance of this extended intellectual episode has been assessed in radically different ways throughout the intervening centuries. As such, it provides a fertile ground on which to pose and answer important questions about science and its role in society. What does it mean to regard science as 'revolutionary'? How are scientific developments shaped by, and how do they shape, the social, economic, and political worlds in which they are embedded?

This class introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Critical Social Thought. Students will learn to interrogate and challenge structures of social, cultural, and political power from a variety of theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, critical ethnic studies, queer and gender critique, critical race theory, media studies, performance studies, disability studies, history of science, the Frankfurt school, and settler colonial and postcolonial theory.

What is freedom? What makes freedom political? How has political freedom been understood over time? What are the obstacles on the way to freedom? Is freedom something we even desire? This course will introduce students to the concept of political freedom through diverse readings that include Greek tragedy, modern political thought, the Book of Exodus, Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquistor, and social science research.

This course will examine the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the afterlife of Hitchcock in contemporary U.S. culture. We will interpret Hitchcock films in a variety of theoretical frames, including feminist and queer theories, and in shifting historical contexts, including the Cold War. We will also devote substantial attention to the legacy of Hitchcock in remakes, imitations, and parodies.

This course offers an interrogation of overt and embedded narratives of migrants and the migration process in popular and documentary film, paying specific attention to cinematic representations of non-citizen bodies confronting migration, deportation, labor, acculturation, and anti-immigrant hysteria. Film screenings and class discussions comprise the interpretative lens through which students will examine the aesthetic, cultural, economic, gendered, historical, political, racial, and sexual dimensions of cultural texts.

The medium of cinema has shown persistent concern with war and memory, and has constituted a heated battleground for rememberance and erasure of the past. Through cinema, in other words, we most clearly see both memories of war and subsequent wars among competing memories. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the repressive military regime of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), and recent attempts to "recuperate" memory all dramatize these dynamics and raise a number of larger questions. How do destruction and devastation register through the visual?

(Component Course in Film Studies)This course examines contemporary Asian American film and visual culture through the lens of cultural recovery, self-invention, and experimentation. Focusing primarily on film and photography, we will explore issues of race and visuality, Hollywood orientalism, memory and postmemory, and racial impersonation and parody. Students will engage with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. Artists may include Nikki S. Lee, Margaret Cho, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jin-me Yoon, Justin Lin, Binh Dahn, Richard Fung, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, and Alice Wu.

A study of ten to twelve plays and their film adaptations. Plays are drawn from a range of periods and genres, and films are chosen to show the scope of adaptive approaches from filmed play to radical re-imagining. The course will include readings on the theory and history of theatre-to-film adaptations. Playwrights will likely include Christopher Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and David Henry Hwang.