(Offered as AMST-328, EDST-328, and HIST-328 [US/TR/TS]) Children’s literature has a diversity problem. A 2018 study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that of more than 3000 children’s books published that year, roughly 50% featured main characters who were White. Only 10% featured Black characters, 7% featured Asian / Pacific Islander characters, and 5% featured Latinx characters.
(Offered as AMST-328, EDST-328, and HIST-328 [US/TR/TS]) Children’s literature has a diversity problem. A 2018 study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that of more than 3000 children’s books published that year, roughly 50% featured main characters who were White. Only 10% featured Black characters, 7% featured Asian / Pacific Islander characters, and 5% featured Latinx characters.
This course examines the history of BIPOC children, crime, and punishment in the United States. We survey historical and contemporary examples of the criminalization of indigenous, Black, Latinx, South Asian American, and immigrant children since the late-nineteenth century. Students have the opportunity to pursue a research project about BIPOC childhoods and punitive governance.
Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor del Moral.
(before 1800) This course starts with a simple premise: American Literature cannot be contained. Rather than a
In this course, students will interrogate the precarious relationship between political and popular culture. As we study how politics has successfully deployed popular culture as an ideological tool, we will also consider how politics has overburdened popular culture as a vehicle of change. These broad issues will serve as our framework for analyzing black femininity, womanhood, and the efficacy of the word “feminism” in the post-Civil Rights era.
(Offered as AMST 115 and SOCI 215) The course is an interdisciplinary, historically organized study of American perceptions of and attitudes towards the human body in a variety of media, ranging from medical and legal documents to poetry and novels, the visual arts, film, and dance.
(Offered as AMST 115 and SOCI 215) The course is an interdisciplinary, historically organized study of American perceptions of and attitudes towards the human body in a variety of media, ranging from medical and legal documents to poetry and novels, the visual arts, film, and dance.
What does it mean to be Asian American today? At once marginalized and woefully unspecific, Asian American identity seems to occupy a purgatorial status in the American racial imagination. How have Asian Americans been understood within, and how do they understand themselves within, white institutions, anti-black hierarchies, and capitalist orders? And what are the cumulative psychic effects of their quotidian, uneventful, and often unspoken racializations?
What does it mean to be Asian American today? At once marginalized and woefully unspecific, Asian American identity seems to occupy a purgatorial status in the American racial imagination. How have Asian Americans been understood within, and how do they understand themselves within, white institutions, anti-black hierarchies, and capitalist orders? And what are the cumulative psychic effects of their quotidian, uneventful, and often unspoken racializations?
This course introduces students to foundational texts in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. By emphasizing Asian American and Pacific Islander, this course foregrounds the “and” as a necessary tension between two groups that have been differently racialized. Some questions that will orient our engagement with these fields include: How does literature shape ideas about what it means to be Asian American or Pacific Islander? What is the role of discourse in (en)gendering ideas about East/West, Asia, the Pacific, and Otherness?
