American Studies

Prerequisites: None Corequisites: None What is America? Who is American? How do we live in America? This new lecture course will introduce you to the dynamic, inter-disciplinary field of American Studies.

How can one approach America, what it has been and what it has produced? Given the length, breadth, diversity, and complexity, of American history and culture, how does one even begin to answer that question? In this panoramic look at some of most interesting, important, and emblematic work that has been created in the first centuries of American history, we attempt to approach the question – and, really, it’s not just a single question - from a wide variety of perspectives, befitting the variety and diversity of the Americans who created that work. Students will be asked to acquaint themselves with a wide variety of material, including but not limited to works of prose fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, theater, visual art and architecture, and radio and film. Discussion section required: AMST UN1011

This course is an introduction to the basic skills in developing production and comprehension skills in American Sign Language (ASL). Students will learn ASL vocabulary, structure, and grammar. Course content also includes the manual alphabet and numbers. Students will develop basic conversational abilities, culturally appropriate behaviors, and learn about the culture and history of Deaf communities.

This course is an introduction to the basic skills in developing production and comprehension skills in American Sign Language (ASL). Students will learn ASL vocabulary, structure, and grammar. Course content also includes the manual alphabet and numbers. Students will develop basic conversational abilities, culturally appropriate behaviors, and learn about the culture and history of Deaf communities.

This course emphasizes continued development of intermediate American Sign Language (ASL) skills, with a focus on narrative structure, visual storytelling, comprehension, and expressive communication. Students will expand their ASL vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and conversational fluency while exploring Deaf culture, history, and storytelling traditions. Because this course meets twice per week, students are expected to complete preparatory video work outside of class. Class time focuses on interactive communication, language production, application, and feedback.

Abortion access will shape the lives of your generation—and yet the issue of abortion is too often left to misinformation and disconnected from its role in overall reproductive freedom. In this course, we will put abortion into multiple contexts (historical, political, legal, pharmaceutical, religious), drawing interdisciplinary material from scholars, activists, community organizers, lawyers, care providers, and journalists. Each class will feature a guest speaker who has dedicated their career to advocating for abortion as a critical part of overall reproductive healthcare in the United States and internationally. Grounded in the reproductive justice framework, which aims not only to protect the “right to choose” but also to create the economic, social, and environmental conditions in which people can parent with dignity, we will think of abortion as one critical part of a constellation of projects that, together, work toward total reproductive freedom.

This course is for American studies majors planning to complete senior projects in the spring. The course is designed to help students clarify their research agenda, sharpen their questions, and locate their primary and secondary sources. Through class discussions and a workshop peer review process, each member of the course will enter spring semester with a completed bibliography that will provide an excellent foundation for the work of actually writing the senior essay. The colloquium will meet every other week and is required for everyone planning to do a senior research project. Application due June 15. See American Studies website.

Please refer to the Center for American Studies for section descriptions

Please refer to the Center for American Studies for section descriptions

The concepts of democratic backsliding, regime cycles (between oligarchy and populism, democracy and dictatorship), hybrid regimes and reverse waves, were devised with regard to newly democratized and/or insufficiently institutionalized democratic regimes. Yet today even long consolidated, wealthy western democracies seem to be at risk. This course will focus on the case of the United States.  While domestic and external threats to American constitutional democracy are not new, there is widespread concern today that both liberal constitutionalism and American democracy are at grave risk.  Our inquiry will involve an in-depth study of the political theory and American politics literature on the relevant concepts and dynamics. In the first part of the course, we will discuss the basic concepts and theories regarding democracy, oligarchy, constitutionalism and regime cycles developed in classical and early modern political thought.  The second part of the course will focus on the U.S., the oldest constitutional representative democracy and typically deemed the exemplar of a successfully consolidated democratic regime.  We analyze the processes, dynamics, reversals and limits to democratization in the US focusing on key tipping points from the founding to the present.  Our focus will be on four sets of factors and modes of explanation for the relevant shifts: constitutional, political, socio-cultural, and economic.  We conclude with analysis of the  contemporary conjuncture and current threats to American constitutional democracy.

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of the Ottoman Empire and the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through migration, mobility, and cultural exchange. It examines why diverse Ottoman subjects (Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Jewish, etc.) migrated to the United States and how they navigated life and contributed to the country’s evolving social and cultural fabric. Students will analyze migration experiences, community formations, and identity negotiations while considering how race, religion, class, and gender shaped the lives of transnational Ottoman communities in America. The course also investigates how Americans imagined the Ottoman world through missionary writings and journalism, and how Ottoman migrants themselves influenced these representations. Combining global and local perspectives, the seminar draws on historical, cultural, and sociological methods. Field-based learning, including visits to historic sites in New York City once home to Ottoman immigrant communities, complements classroom discussions.

“The business of America is business,” President Calvin Coolidge famously said in 1925.[1] But what he said next is far less known, and central to the aims of this course: “They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.” How, exactly, did that concern develop over the course of American history, in response to particular historical and cultural conditions? How did it shape, and how was it shaped by, other American concerns? And how do those concerns, anxieties, challenges, and opportunities manifest in today’s business landscape – and what does that mean for America’s place in the world tomorrow?

To find out, we’ll engage in a largely chronological analysis of the history of American business, focusing primarily on the last 150 years; and using a range of primary and secondary sources, ranging from Revolutionary-era documents to AI company press releases to business school case studies. It should be noted that there is no background in economics or finance required to take this course.

In addition to the readings, we will use Columbia’s largest advantage for the study of this subject – its location in New York City, the historical and still unquestioned home of American business – to bring in senior guest speakers from leading New York companies, offering unique perspectives on the past, present, and future business environment. We are fortunate that Matt Anestis, a former BlackRock managing director, Boston Consulting Group partner, and member of the Board of Visitors of American Studies, has agreed to actively support these efforts, and provide extensive real-world business insight to students throughout the term along with opportunities to visit top New York City businesses in various industries and meet with employees over coffee. These opportunities – ungraded and optional – will supplement the course and provide real-world complementary insight into what life is like on a world-class investment trading floor, Silicon Alley Startup office, publishing office, etc.  The schedule and choice of companies will reflect the goals and interests of students in the class.

[1] Almost: the actual line reads “the chief business of the American people is business.” Always check your sources!

Between the end of WWII in 1945 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, American poetry underwent a profound transformation. Poets like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde began writing about shame, madness, women’s bodies, homosexuality, and race—subjects that had been largely invisible in American poetry. These poets were rebelling against the social conformism that attended the Cold War ideology of “containment.” At the same time, the ideal of artistic freedom became central to American cultural diplomacy abroad, including the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom’s efforts to promote American intellectual and artistic culture as a counterweight to Soviet totalitarianism. In this course, we will explore the relationship between Cold War politics and American poetry, and grapple with the following questions: How did Cold War anti-communism shape American postwar poetry? What relationships emerged between poets and state power? How did midcentury American poets write about war, nuclear anxiety, surveillance, madness, gender, and race? How did these writers challenge dominant American narratives of freedom and democracy? What happens when they exercised their rights as “free” Americans to dissent from authority? And finally, what was their legacy and lasting effect upon American culture?

Games are often treated as distractions: private amusements, children's pastimes, or cultural ephemera. This course examines the multitude of functions games serve in American culture– not only as rules and objects, but also social practices, commercial products, literary figures, legal problems, technologies, rituals, simulations, and ways of organizing conflict. The study of games offers many ways to ask how Americans define freedom, competition, chance, skill, work, leisure, fairness, and social order. This class explores how games and gameplay have evolved in the United States, from early analog tabletop games to modern digital activities, examining their cultural, social, and technological influences and impact. We will be looking at foundational games and other influences in American gaming, the advent and migration of wargames and games-as-training, the rise of tabletop roleplaying games and home gaming, and the impact of the success of arcade, home console, and online multiplayer games within the digital space. The course analyzes how mechanics, narratives, and player-driven communities reflect the historical contexts of their time and the shifting values of the cultures from which they emerged. We will consider games from a multifaceted perspective, viewing them alternatively as art, education, entertainment, economic products, psychological motivators, and transmedia connection points. Through critical readings, gameplay analysis, and discussion, students will learn to understand games not only as recreational activities, but as the meaningful cultural artifacts which they represent. The global, ancient, and universal nature of gaming supplies concepts and institutions that later American game cultures inherit, commercialize, contest, and transform. Throughout the course, students will read games themselves as historical evidence, through the medium of “actual plays,” asking questions such as who was invited to play, who wrote the rules, who did the work, what forms of knowledge the games made possible, and what kinds of social worlds did the games ask players to inhabit. 

According to the latest census, around 2.5 million people of Hispanic origin live in New York City, accounting for approximately one third of the city's total population. Of all the major cities in the United States, New York has the most diverse range of immigrant and national origin communities from Latin America and the Caribbean. This makes it one of the leading Latino cities in the U.S. and, at the same time, a Latin-American crossroads. The seminar “Hispanic New York and the Latinoization of the U.S.” will explore the national, racial & ethnic origins, and demographic evolution of New York's Latino and Latin American population and their main cultural traditions, as well as the connections between those traditions, the broader U.S. culture, and the global Spanish-language culture. To provide students with a first-hand approach to the different Latino communities and their current issues, the seminar will include a list of representative guest speakers and visits to social and cultural organizations. The seminar's main objective is to provide students with an in-depth and solid overview of the cultural history of Hispanic New York, as well as the connections between the city and the Spanish-speaking world. Students will also learn how to use basic methodological, theoretical and statistical tools in order to analyse the racial, ethnic, and demographic development of the U.S. Hispanic population.

A year-long seminar for outstanding majors who want to conduct research -- or to design a creative project -- on any aspect of American history and culture. During the fall, students will clarify their research agenda or creative topic, sharpen their questions, locate their primary and secondary sources, and begin their project to be completed in the spring perhaps leading to departmental honors. See American Studies website for more details.

For students who want to do independent study of topics not covered by normal program offerings, or for senior American studies majors working on the Senior Honors Project independent of 3990y. The student must find a faculty sponsor and work out a plan of study; a copy of this plan should be submitted to the program director.

For students who want to do independent study of topics not covered by normal program offerings, or for senior American studies majors working on the Senior Honors Project independent of 3990y. The student must find a faculty sponsor and work out a plan of study; a copy of this plan should be submitted to the program director.

The politics of what and who counts as worthy, good, or pure mediates possibilities for political and legal life. This course takes as its central question: how do certain ideas around purity and innocence come to appear natural? By considering a wide range of topics including carceral studies, immigration, race-making, settler colonialism, gender and sexuality and cultural studies, we will uncover the ways that cultural objects circulate and do political work. How are notions of race, crime, and purity produced, policed, and lived? And finally, how might we live otherwise—against innocence?