American Studies

The first half of a two-semester introduction to American Sign Language, intended for students with no prior experience in ASL.

The first half of a two-semester introduction to American Sign Language, intended for students with no prior experience in ASL.

Between 1967 and 1969, groups of American Indian, Black, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Mexican, and Puerto Rican college students began to articulate demands for a transformed university, touching everything from admissions, relations to community, and curriculum. Their proposals contributed to the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State University, the longest student strike in US history. Drawing inspiration from Gary Okihiro, founding director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, this course takes student activists’ proposals for Third World Studies seriously. Our readings will draw on the traditions of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle in North America, alongside perspectives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The first half of a one-year sequence in intermediate American Sign Language for students who have completed Elementary ASL I and II or the equivalent.  

This course will examine theories and methods pertaining to evidence as a process, a tool, and a failure. What kinds of evidence are rendered legible or legitimate? What is excluded? What cannot be measured at all? Through close reading and assignments involving both the production and critique of different evidentiary forms, students will be trained to methodologically apply a range of research skills from the archival to the ethnographic and observational. We will also consider particular forms confession, testimony, divine intervention character evidence, archival materials, expertise, and more to parse not only the limits of what can be known, but also the worlds that evidence makes possible and impossible.

Introduction to the theoretical approaches of American Studies, as well as the methods and materials used in the interdisciplinary study of American society. Through close reading of a variety of texts (e.g. novels, films, essays), we will analyze the creation, maintenance, and transmission of cultural meaning within American society.

Please refer to the Center for American Studies website for course descriptions for each section. americanstudies.columbia.edu 

Please refer to the Center for American Studies website for course descriptions for each section. americanstudies.columbia.edu 

The course seeks to combine literary and historical approaches to investigate one of the most rapidly growing, increasingly influential, and, increasingly, critically recognized forms of American popular literature: the graphic novel. A historical overview of the medium’s development, complete with analysis of relevant broader institutional and cultural factors illuminating the development of American media culture more generally, will be complemented by study of a series of recent works illuminating the medium’s explosive maturation. Authors read include Eisner, Crumb, Spiegelman, Bechdel, Thompson, and Hernandez.

The traditional role of the media in our democracy -- to support an informed electorate -- has been disrupted in the 21st century by technological change, transforming the delivery of information and opinion in radical ways. Partisanship has soared, along with a collapse of the shared fact base. In this course we examine the current state of political and election coverage, in counterpoint with iconic pieces of political reporting and media analysis that offer perspective and highlight turning points in the history of American journalism.

With the shrinking role of the legacy news media and the explosion of new formats and platforms, the concept of "objectivity" has lost value. We explore the impact of novel news sources and styles of expression, the impact of algorithms that prioritize emotional engagement, the decline of trust in the media, and the scourge of misinformation. What is the future of independent journalism? And how are these profound changes in news consumption affecting the decisions that voters make?

In the contemporary USA, free speech is often understood as a legal doctrine or a branch of Constitutional Law. But it can also be understood as a tradition, a way of life, part of American culture. In this seminar, we will explore the hypothesis that America’s free speech tradition has been shaped primarily by people who aren’t lawyers or lawmakers: by beatniks, pamphleteers, abolitionists, Red Power activists, queers, feminists and Free Lovers, poets, preachers, and hackers. People from all these groups have shaped America’s free speech tradition from the sixteenth century to the present day, although they’re usually omitted from Constitution-centered histories of free speech because they weren’t lawyers or parties to lawsuits.

This course provides a transnational, cultural perspective on free speech history that decenters the First Amendment from its quasi-sacrosanct place in the historiography of American liberty. Instead of looking at legal arguments and decisions, we will survey the very wide range of social contexts in which struggles over free speech have taken place in American history, from the  Pueblo Revolt in seventeenth-century New Mexico to the rise of MAGA in our own time. We’ll seek to understand how, starting in the twentieth century, “free speech” and “the First Amendment” became practically synonymous, with the result that most contemporary Americans know very little about the history of free expression in this country. And we’ll ask what (if anything) gives America’s four-hundred-year-old free speech tradition its unity and coherence.

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.