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.

This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the values and cultural expressions of the people of the United States since the late nineteenth century. We will examine a variety of works in literature, history, cultural and social criticism, music, the visual arts and the built environment with an eye to understanding how Americans of different backgrounds, living at different times and in different locations, have understood and argued about the meaning and significance of American national identity. Our goal is to make connections between different genres of expression and consider how different cultural forms have served as opportunities to ponder the meaning of modern life in the United States. Lectures and readings will give particular attention to the sites—real and imagined--where Americans have identified the promise and perils of American life. 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 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 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

Please refer to the Center for American Studies for section descriptions

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!

There are certain stories we tell ourselves over and over and over, and many film genres are built around these stories.  This course examines Hollywood genre not only as a system of conventions but as a structure of feeling, a way of organizing fantasy, reproducing ideology, and sharing collective experience. They evolve with shifts in politics, technology, and taste, and each era’s films reveal something about how America imagines itself and grapples with its contradictions. We will engage a range of Hollywood genres, following their increasing self-reflexiveness, genre-bending and hybridity.  Our orientation will be formal as well as social and historical, as we identify codes, tropes and conventions of generic illusion and verisimilitude; the look and sound of different genres; genre and acting style; and different expressions of heroism. Genres will include: the romantic comedy, the western, superheroes, dystopian and “Indiewood” films, and television limited series.

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.

This seminar engages the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois, widely understood to be the greatest intellectual in U.S. history. Students will read and discuss Du Bois’s autobiography, and major works across his long and prolific career. Major themes include pan-Africanism, socialism, and peace.

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?

What is good sex? What, even, is sex? Who should be having it with whom, and when? Why does sex hurt sometimes? Why does it feel incredible, when it does? What makes sex healthy? Normal? Who says? How do they know? Why?

Across the past hundred and fifty years, time doctors, biologists, psychologists, feminists, phrenologists, and LGBTQ activists have spent lifetimes struggling over the answers to these questions and more. In this class, we will explore the growth and development of the field of sexology, its vast impact on U.S. and German life and its imbrications with structures of oppression and visions of (often imperfect) liberation. To do so, we will read a range of both primary and secondary sources from a variety of different schools and perspectives.

The attempt to scientifically study and define sex fundamentally reshaped both sex and science. It changed how everyday people lived their lives and helping give birth to new scientific disciplines. It also helped produce and police idea of normal, healthy sex, and provided evolutionary justifications for heterosexuality and patriarchy. The activist response – both in and outside of the field of sexology – helped build the modern feminist and LGBTQ movements and reshaped how everyday people made sex of sex, gender, and sexuality. Even if deeply flawed, sexology was also widely contentious, with major scholars having their books burned and banned in both the United States and Germany.

Life as a trans person can feel like an unrelenting cacophony of hammers. Around the world, fascist
parties and paramilitaries have set their sights on transgender people and through a torrent of
accusations of crime and depravity all but authorized violence against trans people. Through
explorations of trans* history and social movements in the United States, Turkey, India, and Pakistan
(and to a lesser extent Argentina), this course will provide a space to both understand the global
anti-gender and anti-trans panic and to relate ourselves to the strategies that trans people have used
to both survive and the demands that they have made for structural change and liberation. The goal
of this course will be to provide a space of critical study and a site of learning to be in community as
well as to equip you with both the knowledge and capacity to understand and intervene in
contemporary trans panics wherever you encounter them. Assignments will be a combination of
collaborative skill-building, self-reflections, and analyses of the tactics and strategies employed by
social movements.

This seminar invites junior‐ and senior‐year scholars to interrogate solidarity and coalition through the lenses of Black studies, archival practice, and intersectional politics. Liberation is not a zero‐sum game. Black solidarities are both a theoretical framework and a tactical archive. Black Solidarities disrupts the idea of a Black monolith, i.e. there is no singular "Black community" or "Black experience." This course pushes us to mine the fissures in Black experience for the differences emerging from intersectional experiences of liberatory thought, politics, and social realities. We will explore the meaning of solidarity and coalition as sociological and historical phenomena. Through close readings, multimedia interviews, podcasts, and original research, students will:

- Define and critique the sociological concepts of solidarity, coalition, and allyship in contemporary U.S. and global contexts.
- Explore the tensions and possibilities of extending Black‐centered analysis to other struggles (Indigenous, Palestinian, disability, climate justice, etc.) without diluting the centrality of anti‐Blackness.
- Produce three substantive writing projects that blend scholarly analysis with public‐facing formats (essay, interview‐based piece, or podcast script). By semester’s end, students will have a concrete sense of what solidarities mean across social movement struggles and how individuals translate that knowledge into accountable, solidaristic action.