American culture and cultural change, with attention to the multicultural basis of American society and emphasis on the need for multiple methods of analysis. The course will consistently draw on the arts, material culture, and various fields affecting cultural production and meaning. Those areas include literature, film, history, architecture, history of art, religion, music, engineering, environmental studies, anthropology, politics, economics, law, and medicine. This course may include discussion sections depending on available funding. Some versions of this course need four in-class contact hours because of the extensive use of media.

American culture and cultural change, with attention to the multicultural basis of American society and emphasis on the need for multiple methods of analysis. The course will consistently draw on the arts, material culture, and various fields affecting cultural production and meaning. Those areas include literature, film, history, architecture, history of art, religion, music, engineering, environmental studies, anthropology, politics, economics, law, and medicine.

This course will introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, taking the "Hollywood Dream Factory" as the central theme. Focusing on both parts of that phrase, the course will proceed along a double path. We will examine the historical and geographical development of the motion picture industry from the rise of the studio system to the "new" entertainment economy of the 1980's and we will examine ways Hollywood is represented in literature and film.

The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 freshmen.

Written proposal must be approved by sponsoring faculty. Seminars for the group study of selected topics, which will vary from year to year. Topics may be initiated by students.

Independent study and research by arrangement with faculty.

This course examines how U.S. cultures are constructed, reinforced, and changed, and how those cultures act simultaneously at a given time. To help students develop skills in cultural analysis, lectures will contrast various methods and perspectives as they apply to the study of a particular year or decade. Topics will vary from semester to semester. This course may include discussion sections depending on available funding. Some versions of this course need four in-class contact hours because of the extensive use of media.

This course examines how U.S. cultures are constructed, reinforced, and changed, and how those cultures act simultaneously at a given time. To help students develop skills in cultural analysis, lectures will contrast various methods and perspectives as they apply to the study of a particular year or decade. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

This course examines how U.S. cultures are constructed, reinforced, and changed--particularly in reference to place and material culture. Qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis drawn from several disciplines will help students develop skills in cultural interpretation. Case studies may focus on a neighborhood, a city, or a region. Topics will vary from semester to semester. This course may include discussion sections depending on available funding. Some versions of this course need four in-class contact hours because of the extensive use of media.

This course is designed primarily to allow faculty to develop focused interdisciplinary courses which address specific issues, themes, or problems in American society. Topics vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's webpage for current offerings before the start of the semester.

This course is designed primarily to allow faculty to develop focused interdisciplinary courses that address specific issues, themes, or problems in American society and American cultures. Topics vary from semester to semester.

This course is designed to introduce honors students (those who have achieved a minimum overall GPA of 3.3) to the history and theory of American studies as an interdisciplinary field and to explore current themes, debates, and researh problems in American studies.

The Great Depression and World War II are arguably the two most influential events for the development of the built environment in the 20th century. Not only did they alter the socio-economic and political landscape on which architecture and urban planning depend, but they also led to technological innovations and vital debates about the built environment. This course examines the 1930's and 1940's topically, studying the work of the New Deal, corporate responses to the Depression and war, the important connections between architecture and advertising, the role of the Museum of Modern Art in the promotion of Modernism, the concept of the ideal house, and key tests, theories, and projects from the period.

A course on the intellectual, cultural, historical, and social backgrounds to American literature. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for current offerings well before the start of the semester.

Introduces ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundings-- houses, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts, and regions. Encourages students to read landscapes as records of past and present social relations and to speculate for themselves about cultural meaning.

Introduces ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundings--homes, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts, and regions. Encourages students to read landscapes as records of past and present social relations, and to speculate for themselves about cultural meaning.

The American forest will be examined in terms of its ecology, history, and representations in paintings, photographs, and literary essays. This examination seeks to understand the American forest in its scientific and economic parameters, as well as the historic, social, and ideological dimensions which have contributed to the evolution of our present attitudes toward the forest.

This course considers how the American detective is represented in fiction, fil, and popular culture. We will examine how representations of the American detective are affected by diverse historican and socio-cultural factors, including the ideology of American individualism, paradigms of investigation and ordered knowledge, and competing discourses of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. After a brief consideration of early American detectives and detectives in the classic American hardboiled tradition, we will focus on many detectives from traditionally understudied groups, including female detectives, African American detectives, Chicana detectives, Asian American detectives, Native American detectives, and gay and lesbian detectives. This course may be used as an elective in the American Studies major.

The topic of this course is the history of photography in the United States, from the introduction of the medium in 1839 to the present decade. We will consider the medium chronologically as well as thematically, focusing on the following kinds of issues: the photograph as document and as fine art, the "language" and intentionality" of photography, work and image in photographically illustrated media, the social role of the photograph, photography and gender. This course may be used as an elective in the American studies major.

This course will explore the unique legal status of Indian tribes and reservation lands in the United States, including analyses of treaties, the trust relationship, and the evolution of federal Indian law and policy. Students will examine the impace of such economic development ventures as mineral resource extraction and gaming on tribal sovereignty and culture. The rights of Indian individuals and groups to exercise freedom of religion will be analyzed in the context of sacred lands, repatriation of skeletal remains, and the use of peyote as sacrament.

This course considers several novels, short stories, and autobiographical essays by contemporary Native American Indians. A general historical context will be provided with an introduction to trickster stories and oral performance in translation. The lectures and discussions will focus on the comparative themes of tribal experiences in diverse tribal cultures with a critical review of the traces of traditional oral narratives in contemporary fiction. Comparative worldviews, landscapes, and the identities of authors and characters will be considered in the course.

This course considers several autobiographies written by Native American Indians. The lectures, discussions, and required books focus on various cultural themes and theories of autobiography; a comparative review of diverse tribal experiences and narratives. Theories of cultural simulations and literary forms of representation in autobiographical literature will receive general attention in the course. Students will be required to participate in class discussions and complete two hours review papers and a final examination.

In this course we will be discussing key developments in U.S. thought since the middle of the nineteenth century, roughly beginning with the reception of Darwin. The broader story told in the class weaves together in the history of science and engineering, the arts and popular culture, philosophy, and education. Our goal is to trace how ideas, whether they are dominant, challenging, or look back, have affected the ways in which Americans live together. We will look at how intellectual life has empowered and expanded the capacity of Americans to understand their world and achieve goals more effectively. We will also consider how intellectual theories have contributed to inequality and injustice.

This course focuses on the history and culture of American Indians in the past hundred years and, in particular, the strategies that have enabled them to survive as tribes and individuals. The course will begin with an overview of Native American history and a review of anthropological perspectives on cultural change. This will be followed by an exploration of the issues of identity and tradition in various facets of contemporary Native life, including cultural revival movements, the role of women, people of mixed descent, and contemporary art and literature. An emphasis on participation and small group discussions, and exposure to a wide variety of written and visual materials will give students a chance to develop insights and skills for responding to cultural diversity.

This course proposes to use the extraordinary local collections, particularly of the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd collection of American art, to introduce students to the tradition of painting in America and to the types of intellectual problems with which current scholars of this are are engaged. All sessions will take place in the galleries in front of the paintings at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Topics will include 17th and 18th century painting, 19th century genre painting, folk painting, landscape painting, still life, and 20th century painting.

This course assesses the role of information technology in the digitalization of society by focusing on the deployment of e-government, e-commerce, e-learning, the digital city, telecommuting, virtual communities, internet time, the virtual office, and the geography of cyber space. The course will also discuss the role of information technology in the governance and economic development of society.

This course will briefly review some of the major works by those poets and writers of the "Beat Generation" most closely connected with San Francisco and the Bay Area, and also some of the works by "East Coast Beats" where it is directly relevant either to the San Francisco Bay Area or to an understanding of the phenomenon of the Beat Generation itself. The poets and writers covered will include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, and Michael McGlure. We will pay some close attention to the interplay of Beat Generation writing with music, painting, film, and popular culture. Audio and video tapes of some of the principals will be available for viewing and listening.

This course invites students to consider the implications of "place" in American writing. That is "place" as not simply literal topography or locale but geography of mind, a myth, a body of association, and legend. To which end we shall be discussing four key modern American works, two novels, a book of poetry, and a story-cycle.

American news and entertainment reach people around the globe. This course is an opportunity for critical study of these institutions on their home ground, using the resources of the Graduate School of Journalism. The course mixes the perspective of an American historian and a veteran reporter. We draw on our broadcasting and computer facilities to allow new comers to see how American journalists shape the flow of informnation. We focus on the way this profession is building new audiences and losing others. The goal of this course is to bring outsiders into the debate that now rages about the accomplishment and purpose of American media.

This course will offer several perspectives on the role advertising has played in determining various expressions of American self-identity, with special emphasis on analyzing corporate representations of the self presented of--and directed to-- African Americans and Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The course will complicate commercial representations of African Americans and Native Americans by comparing and contrasting these corporately manufactured identities with individualized voices of racial photography, painting, and music of the period. The lectures and discussions will constitute a subtext throughout the course.

Beginning with the onset of World War II, America experienced not a sigular,unitary Civil Rights Movement -- as is typically portrayed in standard textbood accounts and the collective memory -- but rather a variety of contemporaneous civil rights and their related social movements. This course explores the history, presenting a top-down (political and legal history), bottom-up (social and cultural history), and comparative (by race and ethnicity as well as region) view of America's struggles for racial equality from roughly World War II until the present.

This is a course on the western in American film and literature. We will watch six classic western films, including the and and we will read several important pieces of western literature. We will discuss such issues as the myth of the frontier, the meaning of western landscapes, the American debate about law and order, masculinity, and the nature of cowboy life, etc.

Film Noir is considered a distinctively American Film genre. A selective survey, this course will sample the ganster picture and the pre-noir hard boiled dective film, and then study some prime post World War II examples of film noir proper. Noir themes include a pervasive cultural corruption, the femme fatale, mysteriously disabled and doomed protagonists, the dark city, etc.

This is an urban field geography course which will provide a basic overview of Bay Area geography and history. The course will consist of half day field trips to San Francisco and Oakland. We will observe buildings, landmarks, streetscapes, signs, people on the street, etc. in order to understand the forces at work in creating a city. We will cover a broad spectrum of issues, including employment, property development, political power, race, social movements, class structure, popular entertainment.

This course will provide students with opportunites to discuss and observe in action the most recent theories and practices pertaining to community development in the urban United States. Readings and discussion will be rooted in field trips and interviews with community activists, executive staff and nonprofits, professional planners and designers in the Bay Area. Students will have opportunities to take their own field trips and conduct interviews based on their own interests.

An analysis of the written and oral tradition developed by Native Americans. Emphasis will be placed on a multifaceted approach (aesthetic, linguistic, psychological, historical, and cultural) in examining American Indian literature.

Native American Indian literature is a distinctive collection of fiction, poetry, autobiographical narratives, and oral stories in translation. This course will provide a general literary and historical context of this distinctive literature, consider narrative subjects and themes, and focus on critical readings of contemporary novels by Native American Indian authors.

This course will explore the history
of race, ethnicity and
representation across the 20th
century by considering the
overlapping histories of African
Americans, Native Americans and
Whites through the study of film,
photography and art, and humor.
This course satisfies the American
Cultures requirement by combining
the following 1-unit courses:
American Studies 181B - Race
Photography, and Art; American
Studies 180D - Race and American
Humor ; and American Studies 184I
- Race and American Film.

This course surveys the history of American landscape architecture since 1850 in four realms: 1) urban open spaces--that is squares, plazas, parks, and recreation systems; 2) urban and suburban design; 3) regional and environmental planning; 4) gardens. The course will review the cultural and social contexts which have shaped and informed landscape architecture in the United States since the advent of the public parks movement, as well as, the aesthetic precepts, environmental concerns, horticultural practices, and technological innovations of American landscapes. Students will complete a midterm, final, and a research assignment.

This course will examine selected aspects of the history of American business. Included will be discussions of the evolution of the large corporation, the development of modern managerial techniques, and the changing relationship of business, government, and labor.

Since visual and literary studies have historically been viewed as separate disciplines, we will use theories from both to study those forms of self-representation that defy disciplinary boundaries, or what we call "visual autobiography." The course aims to help students become conversant with the elements of alphabetic literacy (reading and writing) and visual literacy (observing and making) in order to develop a third distinctive textual/visual literacy.

This course will examine the politics of racial representation and expression in popular music as well as film and advertising. This course combines 180C, 184I, and 188F.

This course offers students a unified course experience that examines the politics of visual representation and ways of "seeing" race and ethnicity in the U.S. in a comparative way. This course satisfies the American Cultures requirement by combining the following 1-unit courses: American Studies 180C - The Politics of Adverstising in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Representation; American Studies 181B - Writing Narratives of Race and Gender: Photography and Art;and American Studies 184I - Race and American Film.

This course will discuss contemporary advertising as a commercial practice, as social ideology, and as art/collectibles. Looking at both print and television advertising, we will examine how ads code meaning, how they address audiences, and how they represent identity and construct social norms.

This course will offer several perspectives on the role advertising has played in determining various expressions of American self-identity, with special emphasis on analyzing corporate representations of the self presented of--and directed to--African Americans and Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The course will complicate commercial representations of African Americans and Native Americans by comparing and contrasting these corporately manufactured identities with individualized voices of racial photography, painting, and music of the period. The lectures and discussions will be designed to build comparatively and incrementally. Gender issues will constitute a subtext throughout the course.

This course will address the birth of advertising culture in the U.S., focusing on the specific ways that early advertising used images of Natives to connect products to values associated with nature, authenticity, and masculinity. We will then talk about the use of plantations and African Americans to both sell products and re-imagine the U.S. as a nation. Finally, we will look at the "Golden Age" of advertising (1950-1980) to talk about the way that middle class Euro-American values came to define the American Dream.

In his famous essay, “Indian Humor,” Vine Deloria, Jr., argued that no social movement could succeed without the use of humor. This course takes up that claim by asking how American comedians have used racial and ethnic humor to advance political claims, mobilize social actions, and create specific vocabularies for addressing social conditions. The production of racial and ethnic humor operates to both include and exclude populations. In addition to asking, Why is this funny?, the course will also explore who laughs and why. Resources will include satirical writings by Will Rogers; short stories by Sherman Alexie, including his revision of The Searchers in “Dear John Wayne”; stand-up comedy by Margaret Cho and others, film, and literature.

This course proposes to use the extraordinary local collections, particularly of the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd collection of American art, to introduce students to the tradition of painting in America and to the types of intellectual problems with which current scholars of this art are engaged. All sessions will take place in the galleries in front of the paintings at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Topics will include 17th- and 18th-century painting, 19th-century genre painting, folk painting, landscape painting, still life, and 20th-century painting.

This course aims to uncover the long history between race, gender, nation, and the visual. Our particular concern is how visual culture produces meanings about African American, Native American, and women's bodies. What do visual narratives tell us about national identity? Through the specific lenses of visual art and photography, we will ask how do racial bodies become gendered bodies? How have racial meanings and the visual modalities employed to express them changed over time?

This course examines the nature, function and status in contemporary American culture of a central metaphor and belief in American experience: human life as a journey to the west, to the east, or to nowhere. We will study the nature and extent of this motif in recent American culture (including its expression in literature, music, and popular idioms) as well as situate our discussions within the context of historical expressions of the American journey as cyclical, eschatological, or as a journey to oblivion. Drawing on selections from, among others, Walt Whitman, Josiah Royce, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, and Maya Angelou, we will discuss the notion of journey in terms of possibility, nostalgia, nectar, cynicism, self-deception, and disappointment. Students will be encouraged to consider--and write about--their own relation to this expressive tradition in American cultural history.

Chinatown occupies a permanent space in major North American cities. This space occupies a special place in the imagination of white U.S. and Canadian settlers, inspiring curiosity and fear and provoking missionary zeal and racial antagonism. Chinatown has emerged variously as an exotic Oriental city, guilded ghetto, slum, and metaphor for intrigue and corruption. We will explore the images and realities of Chinatown in history and in American imagination (represented by literature and films).

This course will provide students with opportunites to discuss and observe in action the most recent theories and practices pertaining to community development in the urban United States. Readings and discussion will be rooted in field trips and interviews with community activists, executive staff and nonprofits, professional planners and designers in the Bay Area. Students will have opportunities to take their own field trips and conduct interviews based on their own interests.

This course will explore the history of California in terms of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. The island will be the central reference point and illustration for many of the changes that have taken place in the demographics, environment, and politics of California. Beginning with the earliest inhabitants, students will follow the fortunes and misfortunes of the diverse peoples who have come to call themselves Californians. The course will examine specifically the culture and lifestyle of the Coast Miwok Indians, the period of Spanish colonial and Mission administrations, and the later displacement of Spanish-speaking Californios by Anglos as California became a state of the U.S. Students will also consider the impact of national affairs on the island and California as it became in turn a military base and recruitment center for the Civil War and Indian campaigns and then an immigration station. It was as an immigration station that Angel Island had the most profound effect on individual lives and for which the island is now known. Finally, students will focus on Chinese exclusion and immigration.

This is an urban field geography course which will provide a basic overview of Bay Area geography and history. The course will consist of half day field trips to San Francisco and Oakland. We will observe buildings, landmarks, streetscapes, signs, people on the street, etc. in order to understand the forces at work in creating a city. We will cover a broad spectrum of issues, including employment, property development, political power, race, social movements, class structure, popular entertainment.

San Francisco Chinatown: Oriental city? Gilded ghetto? Or just Old Gold Mountain and home base to its Chinese American residents? This course aims to go against and beyond the gilded facade and exotic mystery of San Francisco's leading tourist attraction by taking an inside look at the history and culture of a complex community constantly in flux. We will review the socioeconomic and political conditions that shaped the formation and development of San Francisco's Chinatown and the lives of its people from the community's beginnings in the 1850's to the present day. In the process, we will also examine how distinct social institutions and Chinatown culture developed in response to life in America, particularly to immigration policies, the anti-Chinese movement, acculturation and assimilation forces, new gender roles and relationships, and U.S.-China politics. There will be an opportunity to learn about San Francisco Chinatown first-hand as the instructor, who is a native of that community, will take the class on a field trip.

Against the backcloth of Alcatraz, we will explore historical and contemporary iterations of power brought to life by questions of memory, punishment, and liberation.

This course will examine samples from several autobiographical "traditions." We will also consider a number of questions about the nature of autobiography, about the act of "writing oneself." We will devote the largest part of the course to a close reading of two major American autobiographies, at least one of which will be from the second half of the 20th century. Students in the course will write weekly and be given the opportunity to experiment with beginning to create their own autobiographies.

This course will briefly review some of the major works by those poets and writers of the "Beat Generation" most closely connected with San Francisco and the Bay Area, and also some of the works by "East Coast Beats" where it is directly relevant either to the San Francisco Bay Area or to an understanding of the phenomenon of the Beat Generation itself. The poets and writers covered will include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure. We will pay some close attention to the interplay of Beat Generation writing with music, painting, film, and popular culture. Audio and video tapes of some of the principals will be available for viewing and listening.

We will read and to discover Fitzgerald's key obsessions, elations, and stylistic strategies. We will then inch through what there is of , to speculate what he might have done had he lived to complete it. At the end of the course, each student will write a scene that fills in part of the unfinished section of , accompanied by a five-page essay explaining how that scene is informed by the semester's reading.

This course will give close attention to three works which have been essential to the making of an African American literary tradition: Frederick Douglass's (1845), Zora Neale Hurston's (1937), and Alice Walker's (1982). It would help if students also read Richard Wright's story (1945). In addition to attending to the literary-cultural context of these works, we will explore other writing by these authors and develop comparisons with other African American literature.

Westward expansion and the frontier experience have long assumed a mythical status as formative events in the annals of American culture, providing Americans with a collective cultural history and space for fantasy. Within this story there has been little room for women: westward expansion has been encoded as a male activity, and the American West has served a proving ground for the definition of American manhood. However, recent research on frontier women's history has shown that white and non-white women were present on all frontiers and in all phases of American expansion to the West. Moreover, white, literate women wrote copiously in, on, and about western frontiers--in letters and diaries, travel and settlement narratives, reminiscences and autobiographies, poems, stories, and novels. Reading from a diversity of women's texts, we will explore gender together with race and class in order to understand the women's frontier. This course will roughly follow a chronological line from the 1830s into the first decades of the 20th century.

Examines the role of U.S. media in constructing racial stereotypes, identities, and understandings of African Americans. Students will examine media coverage of the Rodney King incident, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the Million Man March. Visual representations from "Birth of a Nation" to "Amos 'n Andy" to "The Cosby Show" will be critiqued; black publications and independent black filmmakers will be examined. The goal of the course is to give students a critical understanding of how the media support or challenge social constructions of race in the United States.

Film Noir is considered a distinctly American Film genre. A selective survey, this course will sample the gangster picture and the pre-noir hard boiled detective film, and then study some prime post World War II examples of film noir proper. Noir themes include: a pervasive cultural corruption, the femme fatale, mysteriously disabled and doomed protagonists, the dark city, etc.

From to An introduction to the intersection of image and identity in the depiction of, and by, Asian Americans in film and video. This course seeks to contextualize the independent Asian American media arts field in relation to the mainstream commercial film industry and within the social, political, and cultural movements of the 20th century, providing critical tools for the understanding of ethnicity in American film. Lectures, readings, and discussion will be supplemented by guided screenings of diverse films and videotapes: narrative, documentary, and experimental. Film and video titles include: and .

This course interweaves an analysis of mainstream Hollywood films with significant political, social, and cultural issues of the 1960's. Among the topics considered are the civil rights movement and racial identity; sex and gender relationships; youth culture and the generation gap; the Vietnam war and anti-war protest. Lectures, discussions, and screenings will focus on relevant films, such as and Reading assignments will be compiled in a course reader. For background, students may read Edward P. Morgan, .

American news and entertainment reach people around the globe. This course is an opportunity for critical study of these institutions on their home ground, using the resources of the Graduate School of Journalism. The course mixes the perspective of an American historian and a veteran reporter. We draw on our broadcasting and computer facilities to allow newcomers to see how American journalists shape the flow of information. We focus on the way this profession is building new audiences and losing others. The goal of this course is to bring outsiders into the debate that now rages about the accomplishment and purpose of American media.

We will investigate why the U.S. media are fascinated with murder. Covering a range of topics from "going postal" and women who murder their children, this course will consider the way murder serves as social commentary and ironic entertainment in the mass media. If the murderer has become America's favorite anti-hero, then what does that say about Americans? Answering this question will be the primary goal of the class. Readings in a course reader. For background, students may read and watch the movie

This course explores representations of nature, crossing media boundaries to examine nature writing, TV, film, and advertising. We will discuss the characteristics and constraints of these various media constructions of nature, paying attention in particular to the ways in which all representations of nature serve as reflections of human culture. Considerations of gender, politics, and economics will be included in our analysis of media texts.

This is a course on the western in American film and literature. We will watch six classic western films, including the and and we will read several important pieces of western literature. We will discuss such issues as the myth of the frontier, the meaning of western landscapes, the American debate about law and order, masculinity, and the nature of cowboy life, etc.

This course uses film to investigate the central role of race in American culture and history from the late 1800s to the present. We will consider the ways in which film has represented the history of race and racial formations in the U.S. Other topics include the histories of whiteness and ethnicity, representations of race and nation, blackface minstrelsy in the movies, westerns and representations of American Indians on film, borderlands and immigration, and the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.

Students in this course will learn skills for doing research on the Internet, with particular emphasis on resources available through the World Wide Web. Taught in a computer lab and taking a broadly international approach to "American Studies," the course will provide hands-on experience with locating, searching and evaluating information for specific research projects. Students will collaborate on compiling an annotated index of online American Studies resources. NOTE: Students enrolling in this class should have a basic working knowledge of how to use both e-mail and a Web browser such as Netscape; students without this experience will be at a serious disadvantage. The course is also intended for individuals with a serious interest in American Studies. Due to the nature of the class, there is no required reading, but a list of recommended books and articles will be made available. The final exam will require each student to research a topic in American Studies, selected by the instructor, and report on his or her findings with a set of "bookmarks" (Internet addresses) and a brief summary of what was found. The exam will be conducted in class and turned in on floppy disk.

This course will examine and survey the culture and history of the Indians of California. The first half will focus on the unique culture, art, economy, cosmology, and spirituality of the California Indians. The reaction response and resistance of the tribes of California to a succession of invasions will be analyzed, with an emphasis on Indian perceptions of these events. The course will end with a look at contemporary survival of tribes and the renaissance of their traditions.

This course considers several autobiographies written by Native Americans. The lectures, discussions, and required books focus on various cultural themes and theories of autobiography; a comparative review of diverse tribal experiences and narratives. Theories of cultural simulations and literary forms of representation in autobiographical literature will receive general attention in the course. Students will be required to participate in class discussions and complete two short review papers and a final examination.

This course is designed to acquaint the student with contemporary literary and cultural issues in Native America. Our discussions will focus on the Native American novel as an opportunity for self-representation and cultural resistance. We will read three of the most influential writers in Native America: N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor.

Native American literature is a distinctive collection of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and oral narratives in translation. This course will provide a general historical context of native literature and consider three important novels: by N. Scott Momaday, by Leslie Silko, and by James Welch. Students may read the critical anthology by Gerald Vizenor in preparation for the course.

A comparative study of Native American philosophies. The interpretations of distinctive worldviews in native communities, cultural contact, and concepts of nature and wilderness. A comparative consideration of subsistence and landuse by natives and colonists. The course will also consider origin stories, comparative religions, vision quests, shamanism, and various healing practices. The Ghost Dance and other revitalization movements will be briefly discussed. The lecture approach will be textual and comparative, with some attention to the problems of translation and the representations of native experiences. Students should read by Carl Hammerschlag in preparation for the course.

This course focuses on the history and culture of American Indians in the past hundred years and, in particular, the strategies that have enabled them to survive as tribes and individuals. The course will begin with an overview of Native American history and a review of anthropological perspectives on cultural change. This will be followed by an exploration of the issues of identity and tradition in various facets of contemporary Native life, including cultural revival movements, the role of women, people of mixed descent, and contemporary art and literature. An emphasis on participation and small group discussions, and exposure to a wide variety of written and visual materials will give students a chance to develop insights and skills for responding to cultural diversity.

This course will explore the unique legal status of Indian tribes and reservation lands in the United States, including analyses of treaties, the trust relationship, and the evolution of federal Indian law and policy. Students will examine the impact of such economic development ventures as mineral resource extraction and gaming on tribal sovereignty and culture. The rights of Indian individuals and groups to exercise freedom of religion will be analyzed in the context of sacred lands, repatriation of skeletal remains, and the use of peyote as sacrament.

This course is a comparative discussion of Native American Indian philosophies, distinctive worldviews, and interpretations of sacred and secular ceremonies and stories. The Ghost Dance and other revitalization movements will be studied.

This course considers the experiences, interpretations, and protections of Native American Indian cultural resources in museums and sacred sites. Creation stories, sacred geography, and ceremonies will be compared.

This course will give an in-depth analysis to a selection of contemporary Native American Indian poetry. The issues of voice, cultural traditions, and sense of place, memory, imagery, and humor will be the focus of lectures.

European images of the exotic existed long before 1492. After Columbus, they were applied to people of the Americas who were thus turned into objects of fear and desire. While these images were modified over the centuries, basic elements of positive, and negative stereotyping connected with notions of race, gender, and environmental conditioning have persisted to the present day. This class will study a selection of European and North American literary texts from the late 18th century to the present, focusing on the discourse of culture, alterity, and identity as well as, on such aspects as the Romantic idealization of "natural man," savagism, natural nobility, communicational boundaries, and forms of cultural hybridity.

This course identifies issues and patterns of contemporary immigration related to California's social, demographic, and economic structure. It will provide a framework of migration theories and U.S. immigration admission and restriction policies, then will examine resettlement patterns, economic strategies in the marketplace, and the reconstruction of self within diverse social networks. Finally, we will discuss emerging restrictive state and federal immigrant legislation. The approach will be comparative, integrative, and global-historical.

This course examines European images of America in the areas of political theory, social theory, literature, music, philosophy, pop culture, and art. European intellectuals and artists have been drawn to American culture since the inception of the Republic. This course will indicate contradictions and ambiguities in that attraction. Critiques are displaced by admiration for a dynamic and multicultural society and vice versa. This course will examine the powerful dialectical links which have been obtained between European and American intellectual and cultural life.

American society is fragmented, divided, and often polarized. Race, class, and at times culture serve as boundaries which separate and reinforce distinctions, creating many different Americas within the U.S. How one sees America tends to be intimately related to the environment in which one lives, the social status and class one occupies, and the historical experience of the individual or the group with which one identifies. Yet, there are also forces which bind Americans together and which have produced a culture that transcends various forms of difference to create a common American identity. This course will explore the nature of those forces that divide and unite the peoples of the U.S. Through literature, film, and social science, we will attempt to identify the ingredients of the glue that holds this society together and gives the concept of America meaning.

Law is commonly viewed as the human reflection of natural law, as what police and judges do, or as a form of politics. This course will explore law as a narrative form. The murder trial of the Native American Whitehawk, the American legal response to racial discrimination, and the recent murder trial of O.J. Simpson will illustrate this method of analysis. While the student will be exposed to a wide spectrum of American legal thought, no legal knowledge or training is required.

The Caribbean is a region rich in traditions of performance and music. This course will consider one of the most popular celebrations, the carnival, focusing on the Trinidad Carnival, calypso, and the Mardi Gras celebrations of New Orleans. Students will consider how the carnival has been sustained and reinvented over the centuries by its participants and the role of carnival in subverting or reinforcing identities and relationships of power.

In this course, we will look at the way American society has been both reflected and constructed in the animated films of Walt Disney. We will talk about individual Disney texts as expressions of specific historical moments and as fantasies about more general cultural anxieties.

In the course we will explore the social history, political economy and "aesthetics" of eating in America. We will discuss the foods Americans consume, how and when they eat, and how they communicate about food. We will also consider the specific food culture of Berkeley, and explore the rise of the so-called Berkeley "gourmet ghetto."

In this course, we will consider various theories of detective narratives, discuss the origins of the genre, and focus specifically on the meaning of San Francisco as the scene of the crime. Students will read and works by San Francisco writers Marcia Muller and Stephen Greenleaf. We will also study five detective films: and

This course explores the nature and motives of societal structures and practices to illuminate the intersections and reciprocal influences of society and sports. The central framework of this course draws on Bourdieu's notion that the "space of sports...is inserted into a universe of practices and consumptions themselves structured and constituted as a system." This framework underlies our exploration of the ways that the playing field has been socially constructed and bounded as specific kinds of de-realized, ritualized, specular, performance spaces.

This course will examine the politics of racial representation and expression in American popular music. Topics will include blackface minstrelsy, jazz and the blues, and contemporary music such as reggae, salsa, and rap.

In this course, we will discuss the meaning of shopping in American culture by analyzing films and popular literature as well as theories about consumerism.

This course explores changing representations of Asian Americans in film within the historical context of immigration, community formation, racism, and Asian American political activism. We will begin with a brief overview of persistent cinematic stereotypes of Chinese Americans as "perpetual foreigners" and transition to the creation of a panethnic Asian American activist movement in the late 60s. Finally, we will examine the impact of globalization on cinematic representations of Asian Americans.

This course examines the ways in which American Indians draw upon specific aesthetics to produce culture and political critique through pop culture, as well as the ways in which popular culture contructs "Indianness" as a form of protest or expression of social power.

This course will introduce students to the history, aesthetics, and mythology of the American comic book from the Great Depression to the present. Over the course of three weeks, this class will consider the invention of the superhero in the Depression and WWII era, its evolution in the atomic age, the new reluctant heroes of the 1960s, and the postmodern anti-hero, through to their current manifestations. Other topics include the emergence of the graphic novel in the 1980s.

Film scholar Frank McConell wrote, "Each era chooses the monster it deserves and projects," which is to say that sources of fright are not universal but contingent, culturally and temporally specific. This course will study the changing face of horror in the U.S., from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will begin with Freud's theory of the uncanny - a model which will inform our examinations of various monsters depicted in literature, cinema, television, graphic fiction, and music.

This course is designed to encourage research skills, critical thinking, and effective writing. An intensive reading and research seminar, the course will assist students in the development of skills fundamental to advanced research in the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies. In addition to examining some topics in current American studies scholarship, students will conduct semester-long research projects. The effort entails identification of research topics, cultivation of interdisciplinary methodologies, compilation of annotated bibliographies, and completion of a literature review, which may serve as the first portion of the American studies senior thesis. The course is strongly recommended for those who have been out of touch with the conventions of academic research and writing or who might wish to pursue a graduate degree in the future.

All American Studies majors must satisfy the senior thesis requirement. Three options are available:AS 190-Senior Thesis, AS 191-Senior Seminar, or students may (with prior Faculty Advisor approval) enroll in an upper division seminar appropriate to their concentration for which they write a substantial research paper. Students planning to enroll in AS 190 must complete the "Thesis Proposal/Adviser Agreement" (available in the departmental office) prior to the semester in which the thesis is written.

Students will meet in seminar and will be required to write individual research papers based on the general themes or issues of the seminar. The particular themes/issues will be outlined on the American Studies Course List provided each semester by the American Studies office.

This is a required course for students wishing to graduate with honors in American studies. Entails writing a bachelor's thesis pertaining to the student's individual area of concentration within the American studies major. The completed thesis will be read by the thesis supervisor and one other faculty member.

Seminars for the group study of selected topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Students must have completed 60 units in order to be eligible to enroll.

Directed individual study on special topics approved by an American studies faculty member. Enrollment restrictions apply; see the Introduction to Courses and Curricula section of this catalog.

This course will introduce graduate students to a number of techniques and theories used in teaching at the university level. In particular, it will focus on the challenges of teaching interdisciplinary American studies courses that rely on a range of materials and methodological approaches drawn from multiple disciplines and that address students who come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.