AMS 150 – Introduction to American Pop Culture
Dr. Jeff Melton
MWF – 11:00 – 11:50
Exploration of the relation between the arts – popular, folk, and elite – and American culture in four selected periods: Victorian America, the ’20s and ’30s, World War II and the Postwar Era, and the ’60s. Class presentations and discussions revolve around novels, movies, art, music, artifacts, and readings about the periods. This course is team taught by all the members of the American studies faculty.
AMS – 200 – Introduction to American Immigration
Dr. Michael Innis-Jimenez
TR – 11:00 – 12:15
Selected American topics for lower-division undergraduate students offered by AMS faculty members or Americanists from related departments. Recent examples include The Asian-American Experience, The American Road, The Sporting Life, Baseball Since 1945, and Twilight Zone Culture.
AMS 203 – Southern Studies
Jack Carey
MWF – 9:00 – 9:50 – AMS 203-001 CRN#: 43499
MWF – 11:00- 11:50 -AMS 203-002 CRN#: 43500
This discussion-based course introduces students to major texts and interdisciplinary methodologies in the field of Southern Studies. Traversing epochs from before the Civil War until after the Civil Rights Movement, we will scrutinize the interplay between course materials (autobiographies, fictional texts, historical accounts, and films) and major political, cultural, and social forces influencing the region and the nation.
AMS 204 – Introduction to Western Studies
Jack Carey
MWF – 1:00 – 1:50
A lecture/discussion course utilizing a biographical approach to the salient themes, issues, and episodes of the American West. Some of these lives are real, some of them imagined, and others are a little of each. All of them, however, reveal much about both region and nation and how each has changed over time.
AMS 231 – Contemporary America
Dr. Stacy Morgan
TR – 9:30 – 10:45
This course analyzes the changing nature of American values for the period dating from the 1970s through the 2000s by examining key developments in the everyday life patterns and cultural expressions of Americans in contexts that range from the local to the international. In doing so, we will draw connections between the economic and political contexts of these decades and contemporaneous works of creative expression and popular culture. This course also will serve as an introduction to the types of interdisciplinary research methods used in American Studies.
AMS 310 – The Latinx Experience
Dr. Michael Innis-Jimenez
TR – 9:30 – 10:45
This course focuses on the history of people of Latin American descent (Latinas/os) living in the United States. Although we will examine communities comprised of people of Central and South American descent, the focus of this course will be on the four largest Latinx groups: those of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican descent. Students will become familiar with issues that have affected different Latinx populations in the United States: migration patterns, cultural interaction, community and cultural formation; and racial formations. We will also examine relations among Latinx and European immigrants, and consider the affects of US intervention and imperialism in Latin America on US Latinx communities. Lectures, readings, and films will explore connections between the past and the present and provide students a forum to express their own viewpoints on the legacy of this history.
AMS 320 – American Popular Humor
Dr. Jeff Melton
MWF – 1:00 – 1:50
his course explores major writers, performers, works, and themes of American humor that have achieved enduring popularity among mass audiences. It examines the social and historical contexts that reverberate in humor produced in the United States and focuses on three persistently popular mediums: prose and performance; film; and the television situation comedy.