This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.

This seminar explores the understandings of the US through an analysis of race, class, gender, and national identity in films and TV series. It questions the role of authenticity in film and TV representation, focusing on works that examine how Americans define themselves and each other. Students screen, discuss, and write about recent films and TV series made by Americans who intervene in simplistic narratives of their own diverse cultures. Through the creation of their own essay films, students compare these contemporary works with earlier media to investigate the ways American culture(s) has evolved onscreen, and how far it still must go.

This course centers on the environment as a mediator for social action to understand how ecological change impacts and is impacted by structures of race and indigeneity. Using historical and present-day examples, this course will investigate the intersections of race and indigeneity in ecological change in the United States as experienced by Native people. Assignments for this course include written reflections based on weekly readings, an end-of the-term research paper, a creative collage, and a class presentation.

How do indigenous cosmologies intersect with American literary histories and archives? This course disrupts familiar accounts of American origins on the eastern seaboard through creation stories and oral literature from the Pacific Coast of North America. Through course readings, we travel from Hawaii to Alaska. We also travel to Juneau, Alaska over spring break. We think about the Indigenous cosmologies present in American archives through a conceptual vocabulary that includes ecologies, beach crossings, oral histories, and diasporas.

This class looks at the histories, religion, and material culture of Caribbean Jews from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and traces their impact on the US Jewish life. Prior to 1825, the largest, wealthiest, and best educated Jewish American communities were in the Caribbean. In the early nineteenth century many Caribbean Jews traveled North and settled in the United States, but the region would once again play a key role between WWI and WWII as a sanctuary for Holocaust refugees. Communities we will cover include Recife, Curaçao, Jamaica, Suriname, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

This course examines changes in Americans' understanding of and response to death from the Puritans through the post-modern era, with special attention to how ethnicity impacts traditions and stories surrounding death. We will examine both elegies and gothic literature about the "undead," particularly the grim reaper, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, and zombies. We will study the material culture related to death, including cemeteries and places where the dead are prepared for burial or cremation. The timid should beware, as we will take a field trip to the Princeton cemetery to do iconographic and seriation studies.

This is an advanced Seminar meant to deepen understanding of central themes in American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latino/a Studies.The Seminar concentrates on historical trajectories, social and economic evolution, and cultural contributions to nation making on the part of Asian Americans and Latino/as. We will investigate colonial antecedents and processes of exclusion/stigmatization but also acts of resistance and claims on citizenship that have consistently identified the trajectory of immigrants and their descendants throughout American history.

The seminar examines a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania. After exploring a range of theoretical approaches to the study of colonialism, gender, and sexuality, the course will feature three main case studies: Maori, Oneida, Cherokee, Diné, and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). We will then assess how nationalist self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual decolonization, focusing on the growing body of work on gender liminality, contested masculinities, Native and Indigenous feminisms, debates regarding same-sex sexuality and marriage, as well as Two-Spirit, Mahu, LGBT, and `Indigiqueer' identities.

Just as the Internet does today, the picture press of the last century defined global visual knowledge of the world. The pictures gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers were often heavily edited, presented in carefully devised sequences, and printed alongside text. The picture press was as expansive as it was appealing, as informative as it was propagandistic, regularly delivered to newsstands and doorsteps for the everyday consumer of news, goods, celebrity, and politics. Through firsthand visual analysis of the picture presses of both the U.S. and Russia, this course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of images.

This course surveys critical themes in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, including perspectives from history, literature, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racial and spatial formations as a product of multiple racial settler colonial projects forged through the US wars and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, migration, incarceration, and popular culture.

How did concert dancers and choreographers respond to the aesthetic, social, and political economic shifts we call 'modernism'? How does dance enter the archive? We pursue these questions by examining the ways gender, nationalisms, race, and sexuality shaped ideas of the modern. Key figures include Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, Katherine Dunham, Sada Yakko, Martha Graham, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We begin with dance modernisms in China, Japan, Mexico, and Europe before turning to US cases, with an emphasis on how dance artists negotiated their authority as state actors and public intellectuals.

This course will look to understand the current and historical role of Indigenous people as a trope in both Western culture and in American culture more specifically, the material effects of such representations and the longstanding resistance to them among Indigenous people, and work toward developing ways of supporting Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. It will include a cross-disciplinary program of learning that will work closely with the Indigenous holdings in Firestone Library.

This course immerses students in diverse forms of storytelling about climate change in a US context - from photojournalism and data visualization to podcasting, documentary film, and the longform essay. Informed by these models, students work in teams on a semester-long collaborative project to develop an original climate story focused on a specific place, person, or community. Teams are formed based on student interests and experience.

Foundational ENV course. Introduces students to key concepts and approaches in environmental studies from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. Focus is on the evolving history of environmental movements, including wilderness-centered conservation and deep ecology, urban-centered environmentalism, Indigenous sovereignty and land back, and climate justice. Emphasizes US environmental movements since the 1960s, with points of comparisons to other time periods and national contexts.

Science is commonly held to be the objective, empirical pursuit of natural facts about the world. In this course, we will consider an array of theoretical, methodological, and substantive challenges that feminism has posed for this account of science, and for the practice of scientific knowledge production. In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge?

This introduction to disability studies draws together the work of feminists and queer theorists with that of historians and clinicians in order to contextualize the field's major theoretical claims. We will take up and critique the oft-made distinction between natural, physical impairment and socially constructed disability, situating it with regards to Michel Foucault's account of biopower, and his controversial claims in Society Must Be Defended regarding "racism against the abnormal."

An exploration of the graphic memoir focusing on the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to expand the possibilities of autobiographical narrative. Through our analysis of highly acclaimed graphic memoirs from the American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese traditions, we examine the visual and verbal constructions of identity with an emphasis on the representation of gender dynamics and cultural conflict.

This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese incarceration, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the American Revolution and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will read a number of famous thinkers and actors in their own words and study the development of important schools of thought, such as Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Left.

Rise of popular entertainment, values, ideas, cultural expression, and the culture industries in modern American history. Two lectures, one precept.

Course examines the history of Latin America and the Caribbean since independence, paying particular attention to relations with the United States.

Why do people love Broadway musicals? How do audiences engage with musicals and their stars? How have fan practices changed since the 1950s alongside economic and artistic changes in New York and on Broadway? In what ways does "fan of" constitute a social identity? How do fans perform their devotion to a show, to particular performers, and to each other? This class examines the social forms co-created by performers and audiences, both during a performance and in the wider culture. Students will practice research methods including archival research, ethnographic observation, in-depth interviewing, and textual and performance analysis.

This introductory course examines what it means to be Latinx in the United States. We explore Latinx identity through an analysis of history, social processes, and gender. We analyze how processes of racialization are connected to class, gender, and sexuality, as well as other identity markers. This course studies experiences and events through cultural texts comprising verbal and non-verbal communication and representation and analyzes how Latinx communities negotiate empire, identity, language, and notions of home.

This seminar explores constitutional and legal issues posed by the attempted secession of eleven states of the Federal Union in 1860-1865 and the civil war this attempt triggered. Issues to be examined include the nature of secession movements (both in terms of the constitutional controversy posed in 1860-1861 and modern secession movements), the development of the "war powers" doctrine of the presidency, the suspension by the writ of habeas corpus, the use of military tribunals, and abuses of civil rights on both sides of the Civil War.

This class will concentrate on some of the earliest and most extensive religious and historical texts authored by Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, specifically by the Maya, Mexica (Aztec), Hopi, and Diné (Navajo). This set will allow for a critical and comparative study of Native rhetoric, mythic motifs, notions of space and time, morals, and engagements with non-Native peoples and Christianity.

This seminar focuses on the structural and institutional foundations of racial discrimination in the United States. It emphasizes the contributions of sociologists, some of whom will participate as invited guests. The course gives a historical overview followed by an investigation of key legislative actions and economic factors inhibiting racial equality. Subsequent topics include migration and immigration; urban development; and residential segregation. The end of the course reviews resistance movements and policies aimed at addressing systemic racism, including restorative justice and reparations.

The Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, was the defining (and polarizing) initiative of the Obama era, with provisions to expand health insurance coverage, control health care costs, and improve the health care delivery system. This course will focus on the history of health reform, as well as implementation challenges since the law's enactment. We will examine the federal regulatory process, the many legal challenges to the law, the role that states have played in implementation, and Congressional repeal efforts. We will also investigate the role of federalism in health care policy and the future of health care reform.

Through plays produced in the United States from the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter Movement of the 2010s, we will identify and analyze various themes, approaches, and concerns within feminist plays. Employing script and dramaturgical analyses and performance techniques, students will learn how to contextualize plays from the race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics of the playwright and contextualize plays within their larger historical, social, and cultural milieus. In doing so, students will learn about the different lineages, politics, and aesthetics of feminist theatre.

This course introduces students to the ways that policy, design, and citizen activism shaped affordable housing in the United States from the early 20th century to the present. We explore privately-developed tenements and row houses, government-built housing, publicly-subsidized suburban homes and cooperatives, as well as housing developed through incentives and subsidies. Students will analyze the balance between public and private, free market and subsidy, and preservation and renewal. Close attention will be paid to the role of race in structuring the relationship between policymakers, property owners, renters, and homeowners.