American Studies

Terms offered: Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 3 Week Session
Inspired by Raymond Williams’ classic text, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, and the recent Keywords of American Cultural Studies (Burgett and Hendler), this course will provide a short and focused introduction to central terms and debates in American Studies. The goal is: (1) to enable each student to develop a critical understanding of a key concept such as “Race,” “Representation,” “Class,” and “Democracy': (2) allow students to become familiar with some of the major scholarly works on the keyword; and (3) introduce students to the kind of interdisciplinary inquiry that characterizes our American Studies program.

Keywords in American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
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.
Introduction to American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2013, Spring 2012, Fall 2011
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.
Introduction to American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2013
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.
Introduction to American Studies: Hollywood: the Place, the Industry, the Fantasy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007

This course examines contemporary aspects of American society, politics, economics, and culture,
examining the ways in which today’s issues emerge from wider historical and place-based contexts.
To give our explorations focus, we will look at the concept of technology and design as a set of
practices, processes, and theories of meaning. Through close reading of diverse texts (including
both primary and secondary sources) we will work towards we will work towards developing an
approach that enables us to analyze critically the process involved in the ongoing creation,
maintenance, and transmission of cultural meaning within American society.

Introductory Seminar in American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2017, Fall 2009
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.
Freshman Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
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.
Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2001, Fall 2000, Spring 2000
Independent study and research by arrangement with faculty.
Supervised Independent Study and Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Examining U.S. Cultures in Time: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2023, Summer 2021 First 6 Week Session
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.
Examining U.S. Cultures in Time: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Examining U.S. Cultures in Place: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2023
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.
Examining U.S. Cultures in Place: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Special Topics in American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Summer 2015 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2015 Second 6 Week Session
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.
Special Topics in American Studies--American Cultures: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
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.
Honors Seminar: Special Topics in American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2010
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.
Architecture in Depression and War: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
A course on the intellectual, cultural, historical, and social backgrounds to American literature. Topics will vary from semester to semester.
Topics in American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
What is America as a landscape and a place, and how do we know it when we see it? This course seeks to address such questions, to introduce 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. It does so through the lens of cultural geography, an interdisciplinary practice that developed, in part, here at Berkeley. Our goal in this course is thus twofold: First, to develop literacy in the role of space and place in American culture, and second to develop a working knowledge of cultural geography as a practice.
The American Landscape: Place, Power and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2012, Fall 2011
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.
American Cultural Landscapes, 1600 to 1900: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
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.
American Cultural Landscapes, 1900 to Present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2012, Spring 2011, Spring 2007, Fall 2004
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.
The American Forest: Its Ecology, History, and Representation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
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 American Detective in Fiction, Film, and Television: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 1996 10 Week Session
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.
Photography in America: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 1995 10 Week Session
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.
Native American Indian Autobiographies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2014, Fall 2012
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.
Intellectual History of the United States since 1865: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
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.
Information Technology and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016
World War II lifted the U.S. from the Great Depression and launched a long economic boom that helped underwrite and propel efforts on behalf of greater racial equality and economic equity. As that boom began to fade in the late 1960s, America’s march toward greater racial equality foundered, while its march toward greater economic equity began to reverse course. The Civil Rights Era gave way to the New Gilded Age. This course will explore the political, legal, and economic history of America’s struggles for racial equality and economic equity – and the relationship between them.
From Civil Rights Era to the New Gilded Age: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Summer 2018 Second 6 Week Session
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.
Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 1995 10 Week Session
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.
Community Development in the Bay Area: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
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 Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2015 10 Week Session, Summer 2015 3 Week Session, Summer 2014 3 Week Session
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.
Race and Representation in US Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
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.
The American Designed Landscape Since 1850: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2019
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.
History of American Business: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2008, Fall 2007, Fall 2003, Spring 2002
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.
Visual Autobiography: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2009 10 Week Session, Summer 2009 3 Week Session
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.
Race and Ethnicity in American Culture: Film, Music, and Advertising: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2008 10 Week Session, Summer 2008 3 Week Session
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.
Representing Race and Ethnicity in American Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
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.
Research and Writing in American Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2021 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2021, Fall 2020
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.
Senior Thesis: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
Students will meet in seminar weekly and will be required to write individual research papers based on their individual Area of Concentration, with guidance and support from the seminar instructor.
Senior Thesis Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Senior Honors Thesis Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
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 Group Study for Advanced Undergraduates: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
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.
Supervised Independent Study and Research for Upper Division Majors: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
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.
Teaching Interdisciplinary American Studies: Read More [+]