2013-2014 Courses

Summer 2013

AMST/HIST 110: Introduction to the Cultures and Histories of Native North America
Daniel Cobb, Monday through Friday, 9:00-12:15, Greenlaw 222
Maymester.  An interdisciplinary introduction to Native American history and studies. The course uses history, literature, art, and cultural studies to study the Native American experience.

AMST 269: Mating and Marriage in American Culture
Tim Marr, Monday through Friday, 1:15-4:30, Greenlaw 318
Maymester.   Interdisciplinary examination of the married condition from colonial times to the present.   Themes include courtship and romance, marital power and the egalitarian ideal, challenges to monogamy.

AMST 484: Visual Culture
Erin Corrales-Diaz, Monday through Friday, 9:45-11:15, Greenlaw 318
This course investigates how we make and signify meaning through images, ranging from art to advertising to graffiti, and provides the critical tools to understand the visual worlds we inhabit.

AMST 201: Literary Approaches to American Studies
Ben Bolling, Monday through Friday, 11:30-1:00, Greenlaw 317
A study of interdisciplinary methods and the concept of American studies with an emphasis on the historical context for literary texts.

AMST 290: Topics in American Studies — The Civil War in Popular Culture
Kimberly Kutz, Monday through Friday, 9:45-11:15, Greenlaw 319
This summer, we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War and the focus of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech, which he delivered four months later to dedicate the battlefield cemetery.  Although Lincoln erred in thinking that the world would little note or long remember what he said that day, he was correct in his prediction that we would not forget what the soldiers did in the Civil War.  But how would we remember?  Since 1865, popular depictions of the war’s course, causes and consequences have radically changed as Americans have adjusted their notions of racial justice, gender roles, and class relations.  This course will explore how popular culture has both reflected and shaped how Americans have viewed the Civil War and its legacy.  Topics will include wartime photography, illustration, and music; soldier’s memoirs; films such as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and Glory; novels and short stories set during the war; and historical commemoration, statuary, and reenactment.

ANTH/FOLK 334: Art, Myth, and Nature
Norris Johnson, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Hanes Art 117
Cross-cultural study of form, image, and meaning in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Emphasis on the interrelationship of religion, nature, and image-making in selected prehistoric and contemporary sociocultural traditions.

Fall 2013

AMST 235-001  Twentieth-Century Native America (Xlist HIST 235)

AMST 484-001  Visual Culture

AMST 498-001  Advanced Seminar in American Studies

AMST 700-001  The History and Practices of American Studies

AMST 850-001  Digital Humanities Practicum

FOLK 202-601  Introduction Folklore   (recitation)

FOLK 790-001  Public Folklore

FOLK 850-001  Approaches to Folklore Theory

Spring 2014

AMST101. The Emergence of Modern America
Instructor: Dr. Joy Kasson
Monday/Wednesday, 12:00-12:50pm, Greenlaw 101 plus one Recitation Section (Thursday 12:30pm, 2:00pm, Friday 11:00am, 12:00pm)
This course traces major themes in American culture as viewed through history, literature, art, film, music, politics, and popular culture, from the American Revolution to the present. It is not a comprehensive survey but rather an examination of the ways in which history and the arts interrelate as the present emerges from the past. Topics include American diversity, the natural environment, the rise of the cities, social criticism, the cultural impact of war. Readings consist of primary sources: poetry (Walt Whitman), fiction (Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien), and autobiography (Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams). Each unit will include the work of an artist or photographer, such as Thomas Cole, Matthew Brady, Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange. Topics include the heritage of the American Revolution; slavery, Civil War, and memory; technology and the environment; writers, film-makers, and artists as social critics.

AMST201. Literary Approaches to American Studies
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Robinson
Monday/Wednesday 5:00-6:15pm, Greenlaw 302
This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary methods of American Studies, as well as an overview of major developments in the field of American Studies and contemporary approaches to the study of American society and culture. Our examination of American life will focus on four historical moments. First, we will explore representations of race, gender, and citizenship in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on depictions of the Spanish-American War and the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, as well as more recent reflections on Filipino identity in fiction and film. Next, we will study Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (1958) and the cultural impact of the Beat Generation, as well as the commodification of “beatnik” culture and Beat philosophy in Hollywood films such as Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1957). We will also study the genesis of Affirmative Action policies, John Rawl’s contractarianism (and its critics), and multiculturalism in America, using Supreme Court cases and Ellen Raskin’s Newberry Award-winning book for children The Westing Game (1979) as primary texts. Finally, we will read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, examining the economic impact of globalization, the rise of new religious movements in the late twentieth century, and contemporary attitudes toward race, disability and immigration.

AMST202. Historical Approaches to American Studies
Instructor: Dr. Seth Kotch
Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:45pm, Murphey 204
This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary methods of American Studies scholarship with an emphasis on the importance of historical analysis. Together, driven by your discussion of course texts, we will seek to understand historic and contemporary conflicts over American identity and how history is used and misused today. Since we are here in the South, we will focus in particular on this region, though without ignoring the rest of the country. This course is divided into four units. The first will introduce you to some of the essential concepts in play in American Studies and liberal arts scholarship. Then we will consider four broad subjects: southern identity, gender and sexuality, American national identity, and the role of natural and constructed spaces in shaping American history and culture. Each unit will move from the post-Civil War period to the modern day.

AMST203. Approaches to American Indian Studies
Instructor: Dr. Chris Teuton
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:00-10:50am, Murphey 204
This class serves as an introduction to American Indian Studies. It begins with an exploration of the field’s origins and evolution. Then, throughout the semester, we will learn about the approaches adopted by archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, and specialists in law. You will gain a critical introduction to the questions asked by individuals working in these fields and to the “raw materials” of their various “ways of knowing,” including ethnographic interviews, oral histories, archival materials, artifacts, maps, language, place, forms of expressive culture, and material objects. Still more exciting, you will be learning directly from the outstanding American Indian Studies faculty at the University of North Carolina.

AMST 211. Introduction to the American South: A Cultural Journey
Instructors: Dr. Bernie Herman and Dr. Marcie Ferris
Tuesday/Thursday 11:00am-12:15pm, Greenlaw 101
In the past, to discuss the South, we would first define the borders of the region, and theorize about what makes the South distinctive. The “old” map of the South traditionally referred to the eleven states of the former Confederacy, but today, these rigid borders are more fluid. The South “is found wherever southern culture is found,” existing “as a state of mind both within and beyond its geographical boundaries.” Beyond the question of what constitutes the South’s borders, a new vision of Southern Studies challenges conventional tropes of southern identity. The “new Southern Studies” considers landmarks of southern identity other than the Civil War, Reconstruction, and barbecue. Rather than the old white and black South, the “new Southern Studies” recognizes the diverse cultures and ethnicities of the South, whose global influences have shaped the region in powerful ways for centuries.
In this gateway course to the study of the American South, students will examine southern cultural identity, recognizing the contributions of all its people, including men and women of American Indian, African, Latino, Asian, and European descent. Students will consider the region in all its complexity through a multi-disciplinary conversation about the American South that considers art, archaeology, architecture, cultural tourism, ecology, folklife, foodways, geography, history, language, literature, material culture, myth and manners, music, politics, religion, values, and more. Throughout the semester, students will meet and work with scholars from our university community who study the region from a variety of disciplines and perspectives.
Course assignments will expose students to the unsurpassed resources of UNC’s Southern Historical Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, the North Carolina Collection, and the Southern Oral History Program, as well as southern collections at UNC’s Ackland Museum of Art, and other cultural and historical institutions in the region. Students will be encouraged to explore local cultural “repositories,” to taste the flavors of southern foodways, and to attend regional art happenings, lectures, literary readings, musical performances, and folklife events

AMST233. Native America: The West
Instructor: Dr. Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote
Tuesday/Thursday 11:00am-12:15pm, Philips 328
This course examines the history of Native peoples located in the western part of what is now the United States. It will focus on three major questions. How have Indigenous peoples encountered, navigated, and engaged various colonial powers in this region? How do tribal sovereignty, law, and policy inform the lives of Native men and women the West? How might engaging gender as a lens shape our understanding of the complex histories of Native peoples in the region?
To approach these and other issues, students will read a number of articles, historical documents, and following texts: Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Chief Manuelito and Juanita by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy Pauketat, and We’re All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 by William J. Bauer.

AMST290. Topics in American Studies – Indigenous Performance and Representation
Instructor: Dr. Angeline Shaka
Monday/Wednesday 3:00-4:15pm, Wilson 217
This interdisciplinary seminar course examines a broad range of artistic expression among the Indigenous people of the Americas, Canada, and the Pacific. Using specific case studies, we will consider how chosen performance strategies address many current political, cultural, and historical issues relating to understandings of indigeneity today. Our investigations will emphasize the centrality of performance both historically and in the modern world as a means of preserving and asserting Native cultural values in the present-day. Topics will include: performance and traditions in a Postmodern era, defining indigeneity through performing bodies, representations of the indigenous in drama, and Native stereotypes in film. In addition to reading contemporary theory and criticism and performance ethnographies, students will watch films and performances

AMST292. Historical Seminar in American Studies – The South in Black and White
Instructor: Dr. Tim Tyson
Tuesday 6:15-8:15pm, DUKE
The South in Black and White explores Southern history, politics and culture in the 20th century. This lecture and discussion course is open to students at Duke, UNC, NCCU, NC State, Durham Tech and the larger community. We will constitute a kind of front porch on Southern history and culture, where we will join those whom Zora Neale Hurston called “the big picture talkers” and hear their stories. We meet at the American Tobacco Campus on Tuesday nights in Downtown Durham. There will be live music, poetry, lectures, stories, discussions, oral histories, and dramatic performances. We will explore a history as rich and complicated, painful and delightful as the South itself. *This course counts for Southern Studies credit in History and Social Sciences.

AMST338. Native American Novel
Instructor: Dr. Chris Teuton
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 12:00-12:50pm, Bingham 317
At the heart of any Indigenous community you will find its stories. Stories passed on by word of mouth, through expressive art forms, and in writing all respond in creative and adaptive ways to the changing histories, lifeways, and circumstances of Native American peoples. Over the past forty years, the novel has become the single most important genre of Native American storytelling. In this class, we will read a wide variety of many of the best works of contemporary Indigenous novels from inside the territorial boundaries of the United States and Canada. In the course of our reading and discussion, we’ll engage the ideas and contexts these powerful works of literature invite us to consider.

AMST340. American Indian Art and Material Culture
Instructor: Dr. Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote
Tuesday/Thursday 2:00-3:15, Greenlaw 222
This course examines American Indian art and material culture through interdisciplinary perspectives. Throughout the course students will gain a greater understanding of the role that the arts play in the social, cultural, and political life of American Indian peoples. This course will also explore a number of questions: What is the relationship between art and American Indian identities? How have Native artists negotiated various markets and audiences for their works? Over the course of the term students will read, discuss, and write about a number of objects and texts. In addition to articles and book chapters we will read Native North American Art, by Janet C. Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, History of the Book in Indian Country by Phillip Round, No Deal! Indigenous Art and the Politics of Possession, edited by Tressa Berman, Object of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation in the late Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast, and The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich.

AMST375. Food in America
Instructor: Dr. Marcie Ferris
Tuesday/Thursday 2:00-3:15pm, Greenlaw 302
AMST 375 examines the history and meaning of food in America and how our culinary cultures have shaped national, regional, and personal identity for over five centuries. To approach the unwieldy, vast history of American foodways, this course highlights selected historical moments, places, and people in the complex narrative of our country’s foodways. Rather than an encyclopedic overview of cuisine, AMST 375 steps beyond iconic dishes and recipes to examine a cultural conversation found in the historical interactions of Americans across time. Food is also a barometer of contemporary America, where a return to local food and small-scale, heritage agriculture exists alongside industrial farming. The challenges of our national food system—environmental degradation, sustainable agriculture, food access, and food-related disease—are especially acute in the American South, and have been throughout its history. We must consider how this history impacts current institutional policy and individual action. “Food in American Culture” considers the intersection of America’s multi-racial and multi-ethnic populations to explore the meaning of our nation’s ‘cuisine.’ Throughout the semester, students discuss food as both a source of healing and a source of conflict, and the ways in which it impacts community, from the American family to the “national family.”

AMST398. Service Learning in America: The Arts & Social Change
NOTE: INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED – Email ashackel@unc.edu for details.
Instructor: Dr. Aaron Shackelford, Carolina Performing Arts
Wednesday 3:30-6:20, Greenlaw 319
This seminar investigates the history of the arts as instruments of social change in America. Over the course of the semester we will study how artistic engagement enacts change in the culture and politics of the United States, beginning with abolitionist movements of the nineteenth century and continuing to present-day efforts. A large portion of this class will be student engagement in an arts-based service-learning project. All students will maintain a journal and series of critical reflections throughout their project. The student experiences in the community will provide a direct experience of the power – and challenges – of art as a catalyst for social change here in North Carolina.
As a course which fulfills the Experiential Education requirement, AMST 398 will require individual service-learning placements for a minimum of 30 hours outside of class time. Assistance in finding placements will be provided, and you are encouraged to think deeply about which opportunities will be most beneficial for your interests. If you have an idea for an alternative placement, please speak with me as soon as possible and we will discuss your options. You will be required to return APPLES contracts and placement supervisor contact information will be needed ASAP in the semester. Throughout the semester you will write at least four Critical Incident Reflections. You will also be responsible for leading one class discussion of at least 30 minutes that connects with your service-learning placement. *This course of study can become the basis for 100-300 hours of public service necessary for all Buckley Public Service Scholars participants.

AMST466. You Are Where You Live: The American House
Instructor: Dr. Kathy Roberts
Wednesday 3:30-6:20pm, Saunders 204
This course is designed to attune students to the complexities of human shelter. We will begin our journey by studying the development of several national and regional housing types in the U.S. and the environmental and socio-political factors that contributed to their formation. From shotguns to ranches to mobile homes and more, we will learn about how domestic forms in the built environment have contributed to American cultural landscapes—past and present. In addition, we will explore the social use and meaning of housing and examine the strategies people use to create “homes” out of built forms. Finally, we consider several larger issues associated with housing in the U.S., including affordability, sustainability and gentrification. By the end of the course, students should be able to understand the built environment as a form of communication, capable of revealing what we value as individuals and communities and as a nation, and to critically evaluate the ways in which housing mediates power relations in the U.S.

AMST483. Seeing the USA: Visual Arts and American Culture – The Film Director as Public Intellectual
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Robinson
Wednesday 2:00-4:50pm, Greenlaw 222
This course will tentatively consider the filmmaker as “public intellectual,” an individual whose skillful orchestration of narrative techniques and formal elements generate compelling critiques of American society. We will examine works by a range of contemporary filmmakers, including Spike Lee, Wayne Wang, Todd Haynes, Robert Rodriguez, and others (to be determined by students). No previous experience in film studies is required, but you will be expected to develop or expand your knowledge of film techniques, grammar, history and theory, and to draw on the terminology of film studies in your written work. In addition to reading a very limited selection of essays and interviews, we will watch two films most weeks during the semester. Students will need to set up a Netflix/Amazon account and have time to view films out of class on their own schedule. If you are curious or passionate about cinema, I invite you to take this course!

AMST498. Advanced Seminar in American Studies
Instructor: Mike Wiley
Thursday 12:00-2:50pm, Greenlaw 316
This course is taught by visiting professor Mike Wiley, an actor, playwright and director of documentary theater. Teaches students about a powerful, experimental form of storytelling that complicates the relationships between documentary, narrative, past, and present. Students work directly with the professor conducting oral histories and archival research of African American life, including film footage, photographs, newspapers, letters and other sources to produce the raw material of documentary narratives. Professor Wiley and the students then convert this historical oral and archival research into a documentary theater performance. This course will illuminate both historical events and contemporary issues to show how art and scholarship document and change the world. Professor Wiley’s current project is the research and production of a one-person play about James Baldwin, one of America’s greatest writers and a crucial voice of the civil rights movement. Note: this is not an acting class.

ANTH 537. Gender and Performance (formerly FOLK)
Instructor: Patricia Sawin
Tuesday/Thursday 11:00am-12:15pm, Wilson 217
In this course we explore the culturally and historically variable ways in which individuals constitute themselves as gendered subjects. We ground our study in theories of gender as a negotiated discursive accomplishment and as a recursive and malleable performance (rather than as an inherent or natural quality). Readings suggest the wide range of ways in which people draw upon both unmarked, everyday talk and action and on a variety of aesthetic performance forms—including narrative, pageant, song, dance, and material culture—in order to perform and potentially transform gendered selves. We further explore the ways in which gender performers, who necessarily rely upon extant expressive resources yet modify them, expand the options available to themselves and others. Each student will undertake their own ethnographic study of gender performance, working with a group or individual with whom they can interact over the course of the semester.

FOLK560. Southern Literature and the Oral Tradition
Instructor: Dr. Bill Ferris
Tuesday/Thursdays 8:00-9:15am
Center for the Study of the American South, 410 East Franklin St.
Graduate students enrolling in this course will also meet 9:30-10:30 on Tuesdays.
This course focuses on Southern writers and explores how they use oral traditions in their work. We will discuss the nature of oral tradition and how its study can provide a methodology for understanding Southern literature. We will consider how specific folklore genres such as folktales, sermons, and music are used by Southern writers, and we will discuss how such genres provide structure for literary forms such as the novel and the short story.
The seminar begins by exploring the nature of folklore and how its study has been applied to both oral and written literature. We will then consider examples of oral history and how they capture the southern voice. We will discuss how nineteenth century slave narratives by Harriet Ann Jacobs and Frederick Douglass and works by Tennessee Williams and Mark Twain deal with local color and black and white southern voices. After these readings, we will consider a rich selection of twentieth century Southern writers and discuss how they use folklore in their work.

AMST701. Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Instructor: Dr. Sharon Holland
Tuesday 3:30-6:20pm, New East 301
What is a method? Is it possible to actually tell someone how you do what you do? Or is a method just a collection of tools and our journey to find the right one? Or, more appropriately, is a method a guideline, often rigid, that we must follow, even over the creative cliff? In this course we will track discourses on method in American Studies and create new methodologies as we search for dry sand in muddy water, so to speak. This course will examine award winning books published in the last two years in American Studies whose methodologies challenge, if not compel us to rethink the category. This course will also traffic in debates about method across material culture, American Indian studies and american cultures more broadly. We will have occasion to revisit familiar icons of “American-ness” to search for novel ways in which to re-interpret their meaning in the age of social media. We will also utilize archival resources at our disposal. Students will be required to submit two short papers anytime during the semester and a group project at the end of the course.

AMST850 Digital Humanities Practicum
NOTE: INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED
Instructor: Dr. Robert C. Allen, James Logan Godfrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Director, Digital Innovation Lab (rallen@email.unc.edu)
Thursday 3:30-6:30 pm, Greenlaw 431
This practicum blends traditional graduate seminar discussions with hands-on training and experience in the digital humanities. Students will work alongside DH practitioners in the Digital Innovation Lab, contributing to real-life projects that emphasize trans-domain, collaborative work. DIL projects share a commitment to engaged scholarship, representing partnerships with local communities. The practicum gives students the opportunity to pursue a set of professional development goals for themselves. Students will emerge from this practicum with a deeper understanding of digital humanities approaches, practices and issues, all of which will have be applied to their own project-based work and training.
Enrollment for this course is limited and is by permission of instructor. Please email Professor Allen with a statement of interest. Enrollment is open to MA and PHD students at UNC and (via interinstitutional registration) to graduate students at Duke, and NCSU. Disciplinary diversity is valued.
Structure: The DIL Graduate DH Practicum combines hands-on training in a real-world DH laboratory setting with regular seminar-styled meetings and engagement with a broader Carolina DH community.
1. Lab Work
Students will contribute 8 hours/week to ongoing project work in the DIL, as assigned and monitored by the instructor in consultation with the DIL Manager. The particular role each student will play within the project team will depend upon his/her skills, background, professional goals, and experience in relation to the needs of the project. The DIL is committed to maintaining an ambitious and diverse project agenda focused on 1) the development of digital humanities tools, platforms, and work processes, 2) the testing of these tools in practical application through collaborative projects with faculty, other university units, cultural heritage organizations, and other universities, 3) project-based work developed through the programmatic expression of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative , including the DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship Program, Postdoctoral Fellows Program, and CDHI-supported faculty. Students may also propose new interdisciplinary, collaborative projects. Approval of these new projects by the instructor is contingent upon their fit with the mission and priorities of the DIL, the capability of the student to undertake the project proposed, technical requirements, and the capacity of the DIL to support them.
Students will work closely with the DIL Manager to develop a set of professional development goals at the beginning of the semester (for instance, learning XML, or gaining experience in project management).
2. Weekly Seminars
In addition to working in the Lab, the Practicum will provide a regular opportunity for engaged conversations about the theoretical and conceptual issues and challenges raised by the project upon which they are working. The purpose of these seminars (Thursdays, 3:30-6:30, 431 Greenlaw) is to offer a theoretical underpinning for the students’ work in the Lab, while exposing students to a broad range of DH practices and issues. A portion of the seminar may be devoted to discussing Lab work.

FOLK860/ANTH860. The Art of Ethnography
Instructor: Dr. Glenn Hinson
Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:45am, Greenlaw 526A
To many, the combination of the terms “art”—with its implications of creativity and aesthetic engagement—and “ethnography”—the practice of engaged community study, with the end of deeper cultural understanding—might seem a bit odd. But this layering speaks rather pointedly to the ways we’ll approach ethnography in this graduate seminar, treating it as more than mere process and skill, and as more than just research and writing. Ethnography—as a process based in conversation and the search for shared understanding—is inherently creative. It’s always a “making,” an enacting that begins with conversations in the “field,” moves into domains of intimate sharing and mutual realization, and eventually finds voice in various forms of artful representation. All these realms of enactment involve a host of choices that ethnographers and their consultants creatively make throughout the course of their engagement. In the field, these choices encompass such matters as with whom to speak; how to present oneself in that speaking; how and with whom to craft bonds of collaboration; how to offer oneself as student, friend, and colleague; how to enact an ethic of caring and equity; and how to measure one’s emergent understanding. In crafting the representation, choices involve what to include and what to leave out; when to give voice to consultants and when to speak for self; how to frame and how to order and how to story. In these arenas of dialogue and subjective choice lies the art in ethnography.
This seminar invites students to journey from the classroom to the community to practice this art and to investigate the complexities of community meaning. Over the course of the semester, we will both explore various fieldwork techniques and wrestle with the entanglements of ethnographic representation. Since the only way to “learn” how to “do” this is to actually enter the field, we will each be planning, conducting, and reporting on a semester-long field project; in so doing, we’ll craft collaborative partnerships with both our consultants in the community and our peers in the classroom.