The Scherer Center helps students coordinate programs of research on American culture; it does not offer a degree in the study of American culture. Below you will find a list of courses offered in 2012-13 by departments and schools across the University. For previous years’ course offerings in American Studies, please visit our Course Archive.
Art History
The Visual Arts in American Culture, 1830-1945
S. Miller
Autumn 2012
Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago and Beyond
This course looks at Wright’s work from multiple angles, examining his architecture, urbanism, relationship to the built environment and socio-cultural context of his lifetime, and legend. We’ll take advantage of the Robie House on campus, and of the rich legacy of Wright’s early work in Chicago; we’ll also think about his later “Usonian” houses for middle-income clients and the urban framework he imagined for his work (“Broadacre City”), as well as his Wisconsin headquarters (Taliesin), and spectacular works like the Johnson Wax Factory (a required one-day Friday field trip, if funds permit), Fallingwater, and the Guggenheim Museum. By examining one architect’s work in context, students will gain experience analyzing buildings and their siting, and interpreting them in light of their complex ingredients and circumstances. The overall goal is to provide an introduction to thinking about architecture and urbanism.
K. Taylor
Autumn 2012
New Art in Chicago Museums and Other Spaces
Through very regular, required site visits to museums, galleries, and experimental spaces in the greater Chicago area, this course introduces students to the close consideration—in situ—of works of art created in and for our time, as well as to pertinent modes of critical and historical inquiry. Sites visited can include our own Smart Museum of Art, the Hyde Park Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and private collections and galleries. Enrollment strictly limited to 12 with instructor consent required.
D. English
Autumn 2012
Sexuality Studies in American Art
Taking the recent, controversial exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference & Desire in American Portraiture as our springboard, this course examines the plural strategies by which sexuality studies (in modes ranging from feminist history to psychoanalysis to queer theory) have been brought to bear on the canon of modern American art over the past thirty years, and the ways they have refigured our investigative methods, our objects of study, and the canon itself. Treating sexuality as a multivalent force in the creation of modern art and culture (rather than merely as subject), our topics will range from the 1870s to the 1960s—the years before artistic engagements with sexuality and gender were radically transformed by postmodernism and contemporary identity politics. Case studies will include the work of, and recent scholarship about, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, the Stieglitz circle (Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe), the trans-Atlantic “New Women” of the 1920s (Berenice Abbott, Romaine Brooks), the downtown bohemian and uptown Harlem Renaissance scenes of 1920s-30s New York, Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Eva Hesse. Readings are drawn from recent art historical and key theoretical texts, with an emphasis on methodological analysis.
S. Miller
Autumn 2012
The Black Arts Movement in Chicago
This course studies the 1960s-1970s Black Arts Movement in Chicago, in particular its visual artists, in the broader context of African American art and artists in Chicago from the 1940s to the 1990s. The class will make frequent trips to the South Side Community Art Center at 3831 S. Michigan Ave. Topics include the relationship of art to political militancy, the place of history, the formation of a “Black aesthetic,” text-image relations, and the uses of different media (painting and sculpture, printmaking, performance). Students in the course will work together to curate an exhibition. No art history expertise is required, but willingness to work independently and as a group is essential.
R. Zorach
Winter 2013
Visual Art in the Postwar U.S.
A survey of major figures and developments in visual arts and related fields since roughly 1945. Chronological in progression, this course nevertheless affords a wide view of consequential developments in and beyond major art centers and occurring across mediums and national borders. Themes to be considered will include Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Happenings, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimal Art, Process, Performance, Situationism, Conceptual Art, experimental film and video, Earth Art, Neo-Geo, and others.
D. English
Spring 2013
University of Chicago Campus
An introduction to architecture and planning, this course examines the changes in thinking about the University campus from its origins in the 1890s to the present. Many of the University’s choices epitomize those shaping American architecture generally and some of our architects are of national significance. The course develops skill in analyzing architecture and urban form in order to interpret: how the University images itself in masonry, metal, and lawn; how it works with architects; the role of buildings in social and intellectual programs and values; the effects of campus plans and the siting of individual buildings; and the impact of technological change. “On site” sessions and study of archival documents required.
K. Taylor
Spring 2013
The 1930s as Culture Laboratory
The 1930s was a decade of wildly diverse artistic experiments in the United States, a veritable laboratory for modernizing American art and for redefining “culture” itself. This course introduces a wide range of those experiments, with readings drawn largely from primary sources. Topics include debates about realism vs. abstraction; American versions of surrealism; the work and impact of Mexican muralists in the U.S.; Midwestern regionalism and its controversial nativist sources; African-American artists in Chicago and New York; the impact of European émigré artists and scholars; the involvement of American artists in international anti-fascist movements; experiments in curatorial practice at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art, including the “Machine Art” exhibition; the emergence of “documentary” theories and practices in photography, film, and literature; the rise of photo-magazines LIFE & Look; the WPA Federal Arts Program; and the 1939 World’s Fair.
S. Miller
Spring 2013
Divinity School
American Religious Naturalism Following James
D. Arnold
Autumn 2012
Christianity and Slavery in America, 1619-1865
This course examines the history of Christian thought and practice in relation to slavery’s development in what became the United States.
C. Evans
Autumn 2012
Religion in Modern America, 1865-1920
This course is a general history of religion in the United States from the Civil War to the 1920s. Special emphases include religious practice, interreligious encounters and conflicts, race, confrontation with modernity, and the changing social and public dimensions of religion in the U.S.
C. Evans
Autumn 2012
English
The American Novel and the Photographic Impulse: 1895-1940
This course will consider canonical American novels in concert with the photographic images that influenced their writers and their eras. We will study, for example, how Matthew Brady’s Civil War images helped to produce the realist style of Stephen Crane, as well as how modernist image production and novelistic production might be seen to contradict or reinforce each other.
M. Tusler
Autumn 2012
Anglo-American Gothic Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
In the nineteenth century, gothic fiction in English is an Anglo-American phenomenon. America’s first internationally recognized literary masterpiece, Rip Van Winkle, is written in England and appears the same year as Frankenstein. Our course will study the transatlantic aspect of the gothic tradition, while we also give full attention to the particular qualities of individual texts. Close reading will be central to our project. Attention to textual intricacies will lead to questions about gender and psychology, as well as culture.
W. Veeder
Autumn 2012
American Literary Naturalism and Modernity
Naturalism is commonly understood as a genre that depicts human behavior as determined or influenced by environment and instinct. In this course we will ask what this genre might teach us about subjects embedded in the modern environments of industrial capital and urban centers. We will read from authors who are usually categorized as naturalists, such as Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodor Dreiser, and Edith Wharton; and from authors not usually considered to be naturalist like Don DeLillo.
S. Hutchison
Autumn 2012
Late Nineteenth-Century American Literary Realism
This course takes up major 19th-century American novelists in conjunction with philosophical and scientific essays that reflect on the project of representing “the real”.
K. Warren
Autumn 2012
Theory in the Archive: Working through Freedom in the Americas
This course will consider re-elaborations, interruptions, and improvisations with Enlightenment-era notions of freedom articulated by the African diaspora in the Americas before the twentieth century. Reading a multi-generic archive of polemical pamphlets, poetry, slave narratives, and other ephemera, we will see how diasporans worked through—neither simply rejecting nor accepting—dominant European philosophies of freedom.
C. Taylor
Winter 2013
Chicago
In this course we will sample some of Chicago’s wonders, exploring aspects of its history, literature, architecture, neighborhoods, and peoples. We begin with study of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the early history of Chicago as a mecca for domestic and international immigrants. In subsequent weeks we will examine the structure of neighborhood communities, local debates about cultural diversity and group assimilation, and the ideology and artifacts of art movements centered in Chicago.
J. Knight
Winter 2013
The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow
Taken as a whole, the fiction of Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, and James Baldwin constitutes a powerful testament to the common humanity of black and white Americans in a nation where “separate but equal” in matters of race was deemed consistent with the law of the land. How decisive was the humanistic eloquence of these writers in helping to shift the nation’s legal climate against de jure segregation? How successful was the American novel of race in coming to terms with the turbulent social reality of the Civil Rights era?
K. Warren
Winter 2013
American Television: From Broadcast Networks to the Internet
The idea of electromechanically transmitted moving images dates back to the nineteenth century and the first technological demonstration of televised moving images took place in the 1920s. While this course touches upon the early history of television, we will focus our attention on the era between the commercialization of television in the United States (in the early 1950s) and the rise of internet-based television via services such as Hulu (in the 2000s). As we will see, the history of television in these years, intersects with numerous other media, such as radio, film, video, digital games, and the novel. Alongside a study of the medium of television and its role in American culture, we will attend carefully to the form of TV narrative as it changes from an early episodic format to the complex long-form serial narratives that attained maturity in the 1990s. Through historical, formal, and cultural analyses, we will attempt to make sense of the recent renaissance of television narrative characterized by such serial programs as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. The course combines theoretical texts with close readings of particular television shows. Requirements include engaged participation in class discussion, weekly blog entries, a mid-term paper, and a substantive final research paper. There will be no exams.
P. Jagoda
Autumn 2012
History
US Latinos: Origins & Histories
An examination of the diverse social, economic, political, and cultural histories
of those who are now commonly identified as Latinos in the United States.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the formative historical experiences of
Mexican-Americans and mainland Puerto Ricans, although some consideration
will also be given to the histories of other Latino groups i.e., Cubans, Central
Americans, and Dominicans. Topics include cultural and geographic origins and
ties; imperialism and colonization; the economics of migration and employment;
legal status; work, women, and the family; racism and other forms of
discrimination; the politics of national identity; language and popular culture;
and the place of Latinos in U.S. society.
R. Gutierrez
Autumn 2012
Race in the 20th Century Atlantic World
This lecture course will provide an introduction to the workings of race on both sides of the Atlantic from the turn of the 20th century to the present. Topics covered will include: the very definition of the term “race”; policies on the naming, gathering and use of statistics on racial categories; the changing uses of race in advertising; how race figures in the politics and practices of reproduction; representations of race in children’s books; race in sports and the media. We will explore both relatively autonomous developments within the nation-states composing the Atlantic world, but our main focus will be on transfer,connections, and influence across that body of water. Most of the materials assigned will be primary sources ranging from films, fiction, poetry, political interventions, posters, advertisements, music, and material culture. Key theoretical essays from the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States will also be assigned.
T. Holt & L. Auslander
Autumn 2012
Historical Geography of the U.S.
M. Conzen
Immigration and Assimilation in American Life
This course explores the history of immigration in what is now the United States, starting with the colonial origins of Spanish, French, Dutch and English settlements, the importation of African slaves, and the massive waves of immigrants that arrived in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Additionally, we will study the adaptation of these immigrants, exploring the validity of the concept of assimilation, comparing and contrasting the experiences of the “Old” and “New” immigrants based on their race, religion, and class standing.
R. Gutierrez
Autumn 2012
Atlantic World
We will examine the British, Spanish and French Atlantic Worlds, c1600-1800 with particular emphasis upon themes that lead themselves to comparative analysis. Topics will include the plantation economy: demography and emigration; colony-metropole relations; imperial rivalries; as well as creole institutions and culture.
P. Cheney
Autumn 2012
The Politics of Black Culture
In this course we will explore historically the political implications of black
culture, including the diverse ways in which culture has been invoked or
deployed to political ends, has served as a means of political mobilization, has
marked African Americans as fit or unfit for citizenship rights. Through this
debate which has been sometimes explicit and at other times sub-rosa we
will probe the meanings and significance attributed to race, culture, and their
interrelationship.”
T. Holt
Autumn 2012
Problems in Caribbean-Atlantic
This colloquium broadly surveys interdisciplinary approaches to central themes in the making of Caribbean history, from the 16th through the 20th centuries.
J. Saville
Autumn 2012
Political Science
The Politics of Climate Change in the U.S.
Breakthroughs in climate science affirm with ever more certainty that climate change is occurring and that it is caused by human activity. Yet while the US is the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, America has been slow to act and to recommend initiatives to mitigate global warming. In this course, we will examine political responses to climate change in the US through exploration of three interrelated themes: the political meaning of scientific evidence for climate change, media coverage of climate change, and American public opinion on climate change. The class will look at each theme in turn, but the three topics are not mutually exclusive will all come up throughout the quarter.
A. Bass
Autumn 2012
Contemporary African American Politics
This course explores the issues, actions, and arguments that comprise black politics today. Our specific task is to explore the question of how do African Americans currently engage in politics and political struggles in the United States. This analysis is rooted in a discussion of contemporary issues, including the 2008 presidential election, the response to Hurricane Katrina, debates surrounding the topic of immigration, the exponential incarceration of black people, and the role of rap music and hip-hop among black youth. We situate the politics of African Americans into the larger design we call American politics. Is there such a thing as black politics? If there is, what does it tell us more generally about American politics?
C. Cohen
Winter 2013
Public Opinion
What is the relationship between the mass citizenry and government in the U.S.? Does the public meet the conditions for a functioning democratic polity? This course considers the origins of mass opinion about politics and public policy, including the role of core values and beliefs, information, expectations about political actors, the mass media, economic self-interest, and racial attitudes. This course also examines problems of political representation, from the level of political elites communicating with constituents, and from the possibility of aggregate representation.
J. Brehm
Spring 2013
Law and Society
This course examines the myriad relationships between courts, laws, and lawyers in the United States. Issues covered range from legal consciousness to the role of rights to access to courts to implementation of decisions to professionalism.
G. Rosenberg
Spring 2013
The Political Nature of the American Judicial System
This course aims to introduce students to the political nature of the American legal system. In examining foundational parts of the political science literature on courts conceived of as political institutions, the seminar will focus on the relationship between the courts and other political institutions. The sorts of questions to be asked include: Are there interests that courts are particularly prone to support? What effect does congressional or executive action have on court decisions? What impact do court decisions have? While the answers will not always be clear, students should complete the course with an awareness of and sensitivity to the political nature of the American legal system.
G. Rosenberg
Winter 2013
Electoral Politics in America
This course explores the interactions of voters, candidates, the parties, and the media in American national elections, chiefly in the campaign for the presidency, both in nominating primaries and in the November general election. The course will examine how voters learn about candidates, how they perceive candidates, how they come to turn out to vote, and how they decide among the candidates. It will examine the strategies and techniques of electoral campaigns, including the choices of campaign themes and the impact of campaign advertising. It will consider the role of campaign contributors and volunteers, the party campaign organizations, campaign and media polls, and the press. Finally, it will assess the impact of campaigns and elections on governing and policymaking.
M. Hansen
Autumn 2012
Democracy and the Information Technology Revolution
The revolution in information technologies has serious implications for democratic societies. We concentrate, though not exclusively, on the United States. We look at which populations have the most access to technology-based information sources (the digital divide), and how individual and group identities are being forged online. We ask how is the responsiveness of government being affected, and how representative is the online community. Severe conflict over the tension between national security and individual privacy rights in the U.S., United Kingdom and Ireland will be explored as well. We analyze both modern works (such as those by Turkle and Gilder) and the work of modern democratic theorists (such as Habermas).
M. Dawson
Winter 2013
The Political Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois
The seminar will concentrate on three of Du Bois’s books: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Darkwater (1920), and Dusk of Dawn (1940). Through close readings of these carefully wrought works, we will concentrate on the relationship between Du Bois’s political thought and his conceptualization of race at different stages of his intellectual and activist career. We will also pay attention to Du Bois’s retrospective self-criticisms, and to his reliance on fictional and other genres of writing to articulate his thinking. Finally, we will consider a number of different methodological approaches to the study and appraisal of Du Bois’s political thought in particular and the history of African American political thought more generally, including recent work by Lawrie Balfour, Robert Gooding-Williams, Adolph Reed, Tommie Shelby, and Cornel West.
R. Gooding-Williams
Autumn 2012
The Politics of Blackness in the Americas
The aim of this course is to examine the politics of blackness and black mobilization in historical context and across a number of countries in the Americas. The course begins with an analysis of the structural and ideological conditions that gave rise to particular kinds of expressions of black politics in countries like the United States, Cuba, Panama, Colombia and Brazil. In this, we focus on the early part of the 20th century and analyze the very different ways black populations and African culture were incorporated into, or excluded from, nationalist projects. This laid the context for complex processes of identity formation that would both facilitate and constrain black mobilization in these countries. We then move to the second half of the 20th century where we examine the emergence of nation-based black political movements alongside a number of attempts to build a broader Pan-African movement of the Americas. In so doing, we pay special attention to the crosspollination of ideologies, strategies and aesthetics among black activists in ways that complicate simple North to South flows of influence. Throughout the course we explore contestation between black activists over the meanings and boundaries around blackness itself, as well as the nature of their racial utopias, both within and across national contexts.
T. Paschel
Spring 2013
The American Presidency
This course examines the institution of the American presidency. It surveys the foundations of presidential power, both as the Founders conceived it and as it is practiced in the modern era. This course also traces the historical development of the institutional presidency, the president’s relationships with Congress and the courts, the influence presidents wield in domestic and foreign policy making, and the ways in which presidents make decisions in a system of separated powers.
W. Howell
Autumn 2012
Political Communication Networks
Does an individual’s social context, such as her social networks or social environment, have the ability to impact her political behavior? We focus on identifying a causal relationship from the political behavior of one’s social group to individual political activities. Specific readings are drawn from empirical research which relies upon public opinion surveys and field experiments, with a focus on the role of new media in American political life.
B. Sinclair
Spring 2013
Political Communication Networks
Does an individual’s social context, such as her social networks or social environment, have the ability to impact her political behavior? We focus on identifying a causal relationship from the political behavior of one’s social group to individual political activities. Specific readings are drawn from empirical research which relies upon public opinion surveys and field experiments, with a focus on the role of new media in American political life.
B. Sinclair
Spring 2013
Race and Politics in the U.S.
Fundamentally, this course is meant to explore how race, both historically and currently, influences politics in the United States. For example, is there something unique about the politics of African Americans? Does the idea and lived experience of whiteness shape one’s political behavior? Throughout the quarter, students interrogate the way scholars, primarily in the field of American politics, have ignored, conceptualized, measured, modeled, and sometimes fully engaged the concept of race. We examine the multiple manifestations of race in the political domain, both as it functions alone and as it intersects with other identities such as gender, class, and sexuality.
C. Cohen, M. Dawson
Winter 2013
Law and Politics: U.S. Courts as Political Institutions
An examination of the ways in which United States courts affect public policy. Questions include: How do the procedures, structures, and organization of the courts affect judicial outcomes? Are there interests that courts are particularly prone to support? What effect does congressional or executive impact, including judicial selection, have on court decisions? What are the difficulties with implementation of judicial decisions?
G. Rosenberg
Winter 2013
The Political Nature of the American Judicial System
This course aims to introduce students to the political nature of the American legal system. In examining foundational parts of the political science literature on courts conceived of as political institutions, the seminar will focus on the relationship between the courts and other political institutions. The sorts of questions to be asked include: Are there interests that courts are particularly prone to support? What effect does congressional or executive action have on court decisions? What impact do court decisions have? While the answers will not always be clear, students should complete the course with an awareness of and sensitivity to the political nature of the American legal system.
G. Rosenberg
Winter 2013
Sociology
Labor Force and Employment
This course introduces key concepts, methods and sources of information for understanding the structure of work and the organization of workers in the United States and other industrialized nations. The course surveys social science approaches to answering key questions about work and employment, including: What is the labor force? What determines the supply of workers? How is work organized into jobs, occupations careers and industries? What, if anything, happened to unions? How much money do workers earn and why? What is the effect of work on health? How do workers and employers find each other? Who is unemployed? What are the employment effects of race, gender, ethnicity, religion and other ascribed characteristics?
Stolzenberg
Winter 2013
Social Change in the United States
This course provides students with concepts, facts and methods for understanding the social structure of the contemporary United States, recent changes in the U.S. social structure, survey data for measuring social structure and social change in contemporary industrial societies, and data analysis methods for distinguishing different types of change. This course is taught by traditional and nontraditional methods. The traditional part is taught by a combination of readings, lectures and discussions. The nontraditional part will be taught by in-class, “live” statistical analysis of the 32-year (1972-2004) cumulative file of the NORC General Social Surveys (GSS).
Stolzenberg
Autumn 2012
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