Classes

Studying popular culture reveals much about the society that creates, consumes, and critiques it. How do ideas circulate in mass media? Can popular culture create social change? Who determines what counts as serious or frivolous culture? Is popular culture a democratizing...

Midcentury America saw the explosion of a genre on the page and screen—the hardboiled crime novel and the film noir. Noir represented a foil to postwar optimism: its protagonists were cynics and loners. Filled with lurid crimes and deeds, noir suggested a dark underbelly to...

With the popularity of shows like Inventing Anna and The Dropout, 2022 might be called the year of the scammer. Yet contemporary con artists come from a long lineage of carnival barkers, snake oil salesmen, and self-proclaimed miracle workers. This class examines the...

The 1980s saw the convergence of American politics and economics to strengthen US interests abroad, but the decade was also a moment of social, political, and economic divergence at home. How compatible—or causal—was the end of the cold war with the end of the American...

How do artists and creators engage the debates of the present moment? How do we as scholars and critics help make history? This small course takes these questions as its foundation: we will look at the culture, context, and criticism of 2016 as it unfolds. In this lab-style...

This course considers the culture of American capitalism through an examination of a broad range of literary and historical texts. As we explore the shifts in thinking about class, labor, business, and money from the early days of the republic through the present day, we...

This tutorial examines the American individual as a product and producer of environment. We will contemplate whether America's "moral identity" is one that comes from the individual or society, looking at the ways in which individuals contemplate their relationship to...

This junior tutorial considers the challenges and opportunities posed by communal affiliation in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will investigate how notions of physical space and government infrastructure shape and define lived experience and how ethnic and racial groups...

What does privacy mean in America’s 20th century? Our course examines the conditions of privacy from both a literary and historical perspective, in order to understand how concerns about privacy have shaped American life in both the domestic and public spheres. Our readings...

Being a good writer is much like being a good detective or a good lawyer. Like being a detective, writing requires careful gathering of evidence and thoughtful analysis. Like being a lawyer, writing also demands persuasive argumentation and compelling claims. As a writer in...