American Studies

AFR 117 History of African American People to 1960 (4 Credits)

An examination of the broad contours of the history of African American people in the United States from ca. 1600 to 1960. Particular emphasis is given to how African Americans influenced virtually every aspect of U.S. society, slavery and Constitutional changes after 1865, debates on the meaning of freedom and citizenship, and the efforts to contest discrimination, segregation and anti-Black violence. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

AMS 243/ SWG 243 Feminist & Indigenous Science Studies (4 Credits)

Offered as AMS 243 and SWG 243. This course considers such questions as: What does one know and how does one know it? What knowledges count as science? How is knowledge culturally situated? How has science been central to colonialism and capitalism, and what would it mean to decolonize science(s)? Is feminist science possible? The course looks at key sites and situations in media and popular culture; science writing; sociological accounts of science; creation stories; and traditional knowledges in which knowledge around the categories of race, gender, sex, sexuality, sovereignty and dis/ability are produced, contested and made meaningful. Enrollment limited to 35. {H}{S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

AMS 267/ SWG 267 Colloquium: Queer Ecologies: Race, Queerness, Disability and Environmental Justice (4 Credits)

Offered as AMS 267 and SWG 267. This course examines interrelationships of race, sex, sexuality, gender, queerness, disability, class, embodiment, nation, Indigeneity, nature, and sustainability through critical engagement with a body of scholarship known as Queer Ecologies, e.g. anti-racist feminist and queer scholarship on science, labor, popular culture, cultural and environmental preservation, politics, bodies, and sexual and reproductive practices. The course draws theoretical muscle from feminist science studies, queer of color critique, critical race theory, crip theory, feminist theory, and more. Students learn basic participant observation methods, read scholarship, and analyze cultural artifacts such as web and print advertisements, television shows, films, and fiction. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}{S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

AMS 351mn/ ENG 384mn Topics on Writing about American Society-Medicine, Nature, and Science Writing (4 Credits)

Offered as AMS 351mn and ENG 351mn. This nonfiction writing course cultivates creative work that takes inspiration from the discoveries, controversies, crimes, and unsolved mysteries of the sciences. Students’ writing is artful as well as informative, and the emphasis is on craft and creative process. Students read a wide range of writers who explore social issues through the lens of science, from Susan Sontag and Jamaica Kincaid to Elizabeth Kolbert and Anna Tsing. Students conduct interviews and do immersion research in their individual areas of interest while being guided through the process of producing a substantial work of science writing. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only; AMS 351/ENG 384 may be repeated once with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. (E) {A}{L}

Fall, Variable

ARX 340 Seminar: Taking the Archives Public (4 Credits)

This seminar brings together a cohort of archives concentrators and other advanced students to explore contemporary issues at the intersection of archives and public history. The readings focus on case studies and the challenges in preservation, access and interpretation of archival materials. The class analyzes how these materials become part of a meaningful and usable past for general audiences while taking into account the dynamics of national and collective identity formation, trauma, memorialization, social justice, and the changing digital landscape in the fields of public history and cultural heritage work. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 15. {H}

Spring

ENG 230/ JUD 230 American Jewish Literature (4 Credits)

Offered as JUD 230 and ENG 230. Explores the significant contributions and challenges of Jewish writers and critics to American literature, broadly defined. Discussions include the American dream and its discontents; immigrant fiction; Yiddish in America; ethnic satire and humor; crises of the left involving 60s radicalism and Black-Jewish relations; after-effects of the Holocaust; and the novel as alternate history. Must Jewish writing remain on the margins, too ethnic for the mainstream yet insufficient for contemporary gatekeepers of diversity? No prerequisites. {H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 231 Inventing America: Nation, Race, Freedom (4 Credits)

This course focuses on the extraordinary burst of literary creativity that coincided with the emergence of a new American nation. From its conflicted founding episodes to the crisis of the Civil War, American writers interpreted and criticized American life with unmatched imaginative intensity and formal boldness, taking as their particular subject both the promise of freedom implicit in the nation's invention--and the betrayals of that promise: the horrors of slavery, and in the subtler entrapments of orthodox thinking, constricted vision, a self-poisoning psyche, and a repressive or unjust social life. {L}

Fall, Spring, Annually

ENG 239bc Topics in Multi-Ethnic American Literature: Borders and Border Crossings (4 Credits)

What terrain—physically, culturally and emotionally—do American writers inhabit when they write about borders? How might thinking about borders, whether literal or metaphorical ones, complicate the way race, class and gender inform matters of belonging and citizenship? Using literary and cultural analysis, this course explores what it means to be, become or refuse to be “American.” Major course themes include ethnic subjects and the American Dream, internment and detainment, and the disputed ownership of land, resources and persons. Texts studied include fiction and poetry written by a broad range of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian American writers. Restrictions: Not open to first-years. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 278 Asian American Women Writers (4 Credits)

The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past 100 years or so has been recognized as forming a coherent tradition even as it grows and expands to include newcomers and divergent voices under its umbrella. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text--fiction, poetry, memoir, mixed-genre--central or marginal to the tradition and how do emergent writers take this tradition in new directions? writers to be studied may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Sui Sin Far, Cathy Song, Joy Kogawa, Jessica Hagedorn, Monique Truong, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki, and more. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 303ap Seminar: Topics in American Literature-American Poetry in the Age of Emergency (4 Credits)

What is poetry’s role in bearing witness to an age of seemingly unremitting emergency? How can poets represent and respond to ongoing crises such as collapsing public health infrastructure, racialized police brutality and environmental devastation? Conversely, what is poetry’s relationship to highly mediatized “crisis events” like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina? Through literary and cultural analysis, this course explores and historicizes the concept of “emergency” in the United States. What is a state of emergency, and who gets to declare it? Moving between shorter, witness-based poems and longform documentary poems, the class considers how poetry can compel people to reimagine the terms upon which crises are rendered socially, politically and culturally legible. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

FMS 150 Introduction to Film and Media Studies (4 Credits)

This course introduces students to FMS through units that pair scholarly approaches with influential media forms: the Aesthetics of Film, the History of Television, and the Technologies of Digital Media. Through these units, students ask: what human desires animate a relationship with media? For what purposes have people invented and evolved these technologies? How do makers use them, and what are audiences seeking in them? These questions help students see the fundamental forces that unite film, television, and digital media alongside the elements that distinguish them from each other. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}

Fall

FMS 261 Video Games and the Politics of Play (4 Credits)

An estimated 65% of Americans play video games regularly, and game sales routinely exceed film box office figures. As this medium grows in cultural power, it is increasingly important to think about how games make meaning. This course serves as an introduction to Game Studies, equipping students with the vocabulary to analyze video games, surveying the medium’s genres, and sampling this scholarly discipline’s most influential theoretical writing. The particular focus, though, is on the ideology operating beneath the surface of these popular entertainment objects and on the ways in which video games enter political discourse. Enrollment limited to 25. {A}

Spring, Alternate Years

FYS 188 Indigenous Peoples and the Environment: Myth and Reality (4 Credits)

This course examines the stereotype of the “ecological Indian”—a racial trope that has perpetuated the idea that Native North Americans are naturally closer to nature or are natural conservationists. The class looks at how this stereotype has shaped non-Native ideas about Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States and has affected Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. This course also examines the varied ways Indigenous peoples have thought about ecological relationships and the strategies they developed to live in relation with the environment. The class critically examines the relationship between settler colonialism and the environment and considers contemporary and historical case studies in which Indigenous peoples have fought to protect and care for their lands and waters in the face of the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. Restrictions: First-years only; students are limited to one first-year seminar. Enrollment limited to 16. (E) WI {H}

Fall, Variable

HST 165 Race, Gender and US Citizenship, 1776-1865 (4 Credits)

Analysis of the historical realities, social movements, cultural expression and political debates that shaped U.S. citizenship from the Declaration of Independence to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. From the hope of liberty and equality to the exclusion of marginalized groups that made whiteness, maleness and native birth synonymous with Americanness. How African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and women harnessed the Declaration of Independence and its ideology to define themselves as citizens of the United States. Enrollment limited to 40. {H}

Fall, Spring, Annually

HST 166 Emancipation and the Afterlife of Slavery (4 Credits)

Examines the longevity of the U.S. Civil War in historical memory, as a pivotal period in the development of American racism and African American activism. Explores cutting-edge histories, primary source materials, documentaries, popular films, and visual and political culture. Explores the Civil War as a mass slave insurrection and studies the myriad meanings of Emancipation. Looks at the impact of slavery on race and racism on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Enrollment limited to 40. {H}

Fall, Spring, Annually

HST 214 Colloquium: Sex, God and Rock 'n' Roll (4 Credits)

This course explores the moral revolutions that have transformed American public life since 1960. It focuses particularly on “culture wars” over religion, sex and gender, race, and transgressive music and art. Discussions include: the cultural politics of race, gender, and sexuality; religion and Black liberation; youth rebellion and law-and-order backlash; feminist hippies and psychedelic spirituality; conservative hair metal and Christian rock; tradwives and family values; evangelicals and Wal-Mart capitalism; tech elites and the culture of perpetual disruption; and how algorithms and Hollywood reboots define culture today. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 261 Colloquium: Richard Pryor's America (4 Credits)

When he died in 2005, a New York Times obituary described African American comedian Richard Pryor as “the groundbreaking comedian whose profanely personal insights into race relations and modern life made him one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.” Pryor innovated standup comedy thus inventing new discourses about race and modes of expressing antiracist thinking in the United States. This interdisciplinary colloquium dives into Pryor’s comedy and explores his cultural and historical influences–the legacy of enslavement, the origins of Black humor, the great migration, sex work and Black masculinities, respectability politics, comedy, Black Power, and Africa in the African American imagination. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}

Spring, Alternate Years

HST 278 Colloquium: A Decolonial U.S. Women’s History (4 Credits)

An introduction to U.S. women's history with Black, Indigenous, Mexican and Puerto Rican women at the center. This course is also guided by the cultural and theoretical work of women of color to decolonize knowledge, history and the world. Discussions include colonialism, emancipation from slavery, racial segregation and exclusion, industrial and neoliberal capitalism, imperialism, mass migration, labor, feminism, civil rights and a range of liberation movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emphasis on the oral tradition and working-class cultures. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

HST 280gi Colloquium: Topics in United States Social History-Im/migration and Transnational Cultures (4 Credits)

Explores significance of im/migrant workers and their transnational social movements to U.S. history in the late 19th and 20th centuries. How have im/migrants responded to displacement, marginalization and exclusion, by redefining the meanings of home, citizenship, community and freedom? What are the connections between mass migration and U.S. imperialism? What are the histories of such cross-border social movements as labor radicalism, borderlands feminism, Black and Brown Liberation, and anti-colonialism? Topics also include racial formation; criminalization, incarceration and deportation; reproductive justice; and the politics of gender, sexuality, race, class and nation. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 383bc Seminar: Topics in Research in U.S. Women’s History-Border Crossings and Labor Solidarities (4 Credits)

How have working-class migrant women organized to change the world? This seminar focuses on the transnational labor movement 1880s-1930s through key activist women and their communities in North America, such as Lucy Parsons (African American), Luisa Capetillo (Puerto Rico and the diaspora), Caritina Piña (Mexican Borderlands), and Maria Roda (Italian). How did this generation shape local struggles and create activist networks across many borders? How did they center mutual aid, solidarity, and freedom? What obstacles did they face? Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. (E) {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 383pc Seminar: Topics in Research in U.S. Women's History-Researching People of Color at Smith College (4 Credits)

The history of students of color at Smith College. Draws from readings about African American, Latinx, Asian American, Indigenous, international and other students of color in higher education. Explores the Smith College archives for documents, ephemera and oral histories. Students also familiarize themselves with archival materials compiled by student activists and scour The Sophian (Smith’s weekly newspaper) to uncover the histories of racial policy, racism, community-building, social justice and activism at Smith College. Students work to produce one original academic project such as a podcast, a digital timeline, another digital humanities project or a traditional research paper. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

JUD 260 Colloquium: Yiddish Literature and Culture (4 Credits)

Why did Yiddish, the everyday language of Jews in east Europe and beyond, so often find itself at the bloody crossroads of art and politics? From dybbuks and shlemiels to radicals and revolutionaries, the course explores Yiddish stories, drama, and film as sites for social activism, ethnic and gender performance, and artistic experimentation in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Americas. How did post-Holocaust engagements with Yiddish memorialize a lost civilization and forge an imagined homeland defined by language and culture rather than borders? All texts in translation. No prerequisites. Enrollment limited to 18. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

LAS 201st Colloquium: Topics in Latin American and Latino/a/x Studies-Surveillance, Tech, and Latinx Communities (4 Credits)

This course examines critical interdisciplinary intersections between Surveillance, STS, and Latinx studies. It focuses on colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and their role in shaping surveillance, security, and nation-empire building. It also explores how Latina/o/x communities experience surveillance and technology from colonialism to contemporary dynamics of dehumanization. Students read writings on surveillance, discipline, and punishment, centering racialized and gendered scholars like Ivan Chaar Lopez, Simone Browne, and Joy James. The course studies surveillance and tech systems controlling global mobility, migration, enclosures, extraction, and reproductive and sexual labor. Finally, students read how Latinx communities use technologies for memory, placemaking, information sharing, and struggle. Restrictions: LAS 201 may be repeated once with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 20. {S}

Fall, Variable

MUS 240 Colloquium: Queer Pop (4 Credits)

Through streaming, radio, television, film, online media, public and private social spaces, and more, both artists and listeners use popular music to construct, perform, and assert their queer and trans identities. This course examines shifting conceptions of queer and trans identities and how they are constructed through, reflected in, and challenged by music in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. Discussions include: early blues; disco; women’s music; queercore and punk; and contemporary sapphic pop. Students create a zine as their final project. Weekly assignments include readings and listening. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}

Fall, Spring, Variable

MUS 256 Colloquium: Hip Hop Music and Culture (4 Credits)

In the last five decades, hip hop has become a dominant force in American and global popular music. Originating in the street culture of the Bronx in the 1970s, hip hop is a multifaceted cultural movement that has influenced almost all aspects of American culture. This course explores the musical expressions of hip hop, especially rap, within their cultural and historical contexts. Taking a largely chronological approach, this course focuses on the development and major trends in rap as they intersect with social and political movements at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course examines important topics in rap and hip hop music, including issues surrounding race, gender, sexuality, disability, and geopolitics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

SWG 150 Introduction to the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality (4 Credits)

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of women’s, gender and sexuality studies. Students learn key concepts and theories of the field by analyzing the social construction of sex, gender and sexuality as they intersect with race, class, nationality and (dis)ability at the individual, institutional and ideological levels, and in national and global contexts. The course examines the historical roots of feminist movements and thinking, and engages with contemporary movements for social justice. Texts include archival materials, films, personal narratives, theory, scholarly works, poetry, fiction, art, and popular writing and culture. Students learn interdisciplinary methodologies of archival research, historical analysis, literary and visual analysis, and theoretical analysis. Primarily for first- and second-year students. Enrollment limited to 25. {H}{S}

Fall, Spring

SWG 220 Introduction to Queer and Trans Studies (4 Credits)

This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of queer studies, including its historical formations and recent innovations. The course explores the roots of queer theory in feminist theories of subjectivity and desire, queer of color critique, and queer critiques of traditional domains of knowledge production, including psychoanalysis and visual culture. Students examine a wide range of media and forms of documentation ranging from archival material and oral histories, to critical theory. The course attends to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, and puts these and other topics or identifications in conversation with course material and discussions. {A}{S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

SWG 222 Gender, Law and Policy (4 Credits)

This course explores the impact of gender on law and policy in the United States historically and today, focusing in the areas of constitutional equality, employment, education, reproduction, the family, violence against women and immigration. Students study constitutional and statutory law as well as public policy. Topics include sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, pregnancy and caregiver discrimination, pay equity, sexual harassment, school athletics, marriage, sterilization, contraception and abortion, reproductive technologies, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and gender-based asylum. Students study feminist efforts to reform the law and examine how inequalities based on gender, race, class and sexuality shape the law. The class also discusses and debates contemporary policy and future directions. {H}{S}

Fall

SWG 307 Seminar: Abortion History, Law and Politics (4 Credits)

Previously SWG 300ah. On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing a half-century-long precedent of constitutional abortion rights. This course explores the history, law and politics of abortion in the U.S. before, during and after Roe. The course examines ideologies, strategies and tactics of the abortion rights movement as well as the anti-abortion movement, focusing in particular on the gender and racial politics of these movements. Discussions include abortion access, anti-abortion violence, “crisis pregnancy centers,” fetal personhood campaigns, the criminalization of pregnancy, abortion pills, telemedicine abortion and self-managed abortion. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

Fall, Spring, Variable

THE 213 American Theatre and Drama (4 Credits)

This course discusses issues relevant to theatre history and practices, as well as dramatic literature, theories and criticism in 18th-, 19th- 20th- and 21st centuries United States of America, including African American, Native American, Hispanic American and Latinx, Asian American, LGBTQ+, the American musical, political, feminist and contemporary theatre and performance. Lectures, discussions and presentations are complemented by video screenings of recent productions of some of the plays under discussion. {A}{H}{L}

Spring