Intro to American Studies · Ethnicity And Race Studies
A survey of the prominent historical literature in the field of American Studies.
This course was a great introduction to the American classics. I came in having not read Moby Dick however having spent a lot of my professional life building and maintaining brands and so the classroom discussions were invalauble.
I learned a lot about new perspectives and their application to social and cultural situations. I got to read a lot of new works and I found discussion really interesting.
I received an introduction to various fields I've looked at before (gender studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies) and for the first time read authors I knew from secondary sources (Gramsci, Adorno). I learned some valuable practical skills, including how to propose research and how to structure academic papers (i.e. literature review).
I think the most important thing I learned in this class was a comprehensive history of the American Studies field. The way Dr. Sandler took us through the various periods and critics of the field were incredibly helpful in locating my own research within the broader context. I think his use of Moby Dick early in the semester also gave us a great opportunity to thoroughly invest in a single source while also reading enough tangential material to see how a work of art can be useful for a variety of purposes.
I learned a lot of about the foundational theories that are important to American Studies and the different dynamic ares of research housed under the discipline and how they intersect.
The breadth of the reading material designed for this class made me realize that American Studies is truly an interdisciplinary discipline. The material in this class this semester has focused primarily on the modern era, and I still have a blind spot for the early American material. The course enabled me to not be afraid to pick up interdisciplinary projects.
How to research and write a scholarly paper. How to read a scholarly paper carefully.
It is a required course for the program, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is not in the program
I would recommend it for the reading and tell Black and other students of color from the United States/United Kingdom that there are students who may seek to understand why certain pejoratives are taboo and this may not may be viewed as an expression of intellectual curiosity. This places a large amount of emotional pressure on students for whom this type of language could signal the precursor to emotional, spiritual or even physical violence.