American Studies

CAS AM 502 Topics in American Studies: Four American Masters of the Short Story An in-depth analysis of four twentieth-century American masters of the short story form: Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Stanley Elkin, and Joyce Carol Oates. Each offers a distinctively different vision of the expressive possibilities of short fiction. We will explore what each can tell us about our culture and ourselves. Carney  TR 12:30-2:00 HIS 110

GRS AM 735 Studies in American Culture Stamped Approval. Prereq: AM 736 or consent of instructor. Introduction to the handling of primary materials from a number of disciplines in order to develop an American Studies perspective. Required for all first year Ph.D. American Studies students. Sewell W 2:30-5:30 HIS 110

African American Studies

GRS AA 885 Atlantic History Examines the various interactions that shaped the Atlantic World, connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas between 1400 and 1800. Begins by defining the political interaction, then emphasizes cultural exchange, religious conversion, and the revolutionary era. Also offered as GRS HI 885. Thornton T, R 11-12:30. Meets w/HI885A1 & CAS AA/HI385.

Archeology

GRS AR570 Studies in Colonial Archaeology Topics Vary. Intensive coverage of particular aspects of American archaeology as selected by instructor. Beaudry M 2:00-5:00

GRS AR805 Archaeological Heritage Management Introduction to the practice of public archaeology in the U.S. Historical and legal background; state and federal programs; conducting archaeological investigations; archaeology as a business; the public interest; controversies, problems, and prospects in archaeological heritage management. Elia R 2:00-5:00

Art History

CAS AH 521 Curatorship: Exhibition and DevelopmentPrerequisite: Permission of the instructor. This seminar will be held on-site at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, a regional museum of contemporary American art and will be led by the museum's curators.   Students will be introduced to curatorial practice as it pertains to collections and exhibitions.   DeCordova exhibitions on display during the Spring 2005 semester, and the Sculpture Park, will be used as case studies for collections management and policy, exhibition theory and design, funding, marketing, interface with museum educators, and audience response. Students will assist with the planning of the 2006 group exhibition Animals in Contemporary Art, and in some aspects of The 2005 DeCordova Annual Exhibition. Assignments will include writing catalogue text and press releases, exhibition critiques, and a term paper/oral presentation on a participating artist. Capasso/Lafo M 2-5

CAS AH 404/GRS AH 804 A1 Semester at MFA The Materials and Techniques of Works of Art. Issues in Contemporary Art. This seminar will examine a variety of critical issues, both practical and theoretical, surrounding the art of our time. In addition, we will explore the various approaches to exhibition-making at a museum as well as at other venues such as commercial galleries and not-for-profit spaces. The class will include in-depth examination of contemporary works of art in the MFA's collection, many of which are rarely on view. Students will consider these works with an eye toward the organization of an exhibition. There will be structured visits to local galleries and not-for-profit spaces, reading and writing assignments, and presentations; participation in discussions is essential.

Enrollment limited to twelve. Some familiarity with contemporary art and artists and knowledge of modern art history recommended. Admission to Museum Seminars is by permission of the instructors. Staff of the department of Conservation and Collections Management. Cheryl Brutvan, Beal Curator of Contemporary Art William Stover, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art History Department (617-369-3313)

CAS AH 404/GRS AH 804 B1 Semester at MFAThis course provides an introduction to the materials used in a wide variety of works of art (stone, ceramic, metal, glass, paint, wood, paper, textiles, manmade materials including plastics), where the materials conform, and how they are utilized to make works of art. Most course meetings will focus on a specific material and will include an introductory lecture and visits to the museum's conservation laboratories and/or galleries to examine closely and discuss individual works of art made from that material. How materials deteriorate over time, and how such changes can dramatically affect the appearance over time, will also be discussed. Overview lectures will discuss the nature of materials from a scientific point of view, defining basic concepts that are necessary to understand the materials used in works of art. One lecture will describe how knowledge of materials and technique can be applied to authentication problems. Readings are drawn from a wide range of books, articles, and conference publications. Grading will be based on seven to eight short assignments; each will require students to examine artifacts on display at the Museum of Fine Arts. Enrollment limited to twenty. Admission to Museum Seminars is by permission of the instructor. Coordinator: Richard Newman, Head of Scientific Research (617-369-3466)

GRS AH 887 Seminar: Visual Culture of the Civil War EraThe seminar focuses on American visual culture of the Civil War era: Slavery, Sectionalism, Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction (1850 to 1870), including paintings, sculpture, book illustration, graphics in the illustrated weeklies, photography, exhibitions, and organized urban spectacles. Topics will include but not be limited to: images of slavery in sculpture and paintings; illustrations for such books as Uncle Tom's Cabin; images from the presidential campaigns of 1860 and 1864; the visual record of the Civil War in the illustrated press; the carnage of battle in the photographs of Matthew Brady and others; images of notorious prisons, such as Andersonville; picturing wartime activities of women including nurses, women soldiers, and women on the home front; the "Emancipation Proclamation" in popular imagery; images of the death and mourning of Lincoln; John Brown in graphics and text; visual conceptions of the Freedmen's Bureau; and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in popular imagery. Theories of representation and narrative will be examined for their relevance and/or applicability to the visual culture of this era. Class is limited to 15; graduate students in art history, history, literature, and American Studies are welcome. Permission of instructor required. Hills T 2-4

GRS AH 888 Seminar: Twentieth Century American Painting Stebbins W 3-5

GRS AH 893 Seminar: At Home with the Future: Studies in the Modern House This graduate seminar will explore the central role of domestic architecture in the discourse of modernism. Questions of functionalism, structure, materials, and planning will be considered in relation to politics, economics, technology, gender roles, social organization, and the other arts. Attention will be paid to the documentation and preservation of modernist resources. Seminar participants will discuss common readings, visit a range of representative buildings, and conduct independent research which they will present to the seminar and submit as a final paper. Morgan W 10-12

GRS AH 895 Seminar: Feminism: Art, Theory and Practice This seminar will focus on the positions taken by several generations of feminist theory and theoretically driven art criticism from the 70s to the present. Readings to include British, American and French schools of thought, recent postcolonial critiques, psychoanalytic approaches, queer theory, arguments for the revival of beauty and the problem of postfeminism. Coughlin T 4-6

English

CAS EN 534 American Literature: 1855 to 1918 Idealism and realism in American literature. Poetry of Whitman and Dickinson. Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams. Theory and practice of fiction in Twain, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. Otten MWF 3:00-4:00

CAS EN 536 Twentieth-Century American Poetry Study of five or six poets from the following: Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Frost, Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Ammons, Ashbery, Plath, Ginsberg, or Merrill. Fogel TR 12:30-2:00

CAS EN 545 The Nineteenth-Century American Novel From its beginnings through the nineteenth century. Works by Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Howells, and others. Van Anglen TR 12:30-2:00

CAS EN 546 The Modern American Novel From 1900 to 1950. Works by Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others. Mizruchi TR 9:30-11:00

CAS EN 547 Contemporary American Fiction Study of major American novels from the 1960s to the present by DeLillo, Mailer, Malamud, Morrison, Oates, Pinckney, and others. Mizruchi 12:30-2:00

CAS EN 578 Fiction of the Migrant Primary focus on the experiences of immigration and exile, with reading also of fiction on other kinds of human migrations. Works by Willa Cather, O.E. Rölvaag, Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, Shusaku Endo, and contemporary authors. Ha Jin R 2:00-5:00

CAS EN 584 The Postwar Epic Novel A study of experimental epic novels by postwar American writers such as Ellison, Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Silko, focusing on genre, character, and the fate of ethics, politics, religion, and history in an age suspicious of grand narratives. Chodat TR 9:30-11:00

CAS EN 595 Early Modern History Play Historical and quasi-historical drama of the Tudor-Stuart periods. Attention to contemporary history and historiography, to problems of hierarchy, social distinction, gender, urbanization, religious division, and nation-building. Plays by Anonymous, Marlowe, Peele, Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, Ford, others. Siemon TR 11:00-12:30

GRS EN 788 Transnational Modernism This course examines the transnational literary relations surrounding the rise of American modernism, focusing first on transatlantic connections, and turning to the hemispheric study of modernism in the Americas. Readings by James, Stein, Eliot, DuBois, Hughes, Stuart Hall, and others. Patterson R 4:00-6:30

GRS EN791 Film Theories Weekly films studied in conjunction with various film theories, including psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, materialist, and postmodern. Topics include: seeing through gender, cinematic narrative, the technologies of image production. There will be evening screenings of the assigned films. Monk W 4:00-6:30

GRS EN 796 U.S. Imperialism and Literary Culture Interplay between U.S. imperialism and modern literature, 1880-1940. Relations between national reunification, foreign expansion, emergent empire, the fiction of region and race. Includes Twain, Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Du Bois, Toomer, Glasgow, Faulkner, Peterkin. Matthews W 12:00-2:30

History

GRS HI 752 Readings in American Political History Introduces students to the field of U.S. political history. Readings are divided into four primary areas of scholarship: government institutions, public policy, social movements, and political culture. Zelizer T 9:30-12:30

GRS HI 755 American Immigration History The experience of immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics include premigration cultures, theories of adaptation, perspectives on race ethnicity, sojourner migrants, and the persistence of ethnic enclaves in the urban environment. Halter T 3:30-6:30

GRS HI 757 Topics in American Cultural History Readings seminar focusing on American culture, broadly defined, in various periods of American history. Readings consist of both primary documents and secondary sources relevant to the specific topic. Topic for spring 2005: Race and American Culture, 1880-1940. The course will draw on monographs, historical documents, and literature of the period to explore the changing ways in which Americans thought about race and race relations. Silber R 2-5

GRS HI 865 United States Since 1968 Recent political, economic, social, and cultural history. Includes Nixon, Carter, and Reagan presidencies; stagflation; Watergate; "Me Decade"; end of the Cold War. Schulman TR 12:30-2

GRS HI 874 History of American Thought, 1865 to the PresentThe reconstruction of American thought following the Civil War. Victorian realism; liberal Protestantism and Darwinian science; evolutionary thought and progressive reform; pragmatism and cultural pluralism; literary modernism and modernization theory; 1960s and post-1960s discourses on race, gender, neoconservatism, and postmodernism. Capper TR 9:30-11

GRS HI 875 A History of Women in the United StatesThis course examines the ideas and experiences of women in the United States from the 1600s through the late twentieth century. The course considers the common factors that shaped women's lives as well as women's diverse class, ethnic, and regional experiences. Silber TR 11-12:30

GRS HI 885 History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 Examines the various interactions that shaped the Atlantic World, connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas between 1500 and 1800. After defining the political interaction, there is special emphasis on cultural exchange, religious conversion, and the revolutionary era. Thornton MWF 11-12

Metropolitan College

MET UA 510  Race and Urban Affairs Prereq: MET UA 301, UA 701, or consent of instructor. Grad Prereq: METUA301 & METUA701 or consent of instructor. This course examines Dubois' classic The Philadelphia Negro and its legacy for urban affairs, especially in terms of race, ethnicity, and cities. Dubois combined ethnographic research, social history, and social statistics to investigate the life of African Americans living in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century. Using that study as a jumping off point, this class will first assess changes in race, ethnicity, and cities with a focus on Philadelphia, and then extend that examination to other American cities, especially Boston. Specific topics to be covered include jobs and labor markets, urban education, juvenile violence and crime, housing, and inequality. Carroll R 6-9

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