Courses

• CAS AH 576: Collections: Ancient and Historical in Modern Context
  Considers ancient and historical objects in collections from historical, functional, material, and aesthetic perspectives in order to understand original cultural context. Case studies demonstrate changing theory and practice, as well as legal and ethical implications, of museum acquisition and display.
• CAS AH 580: Architectural Technology and Materials
  An introduction to the history of architectural construction, technologies, and materials, and their consequences in the built environment. Students receive a practical understanding of the building process and of its social and cultural contexts.
• CAS AH 582: Historic Houses
  Studies the preservation of historic homes as museums, a phenomenom involving more than 26,000 houses throughout the U.S. since 1850. Considers Boston's excellent examples as works of architecture and design and as icons in debates about national and regional identities.
• CAS AH 583: English Country House and America's Cottages
  This course explores a variety of poetic and fictional texts, as well as attending to architecture and landscape design.
• CAS AH 584: Greater Boston: Architecture and Planning
  Examines the buildings, development patterns, and open space planning of greater Boston, with particular emphasis on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vernacular architecture and the growth of neighborhoods are addressed.
• CAS AH 585: Twentieth Century Architecture and Urbanism
  Two topics are offered Fall 2010. Students may take one or both for credit. Topic for Section A1: Green Design. Explores the historical context for sustainability and Green Architecture. The engagement of architecture with nature is charted through questions of landscape theory, public park making, suburbanization, adaptive re-use, and new green materials and methods of construction, among other topics. Topic for Section B1: Transnationalism and Architecture.
• CAS AH 592: Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture
  Traces the evolution of photography's role in twentieth-century art from clandestine participation as a preparatory tool in late nineteenth-century painting to omnipresence in contemporary art practice. Also explores photography's impact on ways of experiencing and thinking about art.
• CAS AH 595: English Country House
  For almost three centuries, the country house played a central role in English literary culture. Exploration of a variety of poetic and fictional texts, with attention to related issues of architecture and landscape design. Also offered as CAS EN 595 and UNI HU 595.
• CAS AH 596: Seminar: Contemporary Art
  Rotating topics in art, criticism and theory since 1960. Examines major themes such as formalism, minimalism, conceptual art, the neo-avant-garde, art and politics, postmodernism and globalization in their social and political contexts. Topic for Fall 2010: Contemporary Art and Globalization.
• CAS AH 597: The Baroque
  Examines seventeenth-century architecture, painting, music, poetry, and drama. The syllabus is organized both topically and topographically: issues of space, light, ornamentation, and theatricality are explored in relation to the cultural capitals of Rome, Paris, and London.
• CAS AH 598: The Sister Arts
  Examination of how the linked activities of showing and telling, seeing and saying, have preoccupied Western culture since the time of Horace, whose influential comparison, ut pictura poesis, brought literature and painting into promising alignment. Explores the intimate relations between word and image by concentrating on such subjects as ekphrasis and spatial form. Also offered as CAS EN 594 B1 and UNI HU 541.
• CAS AM 200: Introduction to American Studies
  An exploration of the multi-faceted themes of American society and culture in selected historical periods using a variety of approaches to interpret such topics as American art, literature, politics, material culture, and the mass media. Required of concentrators.
• CAS AM 250: American Arts and Society
  Investigates key issues and themes in American arts and letters. Topic for Spring 2011: Policing the Boundaries of American Identity: Anti-Immigration Movements in U.S. History to 1930. Examines how the trope of America as a “Nation of Immigrants” has challenged and affected political and social policy, with a specific focus on the period of Second Wave immigration (1880–1925).
• CAS AM 301: Perspectives on the American Experience
  American history and society as viewed by those who made it. Topic for Fall 2010: American Folklore: 1900-Present. Examines the role of traditional expressive culture in the history of United States and how issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality shape the political, social, and cultural dynamics of American culture.
• CAS AM 367: Material Culture
  Introduction to the theory and practice of the interdisciplinary study of material culture, which includes everything we make and use, from food and clothing to art and buildings. Also offered as CAS AH 367.
• CAS AM 401: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS AM 402: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS AM 491: Directed Study
  
• CAS AM 492: Directed Study
  
• CAS AM 501: Special Topics in American Studies
  Topic for Fall 2010: American Culture in the Sixties. A survey of American art, literature, film, and visual culture of the 1960s.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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