Fall 2014 Featured Courses
Perspectives on the American Experience: Americans on Television
CAS AM 301
T/R 9:30am-11am
Catherine Martin
Who gets to decide what it means to be an American, and how well do televised visions of “Americanness” reflect the historical and present-day realities of life in the United States? This class will examine the ways in which television has represented and influenced social debates over issues like gender, race, historical events, and what it means to be an American in the 20th and 21st century.
Housing America
CAS AM/AH 376-AM/AH 776
CAS AM/AH 376-T/R 11am-12:30
CAS AM/AH 776-R 2pm-5pm
Claire Dempsey
What do dwellings say about the diversity of American experience? For over four centuries and across a continent, wealth and poverty, family and community, taste and technology have all shaped the meaning of home. Illustrated lectures supplemented by field trips.
Reading Boston: Conversations about the Real and Imagined City
CAS AM 501
T 2pm-5pm
William Hunting Howell (Dept of English) & Keith N. Morgan (Dept. of History of Art & Architecture)
Team-taught by Professors Howell and Morgan, this course offers a multidisciplinary examination of Boston from Wampanoag settlement to the present. Explores how specific neighborhoods have developed and how they have presented in literature. Includes frequent site visits around Boston. Serves as AM capstone.
Places of Memory: Historic Preservation Theory and Practice
CAS AM 546
T 5:30pm-8:30pm
Daniel Bluestone
Covers key aspects of the history, theory, and practice of historic preservation. Preservation will be discussed in the context of cultural history and the changing relationship between existing buildings and landscapes and attitudes towards history, memory, invented tradition, and place.