AMST 6602b, Field Studies  Lisa Lowe and Tav Nyong'o

Students work with faculty to identify relevant field-specific literature (e.g., in preparation for oral examinations), formulate compelling research questions, explore appropriate interdisciplinary methods, and/or describe intended contributions to the field. On completion of the course, students are prepared to write competitive fellowship applications and to engage in full-time dissertation research (after their transition to candidacy).
HTBA

AMST 6603a, Imagining American Studies  Daniel HoSang

This course introduces graduate students to the field through its shifting intellectual, institutional, and political formations. Tracing the discipline from Cold War articulations of American exceptionalism to interdisciplinary expansions across history, literature, and cultural studies, and more recent global and anti-colonial turns, the seminar pays particular attention to its development at Yale, home to one of the country’s earliest American studies programs. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, students examine the field’s trajectory and their own stakes within it. Coursework includes archival research at Sterling Library, syllabus design, pedagogical discussions, and a short research proposal. The course is required for all first-year M.A. and Ph.D. students and replaces the requirement for American Scholars and is open to other students as space permits.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 6609a / ENGL 5709a, Introduction to Early American Studies  Greta LaFleur

This seminar offers a graduate-level introduction to early American studies, an interdisciplinary field that combines historical, literary, geographic, scientific, cultural and religious studies scholarship to understand the cultural and political landscapes of “early America.” The course combines both historical accounts of the field and field formation but also explores important critiques by historians of Native America and historians of slavery of the evolution of the field and its prerogatives; indeed, depending on who you ask, “early America” describes an era between the start of the Paleo-Indian period (15,000 BCE) and 1900, and standard definitions of “early America,” as the saying goes, are only “early” to settlers. This course is bookended by a hard stop in the 1830s and begins in the early colonial period with Native histories. Early America is, as the Omohundro Center bills it, quite vast, so this course in no way claims to offer a regionally, historically, or topically comprehensive account of the field. Instead, it seeks to introduce students to key histories, subfields, scholarly conversations and questions of field formation that provide a foundation for students who plan to engage early American studies scholarship in later work. Topics include the multilayered colonial histories (French, Spanish, British, Comanche) of various regions of North America; cultures of labor and racialization; histories of slavery; histories of encounter, trade, war, and genocide between colonial entities and Native nations, from the northeast through the southwest; the sedimentation of British colonial control of the east coast and the development of colonial and later state and federal governance; histories of culturally-specific forms of gendered and sexual expression; and histories of scientific thought. 
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 6619a / ER&M 6520a / HSHM 7920a / WGSS 6620a, Enduring Conditions: Chronic Illness, Disability, Care, and Access  Kalindi Vora

This interdisciplinary course brings together scholarship on access and care that bridges concerns in the fields of disability studies and humanistic approaches to chronic illness. Scholarly texts are drawn from the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology and sociology of medicine, history, and feminist science and technology studies (fSTS). Seminar participants also engage with the arts and media as critical sites for understanding culture work bringing together knowledge in disability and chronic illness spaces. To embrace community-based research and knowledge sharing, the course features regular guest lectures from grassroots disability justice organizers and culture workers. The course is offered in a hybrid format. To consider what disability studies and work on chronic illness can build together, we explore the work of Moya Bailey, Aimi Hamraie, Jina B. Kim, Sami Schalk, Akemi Nishida, Ryan Cartwright, and Arthur Kleinman, among others. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may also enroll with permission of instructor.
W 4pm-5:55pm

AMST 6635b / ER&M 5200b / HSHM 7570b / WGSS 5520b, Applied Research in Feminist Science and Technology Studies  Kalindi Vora

In this seminar, participants conduct applied research on projects with the primary investigator/instructor. Structured as a lab, we learn research methods, design research activities including building bibliographies for scholarly review, and collecting data through surveys and interviews. Topics vary but are linked to active research by instructor in feminist science and technology studies. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may enroll by permission of instructor.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 6655b, Labor and Technology Studies  Julian Posada

This seminar is structured as a laboratory for the study of labor and technology, focusing on recent transformations driven by the digital economy. We draw from several disciplines to analyze readings, conduct scholarly reviews, develop research projects, and discuss various aspects of the academic profession. The topics and discussions are informed by the background and interests of each cohort of students, complementing the instructor’s ongoing research in three areas: the gig economy and the use of labor platforms both locally and internationally, the impacts of artificial intelligence on work and broader policy and governance, and the effects of digital infrastructures on workers and their communities. Permission of the instructor is required to enroll in this seminar. Undergraduates may enroll with the instructor’s permission.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 6663a / FILM 6070a / HSAR 6770a, Video Art, Guerrilla Television, and Alternative Media  Tom Day

Video art has been an important aspect of contemporary art since the 1960s, born out of the increasing pull of mass media on society and alongside the political unrest of the times. A form of moving image unique to the later half of the twentieth century, video is the embodiment of the heterogeneity and repetition that characterize postmodernism, as noted by theorists like Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson. This course places video art within wider cultural, theoretical, and political contexts. Over the course, we trace video and other moving image media as an alternative ecosystem of production, distribution, and exhibition, observing artists, collectives, and movements that have used the technology to communicate, comprehend, and critique the changing media and lived realties of the second half of the twentieth century. Emphasis is the connections between video and corporately controlled media as we examine artists who attempted to provide an alternative vision of mass media through subversive interventions and utopian alternative programming. We also analyze video’s changing place within recent exhibition practices with the increasing presence of documentary modes and works reacting to an increasingly networked and surveilled society since the 1980s.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 6687b / HIST 7210b / WGSS 6697b, Colonial Domesticity and Reproductive Relations  Lisa Lowe

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we study the central importance of kinship, family, and domestic labor to the social reproduction of racial colonial processes. Settler colonialism, colonial slavery, overseas empire, and their aftermaths depend not only on the brute force of war, captivity, and occupation; they are also sustained and contested through culture, language, forms of family and household, and the social reproduction of race, gender, intimacy, and filiation. We trace a genealogy of “colonial domesticity” that considers histories of the sexual violation and separation of slave women from their children, compulsory boarding schools for Native Americans, racialized gendered divisions of care labor, transnational Asian adoption, and contemporary migrant detention and family separation; this genealogy also includes alternative forms of kinship, domesticity, generation, and relation. Readings include historical and anthropological studies of colonialism, feminist debates on social reproduction, and literary and visual culture materials by Maria Mies, Ann Laura Stoler, Silvia Federici, Tithi Bhattacharya, Ruha Benjamin, Kalindi Vora, Thavolia Glymph, Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, Audra Simpson, Jodi Byrd, Amy Kaplan, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Laura Briggs, Elizabeth Freeman, Chandan Reddy, Alys Weinbaum, Louise Erdrich, Mary Prince, Toni Morrison, Patricia Powell, Chang-rae Lee, Octavia Butler, and others. Permission of the instructor required.
W 4pm-5:55pm

AMST 7040a / ER&M 6555a / HIST 7440a, American West and Its Borderlands  Stephen Pitti

This reading seminar examines historical scholarship on the US West and the US-Mexico border region with particular attention to recent works. It also attends to the development of the region's historiography. Topics include colonialism, migration, labor, urbanization, segregation, and political activism, and we pay careful attention to writings on the region’s Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, and Black communities. The seminar is designed for students pursuing graduate work in history, and in particular for those preparing for oral examinations or dissertation topics on the region or one of these key topics.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 7700a / HIST 7000a, Topics, Themes, and Methods in U.S. History  Regina Kunzel and Joanne Meyerowitz

Exploring key readings in U.S. history, this seminar introduces important areas of research, members of the Yale faculty, and resources for research at Yale and beyond. Highly recommended for first and second year doctoral students in US History and American Studies. Open to other interested graduate students with permission of the instructors.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 7716b / ANTH 7269b / ARCG 7269b / HSAR 6716b, Landscapes of Meaning: Museums and Their Objects  Anne Underhill

This seminar explores how museums convey various meanings about ethnographic, art, and archaeological objects through the processes of collecting, preparing exhibitions, and conducting research. Participants also discuss broader theoretical and methodological issues such as the roles of museums in society, relationships with source communities, management of cultural heritage, and various specializations valuable for careers in art, natural history, anthropology, history, and other museums.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 7725a / ER&M 6525a, Writing the Academic Journal Article  Fatima El-Tayeb

Graduate students are often told that publishing a journal article is a crucial part of their professional development. This course helps students get it done. Students come to class with a piece of writing—seminar paper, dissertation chapter—that we workshop as a group throughout the course of the term. In addition to personalized feedback, we also have broader discussions about the nuts and bolts of this genre of academic writing: organizing your argument, revision, clarity, framing interventions, etc. We complement this structured approach to writing with discussions aimed at demystifying the process by which an article gets published—the art of selecting the right journal, how to read and respond to reader reports, and general timelines. The goal is for all students to submit their article to the journal of their choice by the end of the term. Students are required to have a piece of writing ready to workshop into an article at the very beginning of the class. Students interested in the course should contact the instructor at albert.laguna@yale.edu.
T 9:25am-11:20am

AMST 7743a / ER&M 7402a, Indigenous Thought and Anticolonial Theory  Tarren Andrews

This seminar, cross-listed as an undergraduate (ER&M 4020) and graduate course (ER&M 7402) provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical landscape of Native American and Indigenous studies. The readings approach NAIS from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Throughout the course we explore the major debates, methodologies, and concerns that ground the field, and provide critical context for ethical engagement with Indigenous communities and knowledges. Students learn the disciplinary standards for the evaluation of scholarly sources based on criteria derived from the most outstanding recent scholarship in the field. Students are required to read, write, and think extensively and critically about a variety of issues that are of concern for global Indigenous communities. Mastery of these skills are honed through in-depth discussion and weekly writing assignments.
W 9:25am-11:20am

AMST 7780a / HIST 7601a / WGSS 7734a, Capitalism, Labor, and Class Politics in 19th-20th Century US  Jennifer Klein

This is an intensive readings course, oriented around the concept of political economy.  In some cases, the emphasis is on the relations between business, labor, and the state; in others, the connections between community, work, and the state.  We focus on U.S. capitalism in its modern form--corporate, concentrated in ownership, global in reach, constitutive of state,  market, families, and class.  Yet we investigate different modes of capitalist accumulation and creation of landscapes, territories, boundaries.  Readings will enable us to look at how regionalism, race, and class power shaped the development of American capitalism.
W 9:25am-11:20am

AMST 7791a / BLST 9347a / ENGL 5847a, Black Existentialisms  Shane Vogel

This course is an introduction to Black existential thought as it developed in the writing of African American and Afro-Caribbean authors. Existentialism typically describes a historical movement in philosophy and culture associated with mid-twentieth-century European intellectuals that asked how individuals constitute themselves within and beyond the given constraints and possibilities of their situation. But a deep tradition of Africana philosophies of existence—Black existentialism—are related to yet distinct from this European tradition. Throughout the course we explore key existential concepts such as freedom, liberation, authenticity, responsibility, action, situation, anguish, dwelling, the gaze, and the Other as they have been imagined in Black diasporic expressive cultures. Questions we will ask include: How have Black writers developed existential ideas in novels, poetry, and drama? How does the mid-century encounter between European and Africana existentialisms animate the literature of Black freedom struggles in the US and across the colonial and postcolonial world? How does Black existentialism understand the (im)possibility of self-making within societies structured in dominance, and what might an existentialist understanding of Black collectivity look like? How can Black existential thought provide productive opportunities to reevaluate some of the dialectics that have shaped conversations in Black studies such as hope/despair, being/nonbeing, humanism/antihumanism, and social life/social death? Readings may include work by Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Lewis R. Gordon, Nathalie Étoke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Henry Paget, Angela Davis, Richard Wright, Adrienne Kennedy, Jesmyn Ward, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Toni Morrison, and others. This is an introductory-level seminar, and no previous knowledge of the course content is expected.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 7797a / AFAM 7197 / BLST 7197a / HIST 8135a, Atlantic Abolitions  Marcela Echeverri Munoz

This readings course explores the historiography on the century of abolition, when the new states of the Americas abolished racial slavery. Beginning with the first abolitions in the U.S. North during the 1780s, we consider the emergence and process of abolition throughout the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Brazil, through the 1880s.
Th 4pm-5:55pm

AMST 8807a, Readings in US Law and Religion  Tisa Wenger and Sally Promey

Under the logics of Western modernity, “religion” and “law” are commonly perceived to be easily distinguishable from one another, with each operating as a distinct and largely self-contained aspect of societal organization and social life. Applying the theories and methods of religious studies, this course seeks to critically interrogate that assumption by scrutinizing the complex ways in which religion and law have mutually influenced one another in both historical and contemporary contexts. With a particular focus on the United States, this seminar explores how various religious histories and practices as well as theological claims have helped to structure American legislation, public policy, and judicial doctrines. In turn, it also examines how the American legal system has operated to shape and constrain the possibilities of religious expression and flourishing. Course participants begin by developing a set of critical frameworks from within which to consider and assess interrelationships between religion and law. In relation to this critical rubric, the course then generally proceeds chronologically, focusing on moments in US history and politics when intersections of religion and law are especially salient. Topics include, for example, First Amendment doctrine, the (mis)recognition of Native American traditions, the aesthetics of civic religious displays, and the enduring legacies of slavery and gender subordination.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 8874b / AFAM 7174b / BLST 7174 / HIST 7111b, Readings in Atlantic Slavery  Edward Rugemer

This course explores the history on the emergence, spread, and lived experience of racial slavery in the Atlantic World, including the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.
HTBA

AMST 8877a / HIST 8930a / HSHM 7030a, Problems in the History of Medicine and Public Health  John Warner

An examination of the variety of approaches to the social, cultural, and intellectual history of medicine, focusing on the United States. Reading and discussion of the recent scholarly literature on medical cultures, public health, and illness experiences from the early national period through the present. Topics include the role of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and region in the experience of health care and sickness and in the construction of medical knowledge; the interplay between vernacular and professional understandings of the body; the role of the marketplace in shaping professional identities and patient expectations; health activism and social justice; citizenship, nationalism, and imperialism; and the visual cultures of medicine.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 9002a or b, Prospectus Workshop  Albert Laguna

Upon completion of course work, students are required to participate in at least one term of the prospectus workshop, ideally the term before the prospectus colloquium is held. Open to all students in the program and joint departments, the workshop serves as a forum for discussing the selection of a dissertation topic, refining a project’s scope, organizing research materials, identifying appropriate methods and theoretical frameworks, and evaluating work in progress. Additional topics include finding intellectual communities, preparing for academic conferences, and balancing the demands of teaching and research. The workshop meets six times during the semester.
HTBA

AMST 9003b / HIST 7260b / PHUM 9003b, Introduction to Public Humanities  Karin Roffman and Matthew Jacobson

What is the relationship between knowledge produced in the university and the circulation of ideas among a broader public, between academic expertise on the one hand and nonprofessionalized ways of knowing and thinking on the other? What is possible? This seminar provides an introduction to various institutional relations and to the modes of inquiry, interpretation, and presentation by which practitioners in the humanities seek to invigorate the flow of information and ideas among a public more broadly conceived than the academy, its classrooms, and its exclusive readership of specialists. Topics include public history, museum studies, oral and community history, public art, documentary film and photography, public writing and educational outreach, the socially conscious performing arts, and fundraising. In addition to core readings and discussions, the seminar includes presentations by several practitioners who are currently engaged in different aspects of the Public Humanities. With the help of Yale faculty and affiliated institutions, participants collaborate in developing and executing a Public Humanities project of their own definition and design. Possibilities might include, but are not limited to, an exhibit or installation, a documentary, a set of walking tours, a website, a documents collection for use in public schools.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

AMST 9004a or b / PHUM 9004a or b, Practicum  Karin Roffman

Public Humanities students are required to complete a one-term internship with one of our partnered affiliates (to be approved by the Public Humanities DGS or assistant DGS) for practical experience in the field. Potential internships include in-house opportunities at the Beinecke Library, Sterling Memorial Library, or one of Yale’s museums, or work at a regional or national institution such as a media outlet, museum, or historical society. In lieu of the internship, students may choose to complete a “micro-credential.” Micro-credentials are structured as workshop series (3–5 daylong meetings over the course of a year) rather than as term courses, and include revolving offerings in topics such as oral history, collections and curation, writing for exhibits, podcast production, website design, scriptwriting from the archive, or grant writing for public intellectual work.
HTBA

AMST 9005a or b / PHUM 9005a or b, Public Humanities Capstone Project  Karin Roffman

The coursework and practicum/micro-credential lead to a significant project to be approved by the DGS or assistant DGS (an exhibition, documentary, research paper, etc.) and to be presented in a public forum on its completion.
HTBA