17 courses with the subject AMST BC, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
Prerequisites: None Corequisites: None Prerequisites: None Corequisites: None What is America? Who is American? How do we live in America? This new lecture course will introduce you to the dynamic, inter-disciplinary field of American Studies
This course focuses on the structures and processes that led the U.S. to build the largest carceral regime on the planet in the post-1970s United States. Through readings, lectures, and original research, students will develop analyses of how this growth coincided with a shift in the racial composition of prisons from majority white to almost seventy percent people of color. Students will develop a number of concept such as race, class, gender, neoliberalism, abolition, policing, and surveillance that are foundational for analyzing the formation of the carceral state.
This seminar will introduce students to critical theories of race and ethnicity. It will familiarize students will interdisciplinary scholarship on power and difference, with a special focus on the historically specific relationships between race, capitalism, empire, dispossession, migration, political economy, and the U.S. state's regulation of gender and sexuality. Throughout the course, students will consider the political and economic critiques of race and power that have been articulated by antiracist freedom, anticolonial, feminist, queer of color, and immigrant labor struggles.
This class explores the impact of the colonization of the Americas, and the introduction of the slave trade into the Americas, on the development of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the early Enlightenment.
The first half of a two-semester introduction to American Sign Language, intended for students with no prior experience in ASL
This course is an introduction to the basic skills in developing production and comprehension skills in American Sign Language (ASL). Students will learn ASL vocabulary, structure, and grammar. Course content also includes the manual alphabet and numbers. Students will develop basic conversational abilities, culturally appropriate behaviors, and learn about the culture and history of Deaf communities
Between 1967 and 1969, groups of American Indian, Black, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Mexican, and Puerto Rican college students began to articulate demands for a transformed university, touching everything from admissions, relations to community, and curriculum. Their proposals contributed to the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State University, the longest student strike in US history. Drawing inspiration from Gary Okihiro, founding director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, this course takes student activists’ proposals for Third World Studies seriously. Our readings will draw on the traditions of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle in North America, alongside perspectives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America
The first half of a one-year sequence in intermediate American Sign Language for students who have completed Elementary ASL I and II or the equivalent
This course offers an overview of classic and contemporary examples of feminist ethnography. Over the course of the semester, we will trace the development of, and debates around, feminist ethnography from the 1970s to the contemporary period, highlighting the key questions and dominant paradigms of the field. We will examine how feminist approaches shape the questions we ask, how we present our research and the ethics of research. We will explore how to incorporate collaborative and activist methods and analysis in our scholarly projects, asking: How can feminist ethnography intensify efforts towards social justice in the current political and economic climate? How do feminist ethnographers link their findings to broader publics through activism, advocacy, and public policy?
Abortion access will shape the lives of your generation—and yet the issue of abortion is too often left to misinformation and disconnected from its role in overall reproductive freedom. In this course, we will put abortion into multiple contexts (historical, political, legal, pharmaceutical, religious), drawing interdisciplinary material from scholars, activists, community organizers, lawyers, care providers, and journalists. Each class will feature a guest speaker who has dedicated their career to advocating for abortion as a critical part of overall reproductive healthcare in the United States and internationally. Grounded in the reproductive justice framework, which aims not only to protect the “right to choose” but also to create the economic, social, and environmental conditions in which people can parent with dignity, we will think of abortion as one critical part of a constellation of projects that, together, work toward total reproductive freedom
Introduction to the theoretical approaches of American Studies, as well as the methods and materials used in the interdisciplinary study of American society. Through close reading of a variety of texts (e.g. novels, films, essays), we will analyze the creation, maintenance, and transmission of cultural meaning within American society
This course introduces students to the philosophy, ethics, and practice of oral history with specific emphasis on interview and transcription techniques and the use of oral history in interdisciplinary research and analysis. This course will also include instruction on the archival collection, preservation, description, and digitization of oral history interviews. Course themes include: Introduction to Oral History Foundations of Oral History Ethical and Legal Considerations (IRB, vulnerable populations, shared authority) Oral History Best Practices Oral History and Memory Interviewing Transcription and Metadata as Political Acts Oral History as Primary Sources in Research and Writing Community Oral History Oral History as Public History Oral History and Social Justice Oral History Online Oral History and Exhibitions/Programming
This one-credit tutorial has been designed to assist American Studies seniors as they (1) clarify their scholarly commitments, (2) develop the research questions to be explored in their capstone seminars, (3) identify relevant archives and the methods needs to analyze those archives, and (4) develop a basic familiarity with the scholars and texts driving conversations about their research topic. Meetings alternate between one-on-one tutorials with the instructor and peer discussions. Assignments focus on explorations of ideas and literatures, culminating in a research proposal
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to senior majors.
Spring 2026: AMST BC3704 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment AMST 3704 002/00905 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 613 Milstein Center Dani Joslyn 4.00 7/8 AMST 3704 004/00769 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 613 Milstein Center Manu Karuka 4.00 4/8
At the turn of the twentieth century, struggles against racism, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism encircled the globe. From Irish republicanism in Dublin, Bolshevism in Moscow, revolution in Mexico City, to anti-lynching crusades in Birmingham, as well as all their unanticipated international alliances, these movements represented the largest waves of rebellion hitherto sustained by the global economy. This seminar offers an intensive overview of these various struggles and spaces. Through examination of primary and secondary sources, students will consider radical social movements from distinct yet overlapping cultural and political traditions. We will discuss how participants in these struggles confronted issues of gender, accumulation, and uneven development in their evolving revolutionary theories. Taking a uniquely spatial approach, we will observe how geographies of accumulation emerged alongside sites of global resistance. Throughout the course we will consider the contemporary relevance of these debates, observing how global radicalism might be charted in our present world.
Source: Barnard College's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
