14 courses with the subject AMST, 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.
AMST 1001003/00768 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm Lisa Jahn 4.00 22/35
202 Milbank Hall 4 AMST BC1030 Everything for Everyone: Social Movements in North America. 3.00 points. Over the past months, social movements have captured the nation’s attention: from protests against immigration enforcement to Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City. From the Haitian and American Revolutions to the campaign for an eight-hour day, the Civil Rights movement, indigenous demands for land back, and Black Lives Matter course will explore the long history of movements for economic and social justice across North America. Questions that we will explore together include: how have different groups demanded economic justice over the past two hundred years? What lineages and breaks can we trace in these efforts? What divisions emerged among and within various movements over time? How did groups debate and disagree over the concept of “socialism” and what their ideal visions of liberated society would be? What role have race and gender played as dividing lines and as sites of new liberatory forms of struggle? Fall 2025: AMST BC1030 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
AMST 1030001/01157 M W 8:40am - 9:55am Dani Joslyn 3.00 3/50
302 Barnard Hall AMST BC1040 Incarcerating the Crisis. 3 points. 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. AMST BC1041 Critical Approaches to the Study of Ethnicity and Race. 4 points. 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. AMST BC1042 America and Early Modernity. 3 points. This class explores the impact of the colonization of the Americas, and the introduction of the slave trade into the Americas, on the lment development of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the early Enlightenment.
AMST 2001001/00164 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm Manu Karuka 4.00 19/50
302 Barnard Hall AMST BC2111 INTERMEDIATE AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE I. 3.00 points. 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 Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 61 AMST BC1112 Elementary American Sign Language (ASL) II. 4.00 points. 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 Spring 2026: AMST BC1112 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
AMST 3200001/00221 T 12:10pm - 2:00pm Lisa Jahn 4.00 6/15
214 Milbank Hall AMST BC3310 Planet America. 3 points. This course is a semester-long engagement with the idea of internationalism from the perspective of U.S. culture, history, and politics. We will consider two forms of internationalism: internationalism from above, “imperialism;” and internationalism from below, “radical democracy.” We will engage long-standing models in t the analysis of empire, and focus on cultural, economic, and political dimensions to examine the centrality of imperialism to the United States, and the history of the United States within a context of global histories. On the other hand, radical democratic movements and ideas have long been articulated in relation to the American project. Central to these movements is the necessity of articulating demands for justice not as matters of civil rights, but as human rights. The lectures and readings in this course will engage the body of scholarship known as “transnational American Studies” to think about America, as an idea, a set of institutions, and a way of being, within a larger world. AMST BC3401 American Studies Methods: Archive Fever. 4.00 points. 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
AMST 3704004/00769 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm Manu Karuka 4.00 4/8
613 Milstein Center AMST BC3707 Global Radicalism. 4 points. 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. AMST BC3999 INDEPENDENT RESEARCH. 1.00-4.00 points. Fall 2025: AMST BC3999 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
AMST 4210001/00770 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm Manu Karuka 4.00 14/16
406 Barnard Hall AMST GU4300 Latina/o/x NY. 4.00 points. Latina/o/x populations constitute over 19# of the U.S. population as of 2020, one of the fastest growing groups in the U.S. with a long and rich history in the U.S while maintaining transnational ties. In this course students are invited to critically analyze the social histories of and llment contemporary experiences of a diverse range of Latino/a/x populations from across the Americas. Over the course of the semester, we will discuss how Latino/a/x populations come to reside in and transform New York City, how Latina/o/x populations contend with everyday life and, how they shape and reshape the communities they resettle in. Although the focus is on New York City, we will also examine the movement of peoples from the Caribbean and Latin America. Topics include histories of migration, labor recruitment, citizenship, coloniality and racialization, neoliberalism and the rise of financialization in NYC, environmental racism, community formation and Latino/a/x political activism. We will critically examine a variety of text and genres ranging from anthropological, historical, poetry, documentary, films, media, and art to shift away from homogeneous categorization of Latino/a/x populations to understanding populations as dynamic and complex. Students are invited to bring their stories to class as this is a collaborative learning environment Fall 2025: AMST GU4300 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
AMST 4300001/00222 Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm Lisa Jahn 4.00 10/15
308 Diana Center CPLS GU4325 Abolition Medicine: Medical Racisms and Anti-Racisms. 3.00 points. In 1935, WEB Dubois wrote about abolition democracy: an idea based not only on breaking down unjust systems, but on building up new, antiracist social structures. Scholar activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have long contended that the abolition of slavery was but one first step in ongoing abolitionist practices dismantling racialized systems of policing, surveillance and incarceration. The possibilities of prison and police abolition have recently come into the mainstream national consciousness during the 2020 resurgence of nationwide Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests. As we collectively imagine what nonpunitive and supportive community reinvestment in employment, education, childcare, mental health, and housing might look like, medicine must be a part of these conversations. Indeed, if racist violence is a public health emergency, and we are trying to bring forth a “public health approach to public safety” – what are medicine’s responsibilities to these social and institutional reinventions? Medicine has a long and fraught history of racial violence. It was, after all, medicine and pseudoscientific inquiry that helped establish what we know as the racial categorizations of today: ways of separating human beings based on things like skin color and hair texture that were used (and often continue to be used) nt to justify the enslavement, exclusion, or genocide of one group of people by another. Additionally, the history of the professionalization of U.S. medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations as well as and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion, with a solidification of the identity of “physician” around upper middle class white masculinity. Indeed, the 1910 Flexner Report, whose aim was to make consistent training across the country’s medical schools, was explicit in its racism. From practices of eugenic sterilization, to histories of experimentation upon bodies of color, medicine is unfortunately built upon racist, sexist and able-ist practices. This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti- racist health practice. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to learning about histories of medical racism: from eugenics and racist experimentation to public health xenophobic fear mongering. The second half of the semester will be dedicated to examining medical and grassroots anti-racist practices: from the free health clinics and hospital takeovers of the Black Panther and Young Lords Parties, to environmental activism in Flint and the Sioux Rock Reservation to antiracist AIDS and COVID activism Fall 2025: CPLS GU4325 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
119 Milstein Center AMST GU4500 Eugenics. 4.00 points. For almost two hundred years, people around the world have sought to perfect society through scientifically directed breeding. Though often described as a thing of the past, contemporary life is suffused with fears over declining birth rates and dreams of producing perfect “designer babies.” In this class we will explore the long history of attempts to remake reproduction and regulate population across U.S. History (with some excursions into India and Germany), through a study of a range of interdisciplinary scholarship. Together, we will ask: why have panics around population emerged under specific circumstances, and who pushed them? How and why did eugenics explode into popularity at the turn of the century, and how was it adopted into and by various social movements? What, exactly, is (and was) eugenics? What is the relationship between it and earlier efforts to scientifically categorize and remake society? What role did it play in the development of twentieth-century politics? Why did states engage in campaigns of mass sterilization across the first half of the twentieth century? Why did they stop? How have different groups sought to remake reproduction since? Fall 2025: AMST GU4500 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollm
AMST 4500001/01158 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm Dani Joslyn 4.00 5/16
227 Milbank Hall WMST GU4506 Gender Justice. 3 points. This course will provide an introduction to the concrete legal contexts in which issues of gender and justice have been articulated, disputed and hesitatingly, if not provisionally, resolved. Readings will cover issues such as Workplace Equality, Sexual Harassment, Sex Role Stereotyping, Work/Family Conflict, Marriage and Alternatives to Marriage, Compulsory Masculinity, Parenting, Domestic Violence, Reproduction and Pregnancy, Rape, Sex Work & Trafficking. Through these readings we will explore the multiple ways in which the law has contended with sexual difference, gender-based stereotypes, and the meaning of equality in domestic, transnational and international contexts. So too, we will discuss how feminist theorists have thought about sex, gender and sexuality in understanding and critiquing our legal system and its norms. HIST GU4518 Research Seminar: Columbia and Slavery. 4 points. In this course, students will write original, independent papers of around 25 pages, based on research in both primary and secondary sources, on an aspect of the relationship between Columbia College and its colonial predecessor King's College, with the institution of slavery. Fall 2025: HIST GU4518 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment lment
AMST 4529001/00936 W 11:00am - 12:50pm Dani Joslyn 4.00 15/16
113 Milstein Center AMST GU4697 Protect the Dolls: Trans Panics and Queer Liberation. 4.00 points. Life as a trans person can feel like an unrelenting cacophony of hammers. Around the world, fascist parties and paramilitaries have set their sights on transgender people and through a torrent of accusations of crime and depravity all but authorized violence against trans people. Through explorations of trans* history and social movements in the ent United States, Turkey, India, and Pakistan (and to a lesser extent Argentina), this course will provide a space to both understand the global anti-gender and anti-trans panic and to relate ourselves to the strategies that trans people have used to both survive and the demands that they have made for structural change and liberation. The goal of this course will be to provide a space of critical study and a site of learning to be in community as well as to equip you with both the knowledge and capacity to understand and intervene in contemporary trans panics wherever you encounter them. Assignments will be a combination of collaborative skill-building, self-reflections, and analyses of the tactics and strategies employed by social movements Spring 2026: AMST GU4697 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
