72 courses with the subject ANST, 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.
ANST 100Introduction to American Studies1
An invitation to the open interdisciplinarity of American Studies, a socially-engaged area of inquiry that seeks to holistically understand the lives of people in—and in relation to—the US, both past and present, and critically work toward the creation of a just and livable nation, hemisphere, and world. Either ANST 100 or ANST 102 or ANST 105 will satisfy the 100-level core requirement of the American Studies major. Topics vary with expertise of the faculty teaching the course. Lisa Collins, Jonathon Kahn. Priority given to first-year students and sophomores. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ASIA 102 ) Why are Asians in America? What does it feel like to be Asian in America? Who counts as Asian in the first place? This introduction to Asian American Studies explores the different systems of power that shape Asian migration, racialization, and resistance in the US. We focus on sites of encounter–the plantation, the internment camp, the military base, the interrogation room, the refugee camp, the orphanage, the spa, and the protest–where the meeting of bodies and ideas can reveal how modes of difference-making emerge and endure within and across local contexts. Students engage in articles, legal cases, policy reports, film, art, music and poetry to understand how the experiences of Asians in America are tied to historical systems of power and the ways in which Asians have grappled with their experiences on their own terms. Amy Chin. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
This course is an introduction to the discipline of Native American Studies. Because the area of study is interdisciplinary, we will take into consideration the histories, legal traditions, linguistics, material cultures, geographies, politics, and religions of tribal communities through Indigenous perspectives. Utilizing principles stemming from vast and various Native North American belief systems, worldviews, and cultural frameworks, we will learn to objectively examine key Native American Studies terms such as sovereignty, nationhood, language, land, relationality, and Indigenous consciousness among others. We will investigate how tribal epistemologies inform and shape the way Indigenous peoples conceive of themselves, their communities, and their futures. We will also work to deconstruct hurtful and derogatory myths and misconceptions about Indigenous nations stemming from ongoing colonialities. Course materials will demonstrate the breadth of the discipline amongst the various backgrounds, cultural beliefs, and geographical locations of Native North American tribes. Since this course, for most, will be an introduction to Native American texts and materials, we will work to unpack the fundamental vocabulary of the field. Overall, we will be introduced to the key scholars and artists of Indigenous North America as they work to center Native voices and perspectives against systems of violence and cultural genocide. Either ANST 100 or ANST 102 or AMST 105 satisfies the 100-level core requirement of the American Studies major. Molly McGlennen. Priority given to first-year students and sophomores. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
ANST 106Writing Home: language for travel, belonging, and foreignness1
How might we arrange ourselves around (dis)orientation or (un)belonging through writing? Together we read essayists, poets, translators, and thinkers who may give us language, and practice embodied writing about being in/out of place. Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as AFRS 150 and EDUC 150 ) This course explores how children’s school experiences contribute to their involvement in youth justice systems. Students read about the theories that undergird different approaches to youth justice and how these impact individuals, families and communities. This class weaves together personal narratives and storytelling, policy studies, and curriculum studies to examine the approaches that are currently utilized and to imagine ways to create socially just experiences for youth. This course is held at the Dutchess County Jail. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ART 160 ) Stories and storytelling reside at the heart of human experience; they have the power to shape–and shift–our understandings, actions, and imaginations. How do artists, makers, and other cultural workers draw on the power of storytelling to deepen seeing and knowing and enable emergent stories and realities? Focusing on generative twentieth and twenty-first century creative projects in or in relation to the U.S., this first-year writing seminar–a community of practice and care–explores critical arts and acts of storytelling. Lisa Collins. Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as HIST 170 ) This course introduces students to the diverse experiences and histories of Indigenous peoples in North America since before European contact to the present moment. And course materials invite students to engage with many Indigenous voices and their perspectives on the past. The course focuses on the historical development of a U.S. Federal Indian policy and its ongoing impact on Native peoples. Students analyze the persistence, change, and adaption of Native cultures to historical and contemporary social conditions of the U.S. settler colonialism as well as individual and community efforts to maintain sovereignty in the 21st century. Since Indigenous peoples have their own culturally specific ideas and practices concerning gender and sexuality, students also examine the ways in which Indigenous ideas and practices around gender and sexuality have become sites of resistance to settler colonialism and an assertion of Indigenous identity, both in past and present. Students also investigate issues related to race, identity, and community by analyzing historical relations between African Americans and Native Americans across North America. Noel Smyth. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ART 177 and URBS 177 ) Beginning with visual and written descriptions of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire (today’s Mexico City), this course explores visual and discursive representations of American cities from the colonial encounter to the present. Interpretations of urban landscapes have shaped the practice of planners, builders, artists, and activists in cities across the Americas. By introducing students to philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s theory of urban space—as materially, socially, and symbolically produced—this seminar invites students to reflect critically on the role of writing, representing, and intervening in public space in giving meaning to the built environment of North and Latin American cities. Second six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 203 ) This course examines the various forms of journalism that report on the complexity of contemporary American lives. In the past I have said that this course, in a plain sense, is an investigation into American society. And, of course, that a part of the aim of the course is to acquire the basic craft of journalistic practice. The other main aim of the course has been that we examine different models of writing, especially in longform, that have defined and changed the norms of reportage in our culture. But in honor of the decisive contributions to American life made over the last several years by the previous president, I want to make #fakenews also a focus of our course. How do we pay attention to, how do we produce, and how do we give compelling form to facts? Amitava Kumar. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
ANST 204Intersections of Our Homes, Schools, and Communities1
(Same as AFRS 204 and EDUC 204 ) This course draws on varied and rich experiences of all participants to read about, share and discuss the ways our homes, schools and communities intersect to create experiences for youth. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different school structures and different behavioral and instructional approaches. We explore how school structures such as standardized testing, tracking, and curriculum design influence students’ experiences in and out of school. Throughout the course we grapple with the continued significance of socially differentiating factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and citizenship in shaping public policy and youth’s experiences.
(Same as AFRS 206 , MEDS 206 , and PHIL 206 ) First coined by Cedric Robinson in 1983, racial capitalism asserts that the potential for the accumulation and optimization of profit, which drives capitalism, would not be possible without the project of racial ordering and racialized exploitation. This course reconstructs the history of this concept, from Robinson, who was writing at the rise of neoliberalism, privatization, and deregulation in the Reagan era, through and after the War on Terror, the pandemic, until today. By close-reading main sources in this theoretical lineage, students are given critical skills to reflect on two implications universally shared by racial capitalist theorists: on the one hand, rather than homogenizing social relations as Karl Marx had wrongly assumed, capitalism differentiates populations by racializing them, first of all epidermically, and then geographically, culturally, and religiously; on the other hand, in contrast with prominent historical reconstructions of the rise of capitalism and modernity, including Max Weber’s, capitalism absorbs and reformulates racialized orderings that structured the feudal order that preceded it in medieval Europe. To exemplify the workings of racial capitalism on a material level, we devote considerable time to examining the case of London’s West India Dock, from its modern colonial reconstruction in 1802 until its transformation into an educational museum and a tourist attraction located in Canary Wharf. We show how the development of the West India Dock, from a key colonial hub of transport and exchange, including human bodies, to a Wunderkammer of postcolonial equivocations, encapsulates the feedback loop between the conditions of production organizing the plantation economy in the Caribbean and the workings of the imperial metropole, yesterday and today. Giovanna Borradori. First six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as SOCI 207 ) This course examines features of childhoods in the U.S. at different times and across different social contexts. The primary aims of the course are 1) to examine how we’ve come to the contemporary understanding of American childhood as a distinctive life phase and cultural construct, by reference to historical and cross-cultural examples, and 2) to recognize the diversity of childhoods that exist and the economic, geographical, political, and cultural factors that shape those experiences. Specific themes in the course examine the challenges of studying children; the social construction of childhood (how childhoods are constructed by a number of social forces, economic interests, technological determinants, cultural phenomena, discourses, etc.); processes of contemporary globalization and commodification of childhoods (children’s roles as consumers, as producers, and debates about children’s rights); as well as the intersecting dynamics of age, social class, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in particular experiences of childhood. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ASIA 208 ) The Pacific euphemistically called “America’s Lake” has been a site of US empire building and Indigenous and Asian resistance against US military expansion. This course examines demilitarization movements in the Pacific through visual and material culture. We analyze historical and ongoing processes of military basing, nuclear testing, tourism, sex work and logistics industries among others to better understand the relationship between demilitarization and decolonization in the Pacific. Through different forms of visual representation and material objects, this course engages oceanic indigenous voices, island feminism, bomb survivor narratives and global demilitarization activism. Students grapple with how militarism becomes invisible in American daily life, the colonial foundations in which this invisibility is produced through American and Asian imperialisms, and how demilitarization movements are reimagining what genuine security and safety can look in our world without militarism as a governing ideology. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANTH 213 and ENST 213 ) This intensive seeks to foster a community of students dedicated to learning about Indigenous environmental activism. We read publications, watch films, and listen to interviews that highlight the work of Indigenous activists, scholars, and scientists. Students must be willing and able to invest 3-5 hours a week on this intensive. An hour of that time is spent monitoring news sources for recent events and discussing them with others in this learning community. This is not a traditional course, so students with existing knowledge of Indigenous activism or ways of knowing are best prepared for this intensive. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
(Same as MUSI 214 ) An investigation of the whole range of jazz history, from its beginning around the turn of the century to the present day. Among the figures to be examined are: Scott Joplin, “Jelly Roll” Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Thomas “Fats” Waller, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis.
One unit in one of the following: music, studies in American history, art, or literature; or permission of the instructor. Not offered in 2026/27.
ANST 215Global Indigenous Film0.5
(Same as ANTH 215 and MEDS 215 ) This intensive acquaints students with some of the documentary, experimental, and narrative films/videos of indigenous filmmakers from North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Screenings include films by Rachel Perkins, Tracey Moffatt, Sherman Alexie, Victor Masayesva, Alanis Obamsawin, and Zacharias Kunuk. Discussions of films engage the notion of visual sovereignty, and the use of film/video to document indigenous lives and concerns, and to reframe stories told about them and to tell new stories. Colleen Cohen. First six-week course. One 2-hour period plus outside screenings. Course Format: INT
(Same as ANTH 216 and LALS 216 ) This Intensive focuses on language revitalization and documentation efforts of endangered languages, and also of languages that are undervalued or discriminated against by majority populations. Students can develop their own project, or work with the instructor in an ongoing digital humanities project that focuses on Mesoamerican languages. David Tavárez.
Permission of the instructor. One 90-minute period. Course Format: INT
Offered
Spring
ANST 217Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy: Cultural Studies Between Media Theory and Philosophy0.5
(Same as AFRS 217 , MEDS 217 , and PHIL 217 ) This course is dedicated to exploring the theoretical approach developed by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. Its core is a close-reading of selected works by its two most impactful voices: Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. A foundational methodology for many interrelated fields – from postcolonial studies to media theory, from sociology to critical race studies – cultural studies seek to understand how meaning is produced by culturally hegemonic social and media formations, which have the power to shape both agencies and counter-agencies. We trace the history of the Birmingham school from the late 1970s, when it was born as a response to the neoliberal agenda of the Thatcher government, through the War on Terror, the pandemic, until today. While focusing on the development of Hall and Gilroy as scholars of Black Atlantic diasporic constellations, we also look back at their critical sources, especially their transformation of the Marxist legacies of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Lefevre, and forward at their ongoing worldwide impact, especially in South Africa and Latin America. Giovanna Borradori. First six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as AFRS 219 and ENGL 219 ) “Queer of Color Critique” is a form of cultural criticism modeled on lessons learned from woman of color feminism, poststructuralism, and materialist and other forms of analysis. As Roderick Ferguson defines it, “Queer of color analysis…interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” This course considers what interventions the construction “queer of color” makes possible for queertheory, LGBT scholarship and activism, and different models of ethnic studies.We assess the value and limitations of queer theory’s “subjectless critique” (in other words, its rejection of identity as a “fixed referent”) in doing cultural and political work. What kind of complications (or contradictions) does the notion “queer of color” present for subjectless critique? How might queer of color critique inform political organizing? Particular attention will be devoted to how “queer” travels. Toward this end, students determine what conflicts are presently shaping debates around sexuality in their own communities and consider how these debates may be linked to different regional, national or transnational politics. Throughout the semester, we evaluate what “queer” means and what kind of work it enables. Is it an identity or an anti-identity? A verb, a noun, or an adjective? A heuristic device, a counterpublic, a form of political mobilization or perhaps even a kind of literacy? Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as HIST 222 and LALS 222 ) This course interrogates the normative construction of nation-state borders and the meaning of nation-state borders. We do so from the United States/Mexico border, and utilize a comparative approach, relating Latinx Studies to critical Indigenous feminist perspectives. While focused mainly on the United States landmass the course also critically foregrounds Native/Indigenous land and sovereignty to reconceptualize the United States as a settler colonial, imperial state. Utilizing the knowledges of Latinx and Indigenous thinkers, students trace the construction of modern borders and productively reframe assumptions around immigration/migration, citizenship, nationalism and indigenismo/Indigeneity. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 225Early American Literature: Authoring Self, Nation, Worlds1
(Same as ENGL 225 and GNCS 225 ) This course introduces students to American literatures from before European colonial settlement to the period preceding the Civil War, exploring the significance of literary authorship during an era of authoring a new nation. Through a range of genres including Native American creation stories, colonial histories of exploration, Puritan trial transcripts, personal narratives, poetry, Romantic tales, and sentimental fiction, we trace the literary strategies that writers (and other creative agents) use to claim legitimacy as authors alongside changing ideas about who counts as an author and what it means to “author” something. We also consider how authors respond and contribute to historical circumstances such as settler colonialism, Native resistance, slavery, abolitionism, the nation’s founding, and the literary market. Material texts are a key method of inquiry for this class; we focus on early physical forms in which our readings circulated. To that end, we make two visits to Special Collections, and you are asked to explore digital archives relating to several readings. Using archival artifacts, we consider the shifting forms and reception of literature, especially by authors traditionally regarded at the margins of the literary, and we consider “history” as another kind of textual production that circulates about the past. Blevin Shelnutt. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 230 and LALS 230 ) Students and instructor collaborate to identify and dialogue with the growing but still disputed archive of Latine/Latinx/Latina/o Literature. The categories “Latine,” “Latinx,” and “Latina/o” present us then with our first challenge: exactly what demographic do these categories isolate (or create)? How are these categories different from “Hispanic,” “Chicanx,” “Raza,” “Mestizo,” “Boricua,” or “Brown,” to name only a few? Rather than solidify a universal definition for “Latinidad,” our conversations will seek to unsettle (or reframe) conventional understandings of racial and ethnic identities as immutable. Our destabilization of “Latinidad” is productive; in other words, it treats “Latinidad” as dynamic, complex, robust with possibility. Our approach to the question of “Latinidad,” in turn, serves to re-orient the critical dispositions we bring to the category “literature.” How have notions of literariness, canon, belles-lettres, and disciplinarity obscured or marginalized the polyvocal richness of Latine/Latinx cultural production? How do forms like corrido, choteo, spoken word, and testimonio disrupt and enrich our study of “literature.” Miguel Algarín, founder of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, once proposed that debt and hustle constitute prototypical experiences of survival for the Nuyorican. Algarín concluded that “newness” presented the only viable alternative to “eternal debt” and “living by hustle”: “The poet has to invent a new language, a new tradition of communication.” “Nuyorican” exceeds state taxonomies and cannot be reduced to data recorded by the census or on “papers.” Algarín offers “hustle” and “debt” as metaphysical conceits that imbue Nuyorican “ethnicity” (if we can call it that still) with mutability, aliveness. In similar spirit, this class invites students to seek aliveness in “Latinidad.” How might the metaphor of “eternal debt” help us identify legacies of colonialism that live and breathe in the present, manifested in ways both collective and brutally uneven? How does that same metaphor qualify experiences of independence, freedom, sovereignty, and fugitivity that more conventional understandings of ethnicity flatten or obscure? What does it mean to think of identity as a form of indebtedness or a hustle? Algarín helps initiate our inquiry but does not limit its course. The breadth of the materials and representations covered demands that we also situate “Latinidad” within contexts of hot and cold wars; US foreign and economic policies; seasonal migrant labor; shadow economies; the global feminization of labor; and the commercialization of land and natural resources. These factors contribute to massive displacements of people rarely acknowledged by politicians or corporate media. Much of the literature and cultural production we review contests prevailing narratives about “immigration” (an inadequate catchall that obscures more complex stories). Major frameworks and themes helping us to complicate the story of “Latinidad” include: borderlands; criminalization, carcerality, and deportation; legal vs. cultural citizenships; code-switching; Indigeneity; Afro-Latinidad; contested or shifting racial formations; anxious hybridities; diaspora; queerness; gender politics; intergenerational conflict and silences; and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, nationalism, or assimilation). Assigned texts may include work by Elizabeth Acevedo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Bad Bunny, Sandra Cisneros, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jenine Capó Crucet, Jaime Cortez, Jacquira Díaz, Junot Díaz, Denice Frohman, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roy G. Guzmán, Daisy Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, John Leguizamo, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Nicholasa Mohr, Miguel Muñoz, Achy Obejas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Miguel Piñero, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Gary Soto, Piri Thomas, Justin Torres, and Helena Maria Viramontes. Hiram Perez. This course fulfills the REGS requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 231 ) This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere, and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of written and oral traditions, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the various theoretical debates that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework acknowledges Indigenous literatures as the cultural and creative labor of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities, as well as how the literatures are necessarily entangled with the on-going legacy of settler colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Tommy Pico, among other Native theorists, performance and fine artists, and filmmakers. This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ASIA 232 ) This course examines the methodology of oral history as employed by Asian American women and oral histories of Asian American women. It expands what we understand to be traditional oral history to include, testimonies, political speeches, speaking tours, lullabies, pop music and podcasting. We use sound and story as an object to study subaltern methods of capturing and articulating these stories. Students are able to conduct an oral history project of their own. Amy Chin. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANTH 233 ) Collecting Native American objects and human remains was once justified as a way to preserve vanishing cultures. Instead of vanishing, Native Americans organized and asked that their ancestors be returned, along with their sacred objects. Initially, museums fought against the loss of collections and scientists fought against the loss of data. Governments stepped in and wrote regulations to manage claims, dictating the rights of all parties. Thirty years after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) repatriation remains a controversial issue and few are satisfied with the process. This course examines the development of American museums and the ethics of collecting cultures to anchor our study of repatriation. Perspectives of anthropology, art, history, law, museum studies, Native American studies, philosophy, and religion are considered. Recent U.S. cases are contrasted with repatriation cases in other parts of the world, for repatriation is not just a Native American issue. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 235Picturing Transnational Indigenous Sovereignty in the Americas1
(Same as LALS 235 ) This course examines identities, memories, and social movements of and by Indigenous peoples depicted through film and video in Turtle Island and Abya Yala (North and Latin America). Students learn about visual representations, Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous futures by juxtaposing Indigenous communities past and present struggles. They also critically analyze the different actors, such as nation-states, non-profit organizations, individuals, and collectives, that produce dramas, independent films, and documentaries. This course addresses several questions: How has the discourse around Indigeneity transformed from the 20 th century to the 21 st century? How does the nation-state inform certain Indigenous representations? How can we think about Indigeneity in terms of self-performativity, autonomy, and solidarity instead of authenticity? How do Indigenous communities challenge authenticity and self-represent themselves through visual mediums, which they often seek to decolonize? Candy Martinez. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANTH 236 ) Native Americans have been in North America for at least the last 10,000 years. From the earliest archaeological record we can see how they farmed in the scorching desert, hunted in the frozen tundra, and traded resources over thousands of miles. From the more recent record, we can see how homelands relate to reservation lands and how lifeways changed but culture persists. Now, indigenous archaeologists and community archaeology programs are changing how archaeology is done, who it is done by and for, and what questions are asked of the past. This course surveys the archaeology of two distinct geographical culture areas, the Southwest and the Northeast. This contrast allows us to examine how knowledge of the past is constructed by archaeologists, museum professionals, descendant communities, and public interest. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 239Feeling the Present: Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Social Life1
(Same as SOCI 239 ) Contrary to the Enlightenment vision of a society comprised of rational, self-contained individuals, feelings, moods, and affects in fact play a primary role in contemporary social life, affecting most everything from consumer behavior to political beliefs to the health of the economy. This course examines not only how feelings and moods are profoundly collective but also why and how these collective emotions have come to matter in contemporary culture, politics, and economy. In analysis of current and classic scholarship in the sociology of emotions, affect studies, and psychoanalysis - as well as film and popular culture - we attend to the ways in which anxiety, depression, hope, fear, rage, and other moods figure into everyday life, work, social movements, and other key sites. We consider topics including: mental health and the pharmaceutical industry; neoliberalism and financialization; the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements; Trumpism and resurgent nationalisms globally; and emotion and social media among other topics addressed. Readings include work by Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovitch, Jennifer Doyle, Sigmund Freud, Arlie Hochschild, Jack Katz, Pankaj Mishra, Fred Moten, José Munoz, Amber Musser, Sianne Ngai, and Kathleen Stewart. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 240Italy and its Migrations: Multimedia Cultural History1
(Same as INTL 240 , ITAL 240 , and MEDS 240 ) This course follows the waves that shape and change Italian culture from the time of Unification, in 1861, up through today. We learn about the experiences, dreams, memories and politics of Italian emigration and immigration through a careful study of novels, poetry, cinema, and theater, as well as letters and media coverage. We consider the ways different narrative styles reflect the historical realities of the times, and take a critical analysis approach to the question of how public attitudes towards immigrants have shaped Italian national and diasporic sentiment. Beginning with the first major waves of emigration to the United States in the 1880s, this course provides a unique look at a moment of significant transition in Italian history and the makings of Italian-American Culture; we read literary texts, personal letters detailing the immigrant experience of cross the Atlantic at the turn of the century and of crossing the Mediterranean today, news coverage of significant events like the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and cinematic renditions of past and current migrant experiences. We look at this cultural material in relation to the specific historical context in which it was produced, reflecting on the impact and legacy of things like the U.S. Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the Italian Race Laws of 1938. As we read and discuss narratives of migration, we also examine the ways gender, sexuality and social roles determine and are determined by movement through space and time, reflecting critically on the exclusion of women’s voices from early accounts of migration. Sole Anatrone. This course is offered in English; Italian majors please see ITAL 340 . Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ASIA 241 and HIST 241 ) This course focuses on Asian American women as key historical actors and the use of gender analysis to re-examine major themes in Asian American history: immigration, labor, communtiy formation, cultural representations, feminist political organizing, sexuality, and marriage and family life. We also touch on the “queering” of Asian American history, as well as ideas of masculinity and the intersections of sexuality and racialization for Asian American men. Course materials emphasie Asian American women’s voices and include memoirs, poetry, film, oral histories, and artwork in addition to traditional academic texts. Students explore different types of archives and methodologies to evelop a final reserch project of their choice. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as SOCI 242 ) The ongoing care crisis in America reveals major gaps and obstacles between care needs and care provision. What care obligations does the state have to support the welfare of its citizens? How can we make care more affordable and accessible? Can the provision of care be socially organized in a different way—safely and with dignity to caregivers? This multidisciplinary course explores how the social value of care has changed over time in modern US history and society through theoretical debates in feminist care ethics, empirical studies of feminized work and social welfare history. Topics to be discussed include racialized domestic work, political economy of childcare, aging and eldercare, disability activism and veterans benefits. Theoretical concerns involve the commodification of intimate life, the relationship between state, family, and market in welfare provision and social citizenship. Often evoked but rarely defined, this course helps students better understand what is meant when we talk about care. Amy Chin. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as MEDS 248 ) This course examines the history and influence of books and printing in American society from earliest times to the present. We touch on a range of topics, including the place of books in the colonial era and the new republic, the spread of printing technologies in the 19th century, the emergence of large publishing houses and rising rates of literacy, the role of libraries, bookstores, and book clubs, modernist publishing, the rise of the paperback, the work of private presses, artist’s books, and the effect of recent technologies on reading. Along the way we consider questions relating to the production, dissemination, and reception of texts. The Archives & Special Collections Library serves as a laboratory for the course. Guest speakers and one or more field trips enhance our study of key topics. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
This course examines the key concept of ‘place.’ We examine the evolution of how a place is understood through geographic inquiry and how the concept has grown to include a variety of experiences, voices, and historical events. Students explore how being “on” and “with” lands in the Lenape diaspora (which are also claimed by both New York State and the United States at large) builds a relationship and understanding of place. We also study recent interventions from scholars working in a range of disciplines and geographies, including scholars and practitioners from Native nations around the world. Leora Gansworth. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ART 251 ) Americanist Art History Revisited. How did certain objects come to be recognized as “American art”? This course examines the visual and material cultures, artistic productions, and institutions that repeatedly grappled with this question from early contact & settler conquest through early 20th century transnational modernism. We examine the substance and limits of “American Art” through ideas of territory vs. Landscape, enfiguring race/gender/class and national belonging, museum and exposition practices, constructions of history and nostalgia, and the many impacts of global exchange. We study objects from our inherited American Art canon, and objects that challenge this inheritance. With special emphasis on local collections and resources, we develop familiarity with the methods and questions guiding Americanist art history today.
ART 105 or ART 106 or a 100-level American Studies course, or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 253Topics in American Literature1
The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).
ANST 254Memory and Justice in Latin America and North America1
(Same as LALS 254 ) This course seeks to understand the social and political movements of feminist Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities through frameworks of cultural memory, collective trauma, and collective healing. Students compare, contrast, and link the inequalities in countries in North America (United States and Canada) and Latin America. Students in the class consider the discourse of memory and the various actors who influence and defy accounts of nation-state led narratives. This course validates individual and collective forms of witnessing atrocities but also seeks to complicate notions of witnessing. Besides privileging testimonies of events, it also considers what it means for generations not directly impacted by catastrophic events to remember, reflect, and be affected by the past. Students contextualize histories and memories through a lens that questions the role of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age. Candy Martinez. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 261 and MEDS 261 ) This course introduces students to the study of books as physical objects, focusing on the field-transforming interventions of Indigenous studies and the cultural productions of Native peoples in colonial America and the nineteenth-century U.S. Meeting once a week for six weeks, we examine primary sources and critical scholarship that allow us to consider 1) various material textualities of Indigenous expression, within and beyond alphabetic literacy and print, and 2) alternative models of authorship that disrupt what scholar Robert Warrior describes as “the fetishization of single-author works.” Throughout, we interrogate archival power structures and erasures, using recent criticism that conceives methods for tracing in the archives Indigenous agency and survivance. The texts we study may include birchbark books, poems, painted baskets, traditional creation narratives, personal narratives, execution sermons, hymns, treaties, and receipts, along with scholarship by Drew Lopenzina, Phillip Round, and Kelly Wisecup, among others. Blevin Shelnutt. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
(Same as WFQS 262 ) In an effort to subjugate indigenous nations, colonizing and Christianizing enterprises in the Americas included the implicit understanding that subduing Native American women through rape and murder maintained imperial hierarchies of gender and power; this was necessary to eradicate Native people’s traditional egalitarian societies and uphold the colonial agenda. Needless to say, Native women’s stories and histories have been inaccurately portrayed, often tainted with nostalgia and delivered through a lens of western patriarchy and discourses of domination. Through class readings and writing assignments, discussions and films, this course examines Native women’s lives by considering the intersections of gender and race through indigenous frameworks. We expose Native women’s various cultural worldviews in order to reveal and assess the importance of indigenous women’s voices to national and global issues such as sexual violence, environmentalism, and health. The class also takes into consideration the shortcomings of western feminisms in relation to the realities of Native women and Native people’s sovereignty in general. Areas of particular importance to this course are indigenous women’s urban experience, Haudenosaunee influence on early U.S. suffragists, indigenous women in the creative arts, third-gender/two-spiritedness, and Native women’s traditional and contemporary roles as cultural carriers. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 263Current and Emerging Issues in Public Health1
(Same as STS 263 ) This course explores contemporary issues affecting public health on local, national, and global scales. Students discuss public health challenges and responses, the impact on populations, and consider interventions. We analyze public health events as they unfold, evaluating trends, policy implications, and the roles of public health. Topics include health disparities, environmental health, reproductive health, technology, and healthcare delivery. Students develop critical thinking skills and practical knowledge to address current public health challenges through lectures, discussions, case studies, guest speakers, and projects. Christie Van Horne. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
ANST 265Decolonizing the Exhibition: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Indigenous Art1
This course consists of two areas of inquiry: the study of the impact and importance of Indigenous art from a Native American Studies perspective and the research and exhibition of Inuit works on paper from the Edward J. Guarino Collection at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. We begin by exploring Indigenous art through culturally and tribally specific perspectives in order to challenge the ethnographic lens that has traditionally examined and catalogued Native artists. Through a Native American Studies framework, we approach Indigenous art not through western categories of artifact or craft, but as artworks that stress the continuance of Indigenous peoples in direct conversation with the non-Indigenous world. From this understanding, the class constructs an exhibition to be installed in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at the end of the semester. Students research and interpret Inuit works from the collection, design the exhibition installation, write the exhibition catalogue and create the accompanying website. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 266Art, Urgency, and Everyday Life in the United States1
(Same as AFRS 266 and ART 266 ) What is this thing called socially-engaged, social practice, activist, and/or community-centered art? Where does it come from, who makes it, who is it for, how does it work, and what can it do? What are some of the ways this interdisciplinary practice–often woven within struggles for justice and healing–is defined and deployed? And how might its success be assessed? Dwelling together on these questions by way of dynamic case studies, we consider how a range of U.S. based creators are grappling with urgent issues of our time. Lisa Collins.
ART 105 or ART 106 or coursework in Africana Studies, American and Native American Studies, Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies, or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ANST 268Indigenous Legal Traditions and Governance1
(Same as GEOG 268 ) This course introduces students to the policy histories of the United States (and to a lesser extent, Canada) pertaining to the legal category of persons sometimes called “Indians.” In the era of today, sometimes called the ‘self-determination’ era, many Tribal Nations within the United States are engaged in trust relationships with federal governments based on negotiated treaties and other acts of diplomacy. There are multiple meanings of the term ‘Indigenous’ both domestically and internationally, which we also discuss. Despite histories of attempted assimilation and dissolvement of Native cultures, languages, and spiritual traditions, there are persisting knowledge systems that inform Indigenous understandings of law, justice, governance, and relatedness. The course develops a “timeline” approach of native/newcomer relations in specific geographies starting in the Northeast, before the United States were formed. It examines multinational Indigenous world views and experiences as recorded in literature, film, artistic expressions, and other materials sourced directly from Native peoples. Leora Gansworth. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as POLI 271 ) This course studies the ways in which Native American visual culture asserts and affirms Indigenous political sovereignty. With a focus on visualities, including painting, printmaking, performance art, street art, film and television, we examine the multiple ways Native artists claim political power for themselves on and for their territories and nations. Leaning on Native American scholars such as Scott Richard Lyones and Michelle Rahaja, we examine Native American sovereignty as a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being,’ as well as a process that can be defined artistically and kinesthetically. We consider the spectrum of “high” and “low” arts, looking at – for example – paintings that might hang in a national gallery and graffiti that might be tagged on an abandoned building. While it is tempting to consider this an “artwork of resistance” or “activist art,” in the case of Native American artists the attention paid to sovereignty is the resistance itself. In this course, we ask: How do Native American creative practices speak to sovereignty in ways that differ from what we might call traditional or standard forms of politics? And, how are Native American visual sovereignties tied to decolonial discourses? In addition to this being a co-taught class environment, we aim to offer a variety of perspectives by including guest speakers and visits. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 273Critical Ethnic Studies Curricula for Secondary Schools1
(Same as ASIA 273 and EDUC 273 ) In this intensive, Vassar students work with the professor on developing curricula for a new Grades 9-14 AAPI Digital Textbook that is being produced and published by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. The larger textbook uses AAPI history and experiences as a lens to understand American history, emphasize understanding the world through multiple perspectives, and demonstrate the ability to collaborate and resolve conflicts across many facets of difference and diversity towards shared goals for the common good. Chapters in the textbook are organized around the four foundational themes : Global Capitalism and Migration; Empire and War; Community Foundations and Activism; Race, Power and Identity. Our group is tasked with developing accompanying lesson plans and activities for the chapter on Chinese garment workers in New York. As well, we consider developing curricula for a similar nascent project on SWANA studies for high schoolers. Students are expected to travel to NYC for meetings with the historians writing the chapter. Individual conferences with the instructor. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
(Same as ENGL 274 ) On the first page of Heavy: An American Memoir , Kiese Laymon writes, “I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir. I wanted to write a lie.” This course asks students to consider what it means to write an American memoir, particularly from perspectives historically excluded from mainstream publishing and prestigious literary journals. Keeping Laymon’s words in mind, we might ask how marginalized voices engage the presumed transparency of the memoir form to render lies (or mythologies) that arguably consolidate the US as a nation. How does the American memoir write from and to the nation? This course centers students’ voices. We learn about memoir (and memory) from reading selected memoirs and criticism, but also from our own life writing, which we share in a workshop setting. Our reading selections provide us with a variety of models for transforming memory into story, including the braided essay, lyric forms, flash, the hermit crab essay, and epistolary, among others. Authors may include Kiese Laymon, Deborah Miranda, Melissa Febos, Doris Cheng, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Hilton Als, among others. Two hours every other week. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
(Same as AFRS 276 and ENGL 276 ) Though our culture has become increasingly comfortable with self exposure, it does not completely explain why people so frequently resort to the genre of memoir to publicize the self. What might be required of the writer—in terms of aesthetics, historical memory, the publishing industry, and the market—might also be mysterious to many. This intensive seeks to peak behind the curtain of memoir making, with an eye toward having students produce a substantial, but hardly oversized (20 pages), draft of a memoir of their own. We meet with real live memoirists, and having read their works, question them mercilessly about how they brought their stories into being. Among the inquiries that will drive our enterprise is what makes a memoir black. Another is what difference does this (racial) difference make for memoir- writing. Tyrone Simpson.
Permission of the instructor and 200-level courses in English/ Africana Studies/American Studies. One 3-hour period. Course Format: INT
Offered
Spring
ANST 281Black Classicisms and the Human(ities)1
(Same as AFRS 281 and GRST 281 ) “The Classics” have long been associated with elite educational institutions and constructions of “Western civilization” that, at their worst, provide a thin veil for white supremacy. South Carolina Senator and eventual Vice President John C. Calhoun once claimed that if somebody could find a Black man who understood Greek, then he might at last believe that that man “was a human being and should be treated as a man.” In his account of escaping enslavement, Samuel Ringgold Ward counters Calhoun by pointing to a Roman African author, asking, “Was Terence, the black poet, a gentleman?” At stake in the gatekeeping of the Greek and Roman past is the definition of what it means to be truly human and, as a result, who the humanities are for. In this course, we explore the rich history of Black writers from the eighteenth century to the present day who have reclaimed and reimagined Greco-Roman antiquity. Pairing selections from ancient Greek and Roman texts with readings from authors including Phillis Wheatley Peters, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove, we trace the lives and afterlives of mythological figures like Niobe and Medea. Drawing on the work of poets, novelists, critics, and a range of other thinkers, we ask: How have Black writers complicated and refined ideas of the human and the humanities in light of the classics? Who has gotten to define “The Classics” in the United States? What kinds of capital are at play when someone alludes to Homer, Ovid, or Terence? How have Black classicist authors reimagined ancient Greek and Roman texts? Rachel Morrison.
(Same as ART 296 ) The Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution is the most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in the United States. Diaries, scrapbooks, letters, manuscripts, financial records, sketches, photographs, films, and recordings can all be found in its vast holdings. It also holds the largest collection of oral histories anywhere on the subject of art. In this collaborative exploratory workshop we immerse ourselves in the Archives’ online resources, paying particularly close attention to the in-depth oral histories, life stories, and other firsthand accounts by visual artists and other cultural workers. Together we critically and creatively analyze sources, freshly interpret artwork, piece together stories, and engage key questions of interpretation, evidence, and the limits and possibilities–including potential future histories–of a key archive. Lisa Collins.
Required of students concentrating in the program. Eve Dunbar. The senior project intensive is graded Distinction, Satisfactory, or Unsatisfactory. Course Format: INT
(Same as ENST 310 ) This experiential Intensive invites students to engage with approaches offered by interdisciplinary indigenous scholarship and other publications. Topics include earth elements+, relationality and the role of human beings in the world. Activities include local and regional site visits, guest speakers, student-led discussions, and creative exercises that encourage students to apply ideas and methods to their own areas of interest. This Intensive meets both on campus and off, and is coordinated according to student and instructor schedules. Students record their learning in a weekly journal and create a final project reflecting their cumulative experiences over the semester. Leora Gansworth.
Students should have taken ANST 105 or another NAS correlate course and permission of the instructor. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
Offered
Spring
ANST 313Approaches to Multidisciplinary Inquiry1
This course explores the challenges of conducting multi- and interdisciplinary inquiry within the field of American Studies. Drawing on key texts and innovative projects within the field, the course examines the ways in which varying disciplines make meaning of the world and puts specific modes of inquiry into practice. Students learn how to seek, produce, and evaluate different forms of evidence and how to shape this evidence in the direction of a broader project. Specific forms of inquiry may include: interpreting archival documents, conducting interviews, making maps, crafting field notes, analyzing cultural texts, among others. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 314History of Asian American Social Movements1
(Same as ASIA 314 and HIST 314 ) This seminar uses primary and secondary sources to explore the history of social movements by and for Asian Americans. After brief discussion of early forms of resistance and organizing, the course focuses primarily on social movements during and after the “Asian American movement” arose in the long 1960’s. Topics include struggles for ethnic studies. Yellow Power and recognition for “Brown Asians,” antiwar, Redress (reparations for Japanese American WWII incarceration), fair working conditions, Asian American feminisms, gay marriage, environmental justice, and anti-Asian violence and #StopAsianHate. Throughout the course, we ground Asian American activists and their ideas in their transnational dimensions,including Third World Liberation and anticolonial ideaologies, and we explore their solidarities with other liberation movements such as Civil Rights, Black Power, and Indigenous sovereignty. For the final project, students work together to create our own archive and interpreation of Asian American student activism at Vassar College. Ashanti Shih. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
This workshop is designed to help students embarking on the program’s senior project to identify a compelling research problem, locate appropriate critical resources, and deepen their engagement with the disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods appropriate to their focus within the major. Alongside the focus on individual projects, the participants in the workshop also identify a common research problem and discuss ways to approach it, by collectively building a syllabus and/or an archive. Eve Dunbar. Course Format: INT
(Same as ART 317 ) The current environment creates challenges to ways museums carry out their missions, sometimes forcing institutions to affirm or reimagine how to build better versions of themselves. Through a critical historical survey of the evolution of art museums, we examine their purpose in times of crises. How can we better connect audiences and objects? How do we describe the impact we want to make? If we can’t be all things to all people, how do we determine which of our museum’s “products” to retain, embellish, or drop? From difficult times come opportunities and new habits and ways of thinking.
(Same as ENGL 329 and GNCS 329 ) Exploration of the literary concepts of realism and naturalism focusing on the theory and practice of fiction between 1870 and 1910, the first period in American literary history to be called modern. The course may examine past critical debates as well as the current controversy over realism in fiction. Attention is given to such questions as what constitutes reality in fiction, as well as the relationship of realism to other literary traditions. Authors may include Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as AFRS 336 , ENST 336 , HIST 336 , and WFQS 336 ) This seminar operates on the notion that structural racism and environmental degradation are historically related–and that Black Americans have confronted the two together. Over the course of the semester, we interrogate how different Black activists have done so, from the Antebellum period to the present day. We consider how enslaved people drew from nature in their resistance to slavery, as well as the role of pollution, environmental disasters, and gentrification in twentieth-century organizing. Toward the end of the course, we explore the concepts of environmental justice and ecofeminism. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ANST 337Eels as Teachers: Learning with Earth’s Ancient Residents1
(Same as ENST 337 ) This interdisciplinary seminar integrates material from human geography, biological sciences, critical animal studies, and Indigenous legal traditions to consider the case of Anguilla rostrata /American eel decline as a matter of serious importance across North America. We look at the holistic story of eels and review data pertaining to known historical distribution and significance of eels in and around Poughkeepsie and beyond. We study current and future threats to the species in the Hudson Valley and surrounding estuary which are prime habitat for the only migratory Anguillid in all North America. Leora Gansworth.
Permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ANST 338Labor and Working-Class Culture in Asian America1
(Same as ASIA 338 ) This seminar examines the labor and working-class culture of Asians in America since the mid-19th century. From early indentured labor migration to the Americas to the development of transnational service work, we focus on the role of Asian labor in the making of global capitalism. We explore labor migration, workplace culture, union organizing, leisure, and family dynamics through history, ethnography, law and visual culture. Key theoretical tensions to be discussed include the relationship between freedom and coolie labor, the proletarian status of small business owners, and the Asian body in immaterial labor. Subjects of labor to be studied include gold mining, canning, gardening, domestic work, laundry, restaurants, garment work, nail salons, call centers and surrogacy. Amy Chin. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANTH 352 and LALS 352 ) This course addresses a selection of creation narratives, historical accounts, poems, and other genres produced by indigenous authors from Pre-Columbian times to the present, using historical, linguistic and ethnographic approaches. We examine the use of non-alphabetic and alphabetic writing systems, study poetic and rhetorical devices, and examine indigenous historical consciousness and sociopolitical and gender dynamics through the vantage point of these works. Other topics include language revitalization, translation issues, and the rapport between linguistic structure and literary form. The languages and specific works to be examined are selected in consultation with course participants. They may include English or Spanish translations of works in Nahuatl, Zapotec, Yucatec and K’iche’ Maya, Quechua, Tupi, Aymara, and other indigenous languages of Latin America. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 355 ) In this course, we use Native American Studies frameworks to study and appreciate an array of contemporary North American Indigenous Poets. Through literary analysis and close reading, we consider how Native poetics pay serious attention to ideas of sovereignty, decolonization, healing, and intergenerational memory and continuance. Native American poetry is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range, our goals for the class are to become acquainted with the various creative conversations, discourses, and theoretical debates within the robust field of Native American poetry and poetics. A Native American Studies framework positions the literature as the creative work of Native peoples, expressed on behalf of their respective Nations or communities and complicated by the on-going legacy of colonialism. Molly McGlennen. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Toni Morrison describes, what we would call memory work, as “a kind of literary archeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” This seminar focuses on the process of this reconstruction through major works in memory studies concerning the politics of remembering and forgetting, narrative and form, and philosophical and cognitive aspects of memory as well as recent interventions in the phenomenology of memory, the industry of memorialization, hauntology, indigenous protocol, and ruin as methodology from a global perspective. Students engage these topics through texts, visual culture, digital archives, and sound to gain a deeper understanding of the functions and purposes of memory. Finally, students are asked to grapple with and put into practice course material through a personal memory work project. Amy Chin.
Permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
ANST 369Thinking Doing: Research and Creative Practice1
(Same as ART 369 ) Thinking Doing: Research and Creative Practice is a multidisciplinary laboratory for research-based creative production. Crosslisted between Studio Art and American Studies, this course welcomes advanced studio art students and upper level students from across the disciplines at Vassar who are engaged in creative work as a major component of their studies. The course fosters the creation of research-based work in forms other than academic writing. We ask ourselves the following questions: How can research be embodied and materialized? What is the full range of diverse forms that knowledge production can take? How does research fuel creative practice? How can we acknowledge our influences and nurture our creativity through engagement with those who came before us? Students in this course are challenged to expand your making practice, producing several ambitious creative projects over the course of the semester. Weekly course materials are determined in relation to each student’s interests, and each class-member is responsible for engaging your peers in discussion about the questions, themes, and histories relevant to your individual work. As a class, we look to writing by artists to better understand the ways that artists articulate the questions motivating their creative process and the artworks that result from it. The course is punctuated by rigorous group critique, with the aim of strengthening your work and gaining fluency in the skill of giving and receiving critical feedback within a diverse community. The heart of this class is to support each participant in developing as a creative practitioner and a scholar by identifying and exploring your unique guiding questions through research, conversation, and hands-on making. This course is ideal for seniors from Studio Art, American and Native American Studies, and other departments and multidisciplinary programs, though juniors can also enroll with permission. Gordon Hall.
Juniors and Seniors only and permission of the instructor. Two 2-hour periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ANST 379War and Adoption1
(Same as ASIA 379 and HIST 379 ) This intensive seeks to explore the links between war and adoption in Asia and the US. The consequences of US wars in Asia and the Pacific have been multifaceted and reverberating for adoptees through the formation of new families, institutions, and subjectivities-topics of which we are just beginning to study and theorize. Yet adoptees are more than their conditions of adoption. Through this intensive, we analyze the historical and legal origins of transnational adoption, the relationships between veteran fathers and first mothers, state, religious and civic institutions that facilitated adoptions, as well as the individual lives of adoptees. In particular, we aim to highlight the diversity of adoptee narratives through historical monographs, memoirs, films, photography, graphic novels, comics, oral histories, and performances. It takes a multidisciplinary historical approach to understanding the militarized aspects of adoption in the US by honing in on the interstitial figures that emerge out of war: the orphan, waifs and mascots, the adoptee, American GI fathers, social workers, Asian first/birthmothers. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
ANST 382White Nationalism and Greco-Roman Antiquity1
(Same as GRST 382 and INTL 382 ) Ever since a mob chanted “Jews will not replace us,” at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the resurgence of white nationalist politics in the United States has become increasingly difficult to ignore. This course investigates the intellectual foundations of this phenomenon by examining the inspiration this movement takes from the texts and symbols of ancient Greece and Rome. References that a casual observer might assume amount to nothing more than abuse of history turn out to be symptomatic of the long-standing and wide-ranging entanglement of white supremacy, the nation state, and the study of history. Beginning with a survey of examples of white nationalist classicism and the core tenets of white nationalist ideologies in the twenty-first century, the course then turns to an investigation of the rhetorical utility of Greco-Roman antiquity for white nationalist activists; the relationship between overt and mainstream white nationalism; the racial politics of the Enlightenment ideals that underpin modern concepts of nationhood; and the links between political theory and real-world violence. Curtis Dozier.
One course in GRST or HIST 360 / INTL 360 , or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
ANST 383Indigenous New York1
(Same as URBS 383 ) Over half of all Native American people living in the United States now live in an urban area. The United States federal policies of the 1950’s brought thousands of Indigenous peoples to cities with the promise of jobs and a better life. Like so many compacts made between the United States and Native tribes, these agreements were rarely realized. Despite the cultural, political, and spiritual losses due to Termination and Relocation policies, Native American people have continued to survive and thrive in complex ways. This seminar examines the experiences of Indigenous peoples living in urban areas since the 1950’s, but also takes into consideration the elaborate urban centers that existed in the Americas before European contact. Using the New York region as our geographical center, we examine the pan-tribal movement, AIM, Red Power, education, powwowing, social and cultural centers, two-spiritedness, religious movements, and the arts. We study the manner in which different Native urban communities have both adopted western ways and recuperated specific cultural and spiritual traditions in order to build and nurture Indigenous continuance. Finally, in this course, we understand and define “urban” in very broad contexts, using the term to examine social, spiritual, geographical, material, and imagined spaces in which Indigenous people of North America locate themselves and their communities at different times and in different ways. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
