AMST 520b / ER&M 520b / HSHM 757b / WGSS 520b, Applied Research in Feminist Science and Technology Studies  Kalindi Vora

In this seminar, participants conduct applied research on projects with the primary investigator/instructor. Structured as a lab, we learn research methods, design research activities including building bibliographies for scholarly review, and collecting data through surveys and interviews. Topics vary but are linked to active research by instructor in feminist science and technology studies. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may enroll by permission of instructor.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

AMST 600a, American Scholars  Laura Wexler

This required seminar for incoming first-year graduate students in the American Studies doctoral program focuses on varieties of scholarship and research methods employed in the field. The course aims to be both a history of the interdisciplinary American Studies field and an exploration of newer debates, approaches, and frameworks that engage and revise earlier objects, areas, historical timelines, methods, and periods. Beyond the narratives of United States exceptionalism, we engage American Studies scholarship that considers U.S. culture, history, and politics in relation to the histories of slavery, settler colonialism, capitalism, race, gender, sexuality, subcultures, war and empire. To explore the various kinds of approaches and projects, the seminar features visits from Yale scholars. Students will read 100 pages of visiting scholars’ work and collaborate on topical and thematic questions for discussion. Assignments include brief weekly writing assignments. This course is mandatory for first-year American Studies graduate students.
T 9:25am-11:15am

AMST 602b, Field Studies  Staff

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

AMST 619a / ER&M 620a / HSHM 792a / WGSS 620a, Enduring Conditions: Chronic Illness, Disability, Care, and Access  Kalindi Vora

This interdisciplinary course brings together scholarship on access and care that bridges concerns in the fields of disability studies and humanistic approaches to chronic illness. Scholarly texts are drawn from the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology and sociology of medicine, history, and feminist science and technology studies (fSTS). Seminar participants also engage with the arts and media as critical sites for understanding culture work bringing together knowledge in disability and chronic illness spaces. To embrace community-based research and knowledge sharing, the course features regular guest lectures from grassroots disability justice organizers and culture workers. The course is offered in a hybrid format. To consider what disability studies and work on chronic illness can build together, we explore the work of Moya Bailey, Aimi Hamraie, Jina B. Kim, Sami Schalk, Akemi Nishida, Ryan Cartwright, and Arthur Kleinman, among others. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may also enroll with permission of instructor.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

AMST 620a, Pedagogy  Staff

Faculty members instruct their Teaching Fellows on the pedagogical methods for teaching specific subject matter.
HTBA

AMST 622a and AMST 623b / CPLT 622a, Working Group on Globalization and Culture  Michael Denning

A continuing yearlong collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory.” The group, drawing on several disciplines, meets regularly to discuss common readings, develop collective and individual research projects, and present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. The working group is open to doctoral students in their second year and beyond. Graduate students interested in participating should contact michael.denning@yale.edu.
M 12pm-2:15pm

AMST 630b / HSAR 529b / RLST 819b, Museums and Religion: The Politics of Preservation and Display  Sally Promey

This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the tangled relations of religion and museums, historically and in the present. What does it mean to “exhibit religion” in the institutional context of the museum? What practices of display might one encounter for this subject? What kinds of museums most frequently invite religious display? How is religion suited (or not) for museum exhibition and museum education? Enrollment is by permission of the instructor; qualified undergraduates are not only welcome but also encouraged to join us. There are no set prerequisites, but, assuming available seats, permission is granted on the basis of response to three questions: Why do you wish to take this course? What relevant educational or professional background/experience do you bring to the course? How does the course help you to meet your own intellectual, artistic, or career aspirations?
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 652a / WGSS 652a, Queer Repertoires and the “Great American Songbook”  Karen Tongson

Queer Repertoires is a critical writing and intensive reading workshop using the “Great American Songbook” (in some of its canonical, as well as wildly innovative reimaginings) alongside recent and key texts about popular music, sound, sexuality, and race to explore other ways of approaching “academic writing,” broadly conceived. The class is suitable for students interested in queer studies, sound studies, musical theater studies, and popular music studies, as well as students who are interested in exploring other styles and methods of public writing with scholarly/research-based foundations. From Water Pater's “Preface to The Renaissance” declaring that “all arts aspire to the condition of music,” to Roland Barthes' claim in “The Grain of the Voice” that writing about music inspires an endlessly evasive and “predicative” language, aesthetes, philosophers, and critical theorists have struggled to find methods for writing about music, while playing with musicality in their own language. Meanwhile, American studies has engaged with popular music not merely as another archive constitutive of what constitutes “the American,” but also as a theoretical apparatus and set of stylistic techniques. This course encourages your experiments in critical writing about music, race, and sexuality in and beyond academic contexts. Seminar participants are expected to write short weekly assignments and to create playlists, while also exploring other multimedia modes (including audio storytelling) to workshop with the group on a rotating basis.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 653a / FILM 653a, Studies in Documentary Film  Charles Musser

This course examines key works, crucial texts, and fundamental concepts in the critical study of nonfiction cinema, exploring the participant-observer dialectic, the performative, and changing ideas of truth in documentary forms.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm, M 7pm-10pm

AMST 691b / AFAM 766b / HIST 737b, Research Seminar in U.S. Political Economy  Jennifer Klein

Research seminar oriented around themes and issues in U.S. political economy from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth. Readings in the first part of the term look at various approaches to writing about political economy: for example, business history, intellectual history, labor history, biography, local monograph, or transnational history. Research projects explore new possibilities for writing about labor, business, the state, and capitalism.
T 9:25am-11:15am

AMST 696a / ENGL 906a / ER&M 696a / HSHM 782a / RLST 630a / WGSS 696a, Michel Foucault I: The Works, The Interlocutors, The Critics  Greta LaFleur

This graduate-level course presents students with the opportunity to develop a thorough, extensive, and deep (though still not exhaustive!) understanding of the oeuvre of Michel Foucault, and his impact on late-twentieth-century criticism and intellectual history in the United States. Non-francophone and/or U.S. American scholars, as Lynne Huffer has argued, have engaged Foucault’s work unevenly and frequently in a piecemeal way, due to a combination of the overemphasis on The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 (to the exclusion of most of his other major works), and the lack of availability of English translations of most of his writings until the early twenty-first century. This course seeks to correct that trend and to re-introduce Foucault’s works to a generation of graduate students who, on the whole, do not have extensive experience with his oeuvre. In this course, we read almost all of Foucault’s published writings that have been translated into English (which is almost all of them, at this point). We read all of the monographs, and all of the Collège de France lectures, in chronological order. This lightens the reading load; we read a book per week, but the lectures are shorter and generally less dense than the monographs. [The benefit of a single author course is that the more time one spends reading Foucault’s work, the easier reading his work becomes.] We read as many of the essays he published in popular and more widely-circulated media as we can. The goal of the course is to give students both breadth and depth in their understanding of Foucault and his works, and to be able to situate his thinking in relation to the intellectual, social, and political histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside Foucault himself, we read Foucault’s mentors, interlocutors, and inheritors (Heidegger, Marx, Blanchot, Canguilhem, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, Bersani, Hartman, Angela Davis, etc); his critics (Mbembe, Weheliye, Butler, Said, etc.), and scholarship that situates his thought alongside contemporary social movements, including student, Black liberation, prison abolitionist, and anti-psychiatry movements. Instructor permission required.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 697b / ENGL 5197b / ER&M 697b / HSHM 783b, Michel Foucault II: The Works, the Interlocutors, The Critics  Greta LaFleur

Continuing graduate-level course presents students with the opportunity to develop a thorough, extensive, and deep (though still not exhaustive!) understanding of the oeuvre of Michel Foucault, and his impact on late-twentieth-century criticism and intellectual history in the United States. Non-francophone and/or U.S. American scholars, as Lynne Huffer has argued, have engaged Foucault’s work unevenly and frequently in a piecemeal way, due to a combination of the overemphasis on The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 (to the exclusion of most of his other major works), and the lack of availability of English translations of most of his writings until the early twenty-first century. This course seeks to correct that trend and to re-introduce Foucault’s works to a generation of graduate students who, on the whole, do not have extensive experience with his oeuvre. In this course, we read almost all of Foucault’s published writings that have been translated into English (which is almost all of them, at this point). We read all of the monographs, and all of the Collège de France lectures, in chronological order. This lightens the reading load; we read a book per week, but the lectures are shorter and generally less dense than the monographs. [The benefit of a single author course is that the more time one spends reading Foucault’s work, the easier reading his work becomes.] We read as many of the essays he published in popular and more widely-circulated media as we can. The goal of the course is to give students both breadth and depth in their understanding of Foucault and his works, and to be able to situate his thinking in relation to the intellectual, social, and political histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside Foucault himself, we read Foucault’s mentors, interlocutors, and inheritors (Heidegger, Marx, Blanchot, Canguilhem, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, Bersani, Hartman, Angela Davis, etc); his critics (Mbembe, Weheliye, Butler, Said, etc.), and scholarship that situates his thought alongside contemporary social movements, including student, Black liberation, prison abolitionist, and anti-psychiatry movements. Previously ENGL 907.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 721a / AFAM 522a / ENGL 935a, The Beautiful Struggle: Blackness, the Archive, and the Speculative  Daphne Brooks

This seminar takes its inspiration from concepts and questions centering theories that engage experimental methodological approaches to navigating the opacities of the archive: presumptively “lost” narratives of black life, obscure(d) histories, compromised voices and testimonials, contested (auto)biographies, anonymous testimonies, textual aporias, fabulist documents, confounding marginalia. The scholarly and aesthetic modes by which a range of critics and poets, novelists, dramatists, and historians have grappled with such material have given birth to new analytic lexicons—from Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to José Estaban Muñoz’s “ephemera as evidence” to Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afrofabulation.” Such strategies affirm the centrality of speculative thought and invention as vital and urgent forms of epistemic intervention in the hegemony of the archive and open new lines of inquiry in black studies. Our class explores a variety of texts that showcase these new queries and innovations, and we also actively center our efforts from within the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where a number of sessions are held and where we focus on Beinecke holdings that resonate with units of the course. Various sessions also feature distinguished guest interlocutors via Zoom, who are on hand to discuss the specifics of their research methods and improvisational experimentations in both archival exploration and approaches to their prose and poetic projects.
HTBA

AMST 762b / ANTH 764b, Anthropology in the Anthropocene  Kathryn Dudley

This research seminar examines the anthropological project in the context of the Anthropocene and its intertwined histories of agriculture, empire, slavery, and capitalism. Drawing on transdisciplinary readings that open up multiple ways to conceptualize anthropology’s evolving relationship to our planetary predicament, students develop critical approaches to ecological and governmental problematics produced, as Agamben suggests, by anthropological machines that produce the human and nonhuman within perpetually updated spaces of exception. Throughout we pay close attention to ethnographic analytics and writing practices that trouble such binaries in favor of affective or relational modes of knowing and being. In-class workshops offer opportunities to share term papers in progress.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 787a / WGSS 787a, Transgender Legal History  Greta LaFleur

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the histories of the regulation of gendered and sexual comportment in the United States from the colonial period through the present, understanding gendered and sexual comportment to be historical formations indelibly shaped by racialization, religion, immigration status, disability, and class and labor status (among others). Building on the work of trans studies scholars and legal historians (which are not, of course, mutually exclusive constituencies), this course offers a substantive introduction to trans and legal archives and the unique questions and methodologies that engagement with each of these fields demands. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Dean Spade, Emily Skidmore, Katrina Rose, Sonia Katyal, C. Riley Snorton, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Paisley Currah, Marie-Amélie George, Michael Silverman, Kendra Field, Kyle Kirkup, Kevin Barry, Elizabeth Glazer, Catharine MacKinnon, Siobhan Somerville, Stephen Robertson, Colby Gordon, Sahar Sadjadi, and many more, this course provides graduate students with an advanced introduction to four vectors of inquiry: First and foremost, the course grapples with historical and historiographical questions surrounding what might be included under the umbrella of trans history or histories. Second, the course introduces students to legal history as a field and a method. Third, the course explores the complicated patchwork of laws that, together, make up the legal histories of gendered and gender nonconforming experience. Finally, we consider the role of law and policy in the production of transgender as a framework for experience and site of legislation, regulation, protection, enforcement, etc. Students must be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Yale University.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 797b / AFAM 797b / HIST 797b, Atlantic Abolitions  Marcela Echeverri Munoz

This readings course explores the historiography on the century of abolition, when the new states of the Americas abolished racial slavery. Beginning with the first abolitions in the U.S. North during the 1780s, we consider the emergence and process of abolition throughout the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Brazil, through the 1880s.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

AMST 798b / WGSS 800b, Methods in Gender and Sexuality Studies  Eda Pepi

This seminar explores the dynamics of power and knowledge, the ethics of representation and accountability, and the nexus between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. It is designed for graduate students developing research projects that engage feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race methodologies, among others. The course adopts an epistemological approach that centers “encounter” across geopolitical scales and multiple disciplinary fronts in the humanities and social sciences. It posits that research methods, regardless of their origin, can adopt feminist, queer, decolonial/postcolonial, and critical race perspectives and potentially serve counter-disciplinary purposes. Although we cover a broad spectrum of methods—ranging from ethnographic, historiographic/archival, and geographic, to literary, media, and textual analysis, cultural studies, and political theory—our work does not unfold as a practicum. Instead of experimenting with a predefined “toolkit,” students critically engage book-length works that demonstrate counter-disciplinary methodologies, reflecting hermeneutically on how method and theory relate in these texts by drawing on Foucault's framework of “the archaeology of knowledge.”
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 802b / HIST 702b, Readings in Early National America  Joanne Freeman

An introduction to the early national period and its scholarship, exploring major themes such as nationalism, national identity, the influence of the frontier, the structure of society, questions of race and gender, and the evolution of political cultures.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 805a / HSAR 720a / RLST 699a / WGSS 779a, Sensational Materialities: Sensory Cultures in History, Theory, and Method  Sally Promey

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the sensory and material histories of (often religious) images, objects, buildings, and performances as well as the potential for the senses to spark contention in material practice. With a focus on American things and religions, the course also considers broader geographical and categorical parameters so as to invite intellectual engagement with the most challenging and decisive developments in relevant fields, including recent literatures on material agencies. The goal is to investigate possibilities for scholarly examination of a robust human sensorium of sound, taste, touch, scent, and sight—and even “sixth senses”—the points where the senses meet material things (and vice versa) in life and practice. Topics include the cultural construction of the senses and sensory hierarchies; investigation of the sensory capacities of things; and specific episodes of sensory contention in and among various religious traditions. In addition, the course invites thinking beyond the “Western” five senses to other locations and historical possibilities for identifying the dynamics of sensing human bodies in religious practices, experience, and ideas. The Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group meets approximately once per month at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays; class participants are strongly encouraged, but not required, to attend. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor; qualified undergraduates are not only welcome but encouraged to join us. There are no set prerequisites, but, assuming available seats, permission will be granted on the basis of response to three questions: Why do you wish to take this course? What relevant educational or professional background/experience do you bring to the course? How does the course help you to meet your own intellectual, artistic, or career aspirations?
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 832a and AMST 833a / FILM 735a and FILM 736a, Documentary Film Workshop  Staff

This workshop in audiovisual scholarship explores ways to present research through the moving image. Students work within a Public Humanities framework to make a documentary that draws on their disciplinary fields of study. Designed to fulfill requirements for the M.A. with a concentration in Public Humanities.
W 3:30pm-6:20pm, T 7pm-10pm

AMST 839a / HIST 743a / HSHM 744a, Readings in Environmental History  Sunil Amrith

Readings and discussion of key works in environmental history. The course explores major forces shaping human-environment relationships, such as markets, politics, and ecological dynamics, and compares different approaches to writing about social and environmental change.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 856a / ER&M 658a, American Mobilities  Laura Barraclough

The “mobilities turn,” developed primarily in the social sciences since the early 2000s, examines the structured movements of people, ideas, and things; the transportation and communication infrastructures that move them; and the cultural meanings attributed to mobility and immobility. This course integrates critical mobilities scholarship with American studies and adjacent fields to consider the significance of (im)mobilities for the evolution of American history, geographies, society, and culture. Our focus is on American (im)mobilities and mobility justice in relationship to settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism in a variety of regions and from the seventeeth century to the present.
W 9:25am-11:15am

AMST 857b / WGSS 857b, Frailties  Scott Herring

An overview of the methodologies and interdisciplinary potentials of critical age studies. After beginning with a recent issue of Radical History Review on “Old/Age,” we spend our weeks discussing topics such as ageism and age discrimination; immigrant caregiving and servitude; black debility; creative iterations of queer and trans aging; age standardizations in the early twentieth-century United States; “deaths of despair” amidst “the new longevity”; feminist critiques of optimal aging; and junctures of disability and aging. The course brings together a range of thinkers including historians such as Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett; theorists such as Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette; disability justice activists such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha; and sociologists such as Mignon R. Moore. Two governing concerns that we answer as a class: How do considerations of age, aging, and gerontophobia featured in our readings amplify the contemporary investments of American studies? How can we chart political and aesthetic formations of the frail that offset their persistent nonrecognition?
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

AMST 858a / ENGL 858a, Edgar Allan Poe and His Critics  Caleb Smith

A seminar on Poe’s work and how people think about it. We read Poe’s gothic tales, detective stories, Romantic poetry, book reviews, essays, satires, and hoaxes. We also take up some of his interlocutors, such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Colin Dayan, Jacques Lacan, Mat Johnson, Toni Morrison, Emily Ogden, and Walt Whitman. Histories of slavery and empire, science and secularism, crime and punishment, magazine culture and the literary marketplace. Theories of consciousness, aesthetics, affect, power, guilt.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 866a / HIST 775a / WGSS 712a, Readings in the History of Sexuality  Regina Kunzel

Selected topics in the history of sexuality. Emphasis on key theoretical works and recent historical literature.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 877a / HIST 926a / HSHM 703a, Problems in the History of Medicine and Public Health  John Warner

An examination of the variety of approaches to the social, cultural, and intellectual history of medicine, focusing on the United States. Reading and discussion of the recent scholarly literature on medical cultures, public health, and illness experiences from the early national period through the present. Topics include the role of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and region in the experience of health care and sickness and in the construction of medical knowledge; the interplay between vernacular and professional understandings of the body; the role of the marketplace in shaping professional identities and patient expectations; health activism and social justice; citizenship, nationalism, and imperialism; and the visual cultures of medicine.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 900a or b, Independent Research  Staff

HTBA

AMST 901a or b, Directed Reading  Staff

HTBA

AMST 902a or b, Prospectus Workshop  Daniel HoSang

Upon completion of course work, students are required to participate in at least one term of the prospectus workshop, ideally the term before the prospectus colloquium is held. Open to all students in the program and joint departments, the workshop serves as a forum for discussing the selection of a dissertation topic, refining a project’s scope, organizing research materials, identifying appropriate methods and theoretical frameworks, and evaluating work in progress. Additional topics include finding intellectual communities, preparing for academic conferences, and balancing the demands of teaching and research. The workshop meets six times during the semester.
T 9:25am-11:15am

AMST 903b / HIST 746b / PHUM 903b, Introduction to Public Humanities  Matthew Jacobson and Ryan Brasseaux

What is the relationship between knowledge produced in the university and the circulation of ideas among a broader public, between academic expertise on the one hand and nonprofessionalized ways of knowing and thinking on the other? What is possible? This seminar provides an introduction to various institutional relations and to the modes of inquiry, interpretation, and presentation by which practitioners in the humanities seek to invigorate the flow of information and ideas among a public more broadly conceived than the academy, its classrooms, and its exclusive readership of specialists. Topics include public history, museum studies, oral and community history, public art, documentary film and photography, public writing and educational outreach, the socially conscious performing arts, and fundraising. In addition to core readings and discussions, the seminar includes presentations by several practitioners who are currently engaged in different aspects of the Public Humanities. With the help of Yale faculty and affiliated institutions, participants collaborate in developing and executing a Public Humanities project of their own definition and design. Possibilities might include, but are not limited to, an exhibit or installation, a documentary, a set of walking tours, a website, a documents collection for use in public schools.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 904a or b / PHUM 904a or b, Practicum  Staff

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

AMST 905b / PHUM 905b, Public Humanities Capstone Project  Matthew Jacobson

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

AMST 917a or b, American Studies Professionalization Workshop  Lisa Lowe

This seminar is designed for advanced Ph.D. candidates who are going on the job market. Students draft and revise three full rounds of the five standard genres of job market materials: job letter, CV, dissertation abstract, teaching portfolio, and diversity statement. Students also participate in mock interviewing skills, developing a job talk, and preparing applications for postdoctoral fellowships. Graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.
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AMST 937b / AFAM 752b / HIST 937b / HSHM 761b, Researching and Writing Medicine, Health, and Empire  Carolyn Roberts

This graduate research course is limited to a small number of graduate students who are currently involved in research projects that touch on any issues related to health, medicine, and the body in the context of slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism. The course includes visits to diverse archives on campus, discussions of archival best practices, and digital organizational tools. The course provides graduate students with a balance of support and independence as they carry out their research. Graduate students in any discipline are warmly welcomed to participate in a compassion-based research community that prioritizes values of deep listening, presence, and care.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm