Cultural history and cultural theories:

Some courses I teach are more concerned with the cultural meaning of things, relationships, and processes than with political developments or broad social patterns. These courses focus on aspects of popular (or widely-shared) culture in order to better understand the formation and nature of social identity, the key components of which are race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. In these courses, students examine cultural artifacts such as a novel, a film, a poster, a television show, the lay-out of a mall, museum or highway, a form of dress, a magazine or a trend in music. Simultaneously, they use and explore various theories of culture that twentieth-century scholars have developed to assess cultural meaning and explain cultural change. The sorts of theory a course like this would introduce to students include feminist, Marxist, postmodern, post-colonial, discourse, psychoanalytic, film and literary theory.

Examples of cultural history courses I teach are:

Modern American Popular Culture:  History, Theory and Perspectives (presently listed as Social/Cultural History of the US since 1877, 467/567)

Course description and objectives:  The primary objectives of this course are to expose students to topics and themes in U.S. popular culture of the last century, and to train them in the historical analysis of popular culture.   Students will become familiar with the questions and methodologies employed by cultural historians and with the theories of culture and social change such historians commonly draw from.  Students will learn to view U. S. popular culture in historical perspective and in terms of the racial, gendered, national and class-specific meanings attached to or generated by such media texts, technologies, and phenomena as newspapers, mass transport, novels, films, sports events, dance, slang, jokes, television programs, music, consumer habits, etc.  The goal of such analysis is to make students of U.S. history more fully aware of the complexities of American culture in the past and thus better able to assess their own positioning vis a vis American popular culture in the present moment

 Women, History, and Film  (Special Topics:  HST 340)

Course description and objectives:   Using visual as well as textual sources, this course exposes students to major ideas and debates in feminist film theory.  Students will learn to bring a historical perspective and theoretical sophistication to their analysis of the representation of women, audiences, and popular culture in the twentieth century.

Travel, Adventure and Exploration:  Historical Narratives of Empire in the 19^th and 20^th centuries (Special Topics:  HST 340)

Course description and objectives:   This course will explore the historical development of imperial ideas and cultures in the last two centuries.  We will focus on popular literatures such as memoirs produced by explorers, missionaries, scientists, and travelers in the nineteenth century.    We will also examine popular twentieth-century texts, such as Tarzan, King Kong, and The Lion King that have contributed to the colonization of peoples and places by representing them as in need of civilizing.  Students will mine these sources to understand the ways in which contemporary ideas about race and gender have been shaped by stories of empire.  For example, we will interrogate the racially-specific meanings associated with the “harem” in nineteenth-century women’s travel narratives, and the particular role of women in the “civilizing mission” in Southeast Asia and Africa through looking at the various literary and filmic versions of texts such as A Thousand and One Nights, The King and I and Out of Africa.  In this course, students will be introduced to theories and methods of literary and film criticism, feminist theory and post-colonial studies as scholars have applied them to the historical analysis of imperial culture. The goal of such analysis is to make students more fully aware of the complex legacy of imperial representations as this legacy affects contemporary global relations between peoples today.