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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
A booming multinational industry, tourism is a powerful medium of transnational encounter. There is hardly a place on earth not part of the recreational geography of tourism. In practical terms, tourism is seen as an engine of economic growth both in the cities and in the countryside. While it moves people from one place to another, tourism produces itself with ever-greater complexity. This course will undertake an analysis of tourist productions, including tourist discourse, settings, events, experiences, and artifacts. An exemplary case of cultural invention and commodification, tourism is implicated in the histories of pilgrimage, travel, colonialism, and ethnography, retracing their trips and replicating their discourse, As a result, tourism offers some of the richest material for exploring the semiosis of cultural production on a global scale. In this course, therefore, we will pay special attention to the political economy of tourism as seen through a close analysis of actual sites.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore the history of sexuality in America. The purpose of this course is to familiarize the student with important historical events/periods in the development of sexuality in the United States and major themes and issues in the American cultural history of sex and sexuality. Its purpose is to survey the ways in which sexuality has changed and shifted over the course of colonial and American history. It will also connect sexuality to the social, political, and economic realities that helped to shape it in different eras. The focus of the course will consist of major themes that illuminate aspects of sexuality in colonial and American culture and history. These may include, but are not limited to: censorship, family and sex, marriage and sex, female sexuality, male sexuality, homosexuality, birth control, bisexuality, the state use of sterilization, transgender/transsexual sexuality, sex workers, sexually transmitted infections, and sex in the media and arts. The approach taken in the class will cut across racial, class, gender, transgender, and ethnic boundaries. In order to better understand our own society, it is necessary to be aware of events that shaped the world as we know it today.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine the place of the arts in contemporary America, with an emphasis on the politics of culture. We will take a broad view of “art,” encompassing popular arts, high arts, and what’s in between. And we will look at some examples of how artists and writers have functioned within the contemporary art environment, and within a popular culture and material environment that undermines distinctions between reality and fantasy and between past and present (e.g., Disneyland). Representative figures will be examined from various art forms (literature, music, architecture, painting, photography) within an interdisciplinary context.
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3.00 Credits
The things we produce are fraught with cultural meaning, from the household object to the building to the automobile. This course explores the meanings of things through a historical examination of objects, both handmade and manufactured. The way things have served as repositories of meaning, and as expressions of social class, gender, and ethnicity, will be explored through discussion and observation.
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3.00 Credits
Students will be introduced to the development of the city of Philadelphia as seen from a neighborhood perspective. From Colonial times to the present, neighborhood and community are the primary means by which the city’s residents experienced the growth and change of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Using archival resources over the World Wide Web, as well as the rich historical legacy of the region’s museums, students will explore the development of the city’s neighborhoods.
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3.00 Credits
The museum holds itself to the preserver of cultural memory, yet museums as we know them are a 19th century invention. Their function as shapers of cultural practice and national identity will be explored through this course, which takes us up to the present, when museums have reached out to represent communities that were previously excluded from the elite culture of museums. How museums work as classifiers of knowledge, how they represent culture, as commodity and experience, will also form part of the course.
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3.00 Credits
A study of issues and traditions in the history of radical thought and behavior. Emphasizing the 20th century, the course focuses on major social contexts and ideologies such as anarchism, militant unionism, socialism, and communism, each of which has had a long and vibrant history in the U.S.
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3.00 Credits
This course, which will change given the professor’s expertise, is designed as a close, detailed interdisciplinary study of a single crucial moment in United States history. Using novels, films, both feature-length and documentaries, art, theater, life histories, and primary documents, this class will examine how the politics, economy, culture, events and movements of a given historical era, for instance the Great Depression or the day of hope and rage of the 1960s, shaped the day-to-day lives of ordinary people and how these individuals and groups struggled to control and grapple with the changes swirling around them. In addition, this class will explore how these personal dramas were represented in literature, architecture, art, and on the stage and screen. Finally, through letters, oral histories and other accounts, this class will look at memory, and see how people’s views of the past shaped, and are filtered through, the present.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the way American values have shaped technology and how technology has shaped American life, placing contemporary problems in a historical perspective. Materials are drawn from social history, literature, visual arts, film, advertising, and polemical prose. May also include working with collections at the Franklin Institute.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the importance of place in determining the character of American culture. A variety of materials, visual and textual, are used to examine the way our lives are shaped by the home, the design of the city, and the suburban and regional areas beyond the city. The extent to which places hold their identities in the face of mass culture and megalopolis is also explored.
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