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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will analyze the philosophy and principles underlying the social and political aspects of Latino art. We will approach this by examining a range of topics, including Chicano and Puerto Rican poster art, muralism, Latina aesthetics, and border art. The readings will enable us to survey a number of important exhibitions of Latino art and to explore new possibilities for exhibition and representation. We will examine descriptive material and critical writings concerning issues pertaining to the representation and interpretation of Latino culture and art as well as how these questions surface in a national museum context.
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3.00 Credits
The first third of the course will introduce a variety of theoretical perspectives, presented as a historical overview of popular culture studies, both in the United States and Britain. The theories to be considered are similar to those of SOC 34151, although somewhat more time and effort will be spent with theories associated with post-modernism. Next, students will use a specifically post-modern, deconstructive approach as they examine the meaning systems and messages present in the animated films produced by Disney since 1989, e.g., The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Mulan. Students will prepare an analytical paper in which they apply a theory from the course to another of the movies in the Disney oeuvre. Finally, the course will address the social history of rock 'n' roll, as noted above. In this section, however, we shall also explore the comparisons of meanings and values, whether in common or in conflict, of both Disney films and rock 'n' roll music. To complete this section, students will write a research paper in which they examine some aspect of the American rock revolution. This course is not open to students who have taken SOC 34151, as the content will overlap substantially.
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3.00 Credits
A study of the dynamic process of formation and development of the society of the United States and its cultural, religious, and racial pluralism; a review of the history and theory of interethnic relations, and their manifestation in the basic institutions of family, education, religion, economics, and government.
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3.00 Credits
Industrialization in the twentieth-century resulted in a megatechnic America problematically related to materialism and to earlier visions of the New World. The course will consider a variety of materializations of America.
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3.00 Credits
Political parties play many vital roles in American politics. They educate potential voters about political processes, policy issues, and civic duties. They mobilize citizens into political activity and involvement. They provide vital information about public debates. They control the choices--candidates and platforms that voters face at the ballot box. They influence and organize the activities of government officials. Most importantly, by providing a link between government and the governed, they are a central mechanism of representation. These roles--how well they are performed, what bias exists, how they shape outcomes, how they have changed over time--have consequences for the working of the American political system.
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3.00 Credits
This course focuses on our images of Native Americans and how popular and scientific writing and film may have shaped these images. The course uses books and film displaying Indian stereotypes and compares them to ethnographic studies, which reveal more realistically the diversity of Native American culture.
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3.00 Credits
This course focuses on images of Native Americans and how these images may have been shaped by popular and scientific writing, fine art, advertisement, and film. Using an anthropological perspective, the student reads fictitious and factual accounts of Native Americans and their cultures, both past and present, allowing them to build a more accurate image of Native Americans. The course uses books and film to broaden the understanding of Indian stereotypes, and the student will compare them to ethnographic studies that use a scientific approach to Native American beliefs, life styles, and material culture. Some of the literature will be from Native American authors and the art from contemporary Native American artists. Together the readings, artworks, and films will also reveal the great diversity of both people and ideas that all too often are lumped under one category which we label "Native American." Writing intensive course for the College of Arts and Letters.
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3.00 Credits
This course introduces students to the diversity of cultures living in the American Southwest from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. Most of the course is devoted to learning about the complex cultural developments in the Mimbres Valley, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, and the Phoenix Basin. Class work and discussions will focus on important issues such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of villages, the transformation of ideological beliefs and political organization, the importance of migration, and the impact of warfare using information on environmental relationships, technology, and other aspects of material culture. Students will also learn about descendant populations living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Santa Clara, Acoma) and Tohono O'odham.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the career and image of Frank Sinatra. As an entertainer who worked in numerous media - radio, the music industry, television, cinema, and live performance - Sinatra provides a lens through which to examine American 20th century media. Moreover, as an iconic figure, Sinatra enables an explanation of masculinity, American identity, ethnic identity, race, liberalism, and more. Sinatra will be paired with various other performers, especially Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, and Gene Kelly, to consider his star image comparatively. Sinatra will be situated within discourses on Italian immigration, urbanism, the Depression, prohibition and war. Students will listen to Sinatra music and radio programs, watch Sinatra films and TV shows, and read a wide range of materials - including contemporary accounts of Sinatra performances, analyses of his career and meaning, essays and articles about the star system, recording technology, film genre, acting styles, the mob, and more. Throughout, we will consider what model of American masculinity Sinatra embodies, ranging from early concerns that his female fans and lack of military service rendered him effeminate to his image as family man, and later incarnation as playboy. We will consider what Sinatra means today through an analyses of his entertainment heirs, like George Clooney; parodies, like Joe Piscopo's; the use of his music in film soundtracks and advertising; and in performances like the Twyla Thorpe "Come Fly With Me." This is an undergraduate course. Graduate students who take it will have additional readings and meetings, and they will have different written assignments. All students should be able to attend the lab, which will consist of film screenings.
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3.00 Credits
This course is an MA level course in Theology; undergraduates require department permission. The first half of the course is dedicated to a history of Christian music in the U.S.A., outlining the major worship traditions and the great variety of vocal, choral, and instrumental repertories that functioned within them. Study will be of primary resources, from facsimiles of the Bay Psalm book and wall paintings on missionary churches in California to field recordings of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, and Gospel, quartet, sung sermons and testimonies found in the extraordinary collection Good-Bye Babylon - to anthems, sacred songs, and organ works by American composers. The second part of the course introduces various contemporary Christian repertories and the ways in which they both extend and break with the streams of liturgical understanding studied in the first half of the course. There will be attention to the mega-churches, to contemporary monastic communities, and to the Copts and other immigrant communities newly arrived during the second half of the twentieth century. A documentary film in progress Where the Hudson Meets the Nile: Teaching Chant at St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church, will offer material for discussion. The ways in which sacred music in the context of worship serves as sung theology in Christian practices, and music's role in helping congregations to understand and form their own identities will be emphasized. Students will conduct intensive studies of local communities of song, both from within and from without their own traditions, and prepare either a treatment for a short documentary film about the community studied, or a musician's or minister/priest's case study of how to work as a leader within that particular community. Toward the end there will be a class project on shape-note singing, its history and its contemporary revival, with study of local communities of song in Northern Indiana. We end with reflection upon the ways in which traditional repertories are being reconsidered as many Christian groups rethink their practices taking either "preservation" or "updating" actions, or some combination of both. The textbook, Steven Marini's, Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (UI Press, 2003) provides historical background for several digital resources focusing on contemporary practice, including the documentary directed by Margot Fassler, Joyful Noise: Singing Psalms in Community and her (with JC Richard) You can't Sing it for Them: Music Ministry at Messiah Baptist Church, streamed audio databases such as Smithsonian Global Sound, and American Music, or the wonderful Folkstreams.net, which features many ethnographic studies of American sacred music and a variety of contemporary musicians.
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