|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
Throughout American history, those who took a hand to alter nature - or raised one to preserve it -have rarely been concerned exclusively with the continent's ecosystems. Rather, they saw themselves as advancing lofty ideals, such as progress or freedom. After a general introduction to American environmental history, this course examines how nineteenth and twentieth-century American explorers, activists and writers have understood our alterations to landscape and river, and what the stakes are for modern environmentalists who seek to preserve what wilderness remains.
-
3.00 Credits
The first half of this course use narrative non-fiction - investigative journalism - as a stepping stone into public policy policy issues. We supplement these texts in the second half of the course with an introduction to basic phases of the policymaking process, such as implementation and evaluation.
-
3.00 Credits
This course surveys American attitudes, beliefs, and practices regarding race and ethnicity primarily in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including a consideration of the development and changing meaning of the concept of "racism." We will trace the shifting constructions of race and ethnicity over time and the constantly evolving understandings of how these boundaries are demarcated and crossed. A central theme will be to consider how various European groups transformed themselves from racial-ethnic outsiders to being "white," a process that simultaneously expanded the bounds of inclusion for some and solidified the terms of exclusion for others. We will also explore how non-white minorities challenged the existing racial order, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, we will ask questions of how salient the concepts of race and ethnicity continue to be in American culture, what problems still remain, and what prospects exist for the future.
-
3.00 Credits
This course traces the struggle for equal rights undertaken by various marginalized groups in the twentieth-century United States, focusing particularly on the experience of African Americans. We will examine in detail the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, considering its contesting visions for African American liberation and the meaning of American freedom and democracy. This will be put in context of the "long" struggle, going back to early efforts to fight Jim Crow and moving forward to current debates over issues such as affirmative action and reparations. A significant portion of the course will also focus on other groups' struggles to achieve a full measure of constitutional rights and cultural acceptance, including women, Native Americans, Latinos, and gays and lesbians. The ideological and organizational relationships between these various movements will be examined.
-
3.00 Credits
Since the earliest movements for women's rights in the US, American feminisms have been defined in relation to empire. And since the earliest days of westward expansion, American imperial projects have interacted with multiple feminisms around the world. This course investigates the connections between feminism and US empire, asking (1) how US empire has been central to a wide range of feminist political and intellectual work -- both within and outside the US -- since the mid nineteenth century, and (2) how discourses of feminism and female empowerment have been mobilized in the service of American imperialism. Our study will take two overlapping paths. First, students will read primary and secondary materials that document and analyze American feminist movements in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that have (a) utilized the tools of US empire and/or (b) sought to "civilize" or "save" non-white and non-American women, as part of their strategies for claiming political and citizenship rights. Examples will include nineteenth-century suffrage movements and missionary projects; twentieth century struggles over birth control and abortion rights; and contemporary feminist debates about such issues as hijab, genital cutting, reproductive justice, and war. At the same time, students will read a wide variety of feminist work, produced both within and outside the US, that critiques or resists both US imperialism and imperial feminisms. This study will include historical and contemporary anti-racist, anti-imperial, and transnational feminisms based in the US (such as Black, Chicana, Asian American, and Native American feminist scholarship and activism), as well as feminist work taking place in regions directly impacted by US empire, such as Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Middle East. Evaluation will be based on a reading journal, 4 in-class quizzes, and a final research paper.
-
3.00 Credits
Why do Walmart's current advertising campaigns idealize the "stay-at-home mom?" Conversely, why does Congress require that mothers on welfare be sent out to work? This course will introduce students to a broad view of American social history that highlights the gendered aspects of work and asks students to examine the meaning of work in American history from the colonial period to the 21st century. This broad historical perspective is especially crucial to the examination of the construction of current beliefs about work in the United States, since changing gender ideologies dictated the work experiences of large race- and class-defined segments of the population. On one level, this approach allows for the recovery of women and girls' contributions to the formal and informal economies, including their work activities within the household. Male work practices will be similarly illuminated through a gender studies approach. Hence, an overarching purpose of the course will be to explore the fluidity and instability of those conceptions of work that were applied alternately to masculine as opposed to feminine occupations, just as they were alternately applied to white versus non-white, free versus enslaved, and public versus domestic activities.
-
3.00 Credits
This lecture intends to offer a close analysis of pieces of American literature about the visual arts. The focus will be twofold. On the one hand, we will look at American literary pieces that deal with painting (and sculpture) in more general terms, e.g. E.A. Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait", Willa Cather's short story "The Profile," or Edith Wharton's story "The Muse's Tragedy." The second part will focus on poems and fictional pieces that refer to a specific painting and/or painter, e.g. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem about the (Austrian) Gustav Klimt's painting "The Kiss," Gail Godwin's short story "The Legacy of the Motes" about Hieronymus Bosch's painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights," and Jorie Graham's poem "San Sepolcro," which deals with Piero della Francesca's painting of the "Pregnant Madonna." Special emphasis will be given to the male versus the female perspective. Jorie Graham, for example, offers a different approach to viewing and understanding art that is typically female with a different epistemological implication, and Wharton raises the question of woman as the male artist's muse versus woman as the creative artist herself. Students attending the course will be provided with a folder of the texts and copies of the paintings that are referred to.
-
3.00 Credits
This course will explore the work of such seminal American media critics as A.J. Liebling and Walter Lippmann, as well as the plethora of contemporary critics in newspapers, magazines, television, and web publications. It will examine the philosophical principles against which journalism in the American democracy ought to be measured. It also will explore the phenomenon of the ombudsman, or reader representative, in modern American media, with a particular focus on whether ombudsmen have been able to build or buttress the credibility of news organizations. And it will challenge students to write on a regular basis their own media criticism.
-
3.00 Credits
This is an advanced course in journalistic reporting and writing devoted to learning how to prepare, in a professional manner, in-depth articles on issues and events of community interest for Notre Dame and this area. Emphasis will be on the techniques, ethics, and responsibilities of conducting interviews and research, and crafting pieces for newspapers and other publications.
-
3.00 Credits
The 21st century journalist needs to be comfortable with what is called "writing across the media" and can no longer be selective about which form of communication to build a career around. In many newsrooms, print journalists are now expected to perform on radio or in front of TV cameras, while the bylines of electronic journalists are turning up in newspapers and magazines. Such media "convergence" is already more the norm than the exception. On top of that, the Internet has become a major medium in its own right, encompassing different styles of communication. While the focus of this course will be on writing, it will expose students to a variety of media in an effort to prepare them for the reality of modern communications careers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Privacy Statement
|
Cookies Policy |
Terms of Use
|
Institutional Membership Information
|
About AcademyOne
Copyright 2006 - 2025 AcademyOne, Inc.
|
|
|