American Studies (AMST)

This First-Year Seminar explores the history of law enforcement in the United States, with a particular focus on its relevance to contemporary movements for racial justice. Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary source materials—from historical accounts of police practices to critical arguments for police reform and abolition—we will trace three interlocking historical threads across time: 1) the evolution and modernization of police institutions; 2) the nationalization of law enforcement imperatives; and 3) the persistence of selective police enforcement, disproportionately targeted toward Black and immigrant communities. The goal is to provide students with a common language for understanding some of the most urgent political issues of our time: police surveillance and militarization, force and violence, immigration and border enforcement, and the movements for restorative justice and prison abolition. Readings will include works by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Elizabeth Hinton, Anna Lvovsky, John Pfaff, Radley Balko, Angela Davis, Derecka Purnell, and Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor—among many others.

This integrative, experiential course provides opportunities for special events, site visits, and hands-on research for students enrolled in the Race and Class in DC course cluster.

This first-year seminar examines the way race and class have shaped Washington D.C. over the last two centuries, drawing on scholarly analyses from several disciplines, artistic and media representations, and public debates.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the experience, social and economic structures, and meaning of work, with attention to how different kinds of sources, including artistic and literary works, social analyses, philosophical and spiritual approaches, and history reflect different aspects of work.

This integrative, experiential course provides opportunities for special events, site visits, and hands-on research for students in the second year of the Race and Class in DC course cluster.

The American Studies Program is a hub for bringing students of diverse perspectives together to engage with the often colliding narratives of our nation’s past. We work on understanding racial, religious, class-based, and gender-based distinctions and power-dynamics by studying and interrogating a multitude of cultural representations. We play with perspective, and use art, literature, laws, letters, scripture, environmental data, political speech, material culture, monuments, and media as avenues into our deeper understanding of how and why stories about American identities and origins are shaped, and the powerful roles they play in society historically and into present day. In AMST 203, we begin this conversation, while also developing common language and methodological approaches. There is a strong focus on writing, making analytical arguments, identifying your intellectual interests, and learning in and outside of the classroom. If you are interested in American Studies, you need instructor permission to register for AMST 203. To begin this process, please submit the American Studies Interest form which can be found at http://americanstudies.georgetown.edu/forms. Please contact us at AMST@georgetown.edu with any questions.

AMST 204: Memory, Power, & Culture allows American Studies majors to continue their intellectual journey together, working simultaneously towards developing common vocabulary and methods, while also recording their own interests. In this course, American Studies majors sink more deeply into questions associated with American culture and corresponding problems regarding memory, diversity, identity, borderlands, nature, power, and empire. Where Origins & Identities focused on the births or constructions of narratives, this course examines how historical moments and the constructed narratives around them become ‘usable pasts’ for producers of culture. The aim is to complicate, not answer, questions tied to agency and representation. While texts and case studies are organized around prominent nineteenth-century voices and episodes that highlight anxieties over the fate of the West, (hu)man in nature, nation/empire-building, and diversity and hybridity in border spaces, this is not a nineteenth-century course. The assignments are designed to allow students to move fluidly backwards and forwards in time to interrogate the nature of memory and the fluidity and durability of cultural formation and consumption.

Advertising & Social Change investigates the significance and impact that advertising has on American culture. We analyze how this institution is evolving in a new landscape featuring Social Media; moreover, what is meant by advertising being a “mirror and/or lamp”? Throughout the semester students explore five constructs: the communication process; the significance of representations and interpretations; the correlation between said representations and cultural attitudes; the effects of time and space; and the emergence of new communication technologies on mass media.

This interdisciplinary course examines how housing, education, and incarceration serve as key sites for the production of racial and economic inequality in American life. Drawing on ethnic studies, history, sociology, and geography, we will explore the deep roots of property, discipline, and punishment in US culture and how they manifest in the urban present. In the final portion of the course, we will consider how communities of color have struggled to secure access to dignified housing and good schools while challenging multiple forms of criminalization. With gratitude to Dr. Perla Guerrero, Associate Professor of American Studies and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland - College Park, who first developed and taught an iteration of this course.

This course examines the role of the horror genre in 20th century American film and culture. How is American horror cinema and literature representative and indicative of the cultural, political, and social landscape of America and what is horror’s utility in society? The course considers the complex relationships between history, culture, and consumers through key socio-political events of the 20th century, allowing us to see how America’s horrors are conceived, shaped, and what they attempt to address. The course will also explore the origins of the genre in America and its evolution, both narratively and visually, in an effort to understand how horror works for American viewers and how to critically engage with the genre. The course will engage with film and literature as well as theoretical readings. Films will include (among others), The Wolfman (1941), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and Scream (1996).

The blacklisting of left-wing filmmakers in Hollywood during the late 1940s and early 1950s was an politically and emotionally divisive event. As a result, accounts of this dark period in American cinema have been particularly prone to subjective narratives. This history of bias make the Hollywood Blacklist an ideal subject for film historiography: the history of film history. A number of recent books have applied revisionist approaches to the study of the Blacklist, which is revealed as not only a domestic but transnational phenomenon and one with broad implications for our understanding of Cold War cinema. These texts share a methodological framework that emphasizes archival research using a variety of primary sources: oral histories, memoirs, film criticism, and newspapers and periodicals.

Through readings in historiography and film history, along with tours of archival collections at Georgetown and other institutions in the Washington D.C. area, students in this seminar will evaluate different types of historical sources while gaining an understanding of important trends in postwar American cinema. Our investigation of blacklist narratives extends to questions of film style and genre through screenings ranging from Emile de Antonio’s Point of Order (1964) to documentaries about the blacklist to George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck (2005). The second part of this seminar will allow students to apply their theoretical and practical understanding of archival methods and historiography to other major topics such as early cinema, censorship, and the relationship between film, government, and the military. The course will culminate in individual research papers based on original primary research in which students reconsider some aspect of American film history.

Required Texts:

• Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (McGraw Hill, 1985) • Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. • Rebecca Prime, Hollywood Exiles in Europe: the Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture (Rutgers UP, 2014) • Jeff Smith, Film Criticism, The Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds (University of California Press, 2014)

Partial Filmography:

• Crossfire (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1947) • He Ran All the Way (dir. John Berry, 1950) • The Sound of Fury (dir. Cy Endfield, 1952) • Pickup on South Street (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1953) • On the Waterfront (dir. Elia Kazan, 1954) • Salt of the Earth (dir. Herbert Biberman, 1954) • Kiss Me Deadly (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1955) • The Intimate Stranger (dir. Joseph Losey, 1956) • Storm Center (dir. Daniel Taradash, 1956) • Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel, 1956) • Point of Order (Emile de Antonio, 1964) • The Front (dir. Martin Ritt, 1976) • Legacy of the Blacklist (dir. Judy Chaiken) • Fellow Traveller (dir. Philip Saville, 1990) • Good Night and Good Luck (dir. George Clooney, 2005) • Trumbo (dir. Jay Roach, 2015)

This is a junior core course for American Studies juniors, and seniors. Others may seek professor approval for access.

This course introduces the field of Public History by examining topics that range from historical methods and interpretation, historical analysis, public interactions, and controversies associated with the practice of public history. We will examine the role of museums, monuments, archives and film in how societies understand the past. We will also discuss the role of digital humanities in presenting ideas about the past to new publics. In addition, we will learn oral history methods, and examine the role of both individual and collective memory in providing distinct interpretations of historical events.

This course explores the place of crisis narratives in American culture. As a nation founded upon revolution, the United States has organized key political debates and historical narratives around the structure of crisis. Representations of crisis reflect our most common anxieties and our most powerful coping mechanisms. A crisis can be global in scope or highly personal, inevitable or easily avoided, ongoing or sudden. We will explore a variety of crisis narratives—from terrorist attacks to global pandemics to financial collapses—and ask what these portrayals of crisis and its aftermath tell us about our national identities, our political values, and our hopes for humanity’s future. Certain forms of destruction, such as forest fires, clear the way for new growth, so perhaps crisis can be a good thing. We will explore diverse crisis narratives in fiction, film, poetry, historical narrative, and other genres. Secondary readings in American studies and related fields will provide historical context and model key methods for interpreting crisis narratives. Student responses will include essays and a new media composition about the politics of crisis and the variety of strategies for representing it.

AMST-344 explores changes in cultural and intellectual life in America after the Civil War through the early 20th Century, with special attention to higher education as a reflection of those changes. We’ll reach for a feeling of the time period from a number of perspectives, but zeroing in on class and cultural stratification of the time, and the hardening boundaries between elite and popular, between high and low. With new outlets for leisure, consumption, and education, individuals and groups increasingly identified with particular slices of culture, including an increasingly prevalent “middlebrow” median. We will work through the lens of curriculum, what colleges (and then universities) were doing in the areas of teaching and learning, to understand the broader cultural history better. This course privileges and analysis of higher education as one way to read cultural history; students will work toward developing their own lens as well, exploring expressions of class and culture through many other means. Texts may include works by Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, WEB Dubois, HL Mencken, Matthew Arnold, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” are the words the Supreme Court of the United States has to guide to address questions of religion. Can the government give public tax money to religious schools? Can teachers and students be required by law to participate in a prayer meant to unite Americans? Are there any circumstances in which a law can prevent a religious person from practicing their religion? In considering the role of the Court in deciding these issues and many others, theoretical questions arise: If religion is to be protected, who is to decide what religion is - the Court, the majority of the American people, or some other means? What guidance did the ‘founders’ give on these questions and what role does or should their perspectives play in contemporary Religion Clause debates? If the religious landscape shifts or the Justices who sit on the Court shift or the nation’s problems shift, do and/or should the Court’s opinions shift as well? This course is designed to introduce students to these questions as well as the role that the Supreme Court has played in attempting to address them. While this course will focus primarily on historical First Amendment Establishment and Free Exercise Clause cases, this is not a constitutional law course. The aim of this American Studies course is to give students an appreciation for the actual and symbolic role of the Court in shaping how the nation approaches and manages conflicts and issues related to religion in American public life. The final research project is designed to give American Studies students practice in shaping and conducting an interdisciplinary research project with primary and secondary sources. This will help prepare students for the processes involved shaping an American Studies senior thesis project.

Legally, Italians have religious freedom. Article 3 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic states that “All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions.” Article 19 goes into religion more deeply – “Anyone is entitled to freely profess their religious belief in any form, individually or with others, and to promote them and celebrate rites in public or in private, provided they are not offensive to public morality.”1 However, culturally and politically, Catholicism is pervasive. In Florence, the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, the art and architecture are infused with Catholic imagery. The Virgin Mary, as protector of Florence, appears almost as frequently as leather stores and gelato shops. The Pope appears in the news consistently. For fiercely debated issues tied to “public morality” the influence of Catholic values and norms is apparent. What does all this mean? Is Italy a Catholic nation? Do Italians really have religious freedom? What is the relationship between Church & State, or religion and the government? What does this look like for atheists or Jews or Muslims or others living in Italy? Where can one see and experience religion in public life when they live in Florence? This course is designed to give students context, methods, and platforms for exploring these questions. The multi-phased semester project is aimed at getting students out onto the streets of Florence with their cameras, notebooks, and questions. For the first part of the assignment, they will be encouraged to go – go explore streets, shops, gardens, museums, schools, cemeteries, and celebrations for clues as to the role of religion in public life; take photographs, talk to people, and read the news to discover ways that religion manifests not only in physical landscapes, but also in ideological and political debates about immigration, abortion, marriage, healthcare, and war. For the second part of the assignment, in consultation with the professor, students will narrow to one very specific arena for deeper inquiry and field-work. Ultimately, in the third part, they will share their discoveries with their classmates in written and visual formats. The collection of student projects will create a lively classroom space for debating the role of religion in Florentine public life. The course readings throughout the semester will complement the field-work students embark upon, focusing on the historical evolution of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Italian government from Reorgimento to present day. In order to clarify what makes the Italian church-state situation unique, we will continually return to the United States and France as points of contrast.

This course traces the historical construction of the undocumented subject in the United States. Through case studies, and primary and secondary sources, we will explore the lives and experiences of people who have lived outside of the boundaries of citizenship. This will include an examination of the rise of the border patrol, the legal mechanisms for incarceration of immigrants and the creation of detention and deportation regimes. In addition, we will study the activism of undocumented communities and their claims to American cultural citizenship.

This seminar convenes students from Georgetown's Doha and DC campuses to explore a foundational concept in American Studies scholarship: empire. Using the relationship between the United States and the Middle East as a representative case study, we will examine the cultural and political mechanisms behind global American power in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Primary and secondary source readings will range widely, surveying topics such as colonialism and sovereignty, immigration and migration, liberation and resistance. Discussions will take place across campuses in Georgetown’s RPX virtual classroom and will culminate in week-long, mid-semester site visits to Washington, DC, and Doha, Qatar.

This course will explore the reciprocal relationship between American culture and photography over the past 175 years. We will examine the shifting cultural contexts that have influenced how and why photographs have been made and used in the U.S., but will also consider photographs themselves as artifacts of social structures and practices that may now seem alien to us. The course will begin with a history not just of photography, but of the desire to photograph before the process even existed, the desire to capture fleeting images. There will be an optional field trip to the National Gallery of Art to look at selections from their collection representing different photographic media as used by American artists, both historic and contemporary. Subsequent sections of the course will cover these broad areas: ? The “Selfie,” the “Other,” and the self as “The Other.” ? Photography as “Art” and photography as document. ? Photography of those on the economic and social margins, both urban and rural. ? Depictions of the American landscape as a virgin frontier, as the logical outgrowth of the Public Land Survey System grid, as anonymous industrial parks, as ecological disaster ? Photography on the street I hope to show two films, one on Vivian Maier the other about the families depicted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans. There will be regular blog-writing assignments, two short papers, and one final project that will be a combination of writing and original photography. Purchased texts: Agee and Evans, Cotton Tenants Corner and MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape Dyer, The Ongoing Moment Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs Additional textual and visual resources will be available on Blackboard or provided in class.

The United States is addicted to imprisoning its citizens. According to the most recent data supplied by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2.2 million individuals are currently incarcerated in this country—and another 4.5 million live under a form of community supervision, such as probation or parole. The total number of Americans filtering through the criminal justice system is almost twice the size of the population of Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city. Mass incarceration remains one of the most urgent social problems of our time. As such, the failings of the U.S. criminal justice system continue to provide fertile ground for both political discussion and narrative imagination. From gangster films and detective novels to police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and true-crime podcasts, Americans like to tell themselves stories about crime and punishment. In doing so, we don’t simply come to terms with the forces that have made us the “jailingest country on earth.” We help to determine who is and isn’t worthy of democratic citizenship, and we engage in long-standing social debates about law and lawlessness, innocence and guilt, criminality and victimhood, retribution and rehabilitation, protection and control, race, class, and citizenship. This seminar takes the history, politics, and representation of criminal justice in the United States as its point of departure, exploring the myths and realities of American crime and American punishment across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside relevant readings from the cultural canon of criminal justice, we will engage with recent scholarly studies on the makings of our carceral society.

This course will examine the relationship between women and their homes in American novels, films, television shows, and new media. While the idea of showing a woman in her home is deeply traditional—as in, “a woman’s place is in the home”—there are ways to do it that queer the relationship between women and domesticity. As we put such films as Grey Gardens, novels like Beloved, and shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians in a transnational context, we will consider the following questions: How does the relationship between women and domesticity iterate and change across space and time? How do different kinds of genres (e.g., the domestic novel, the horror film) grapple with this longstanding relationship? Why are texts that take place in the home often referred to as “guilty pleasures?” What are the political implications of off-kilter depictions of women in their homes? Upon completion of the course, students will be able to perform close reading in order to consider how visual and literary texts engage with the broader sociopolitical contexts from which they emerge, understand the history of the relationship between women and the home, and also think critically about the stakes of this ever-evolving connection in today’s culture.

This course examines American literature and culture in the twentieth century through three themes that persist across the century: migration and immigration, the complexity of individual and shared identities, and the interconnections among social, political, and artistic change. We’ll focus our exploration around a central theoretical and methodological question: what does it mean to read literature and social history in dialogue, as a contested two-way conversation? We’ll devote the first third of the course to case studies of three decades -- the 1900s, the 1950s, and the 1990s, which will help us identify the core themes as well as key strategies for studying literature in dialogue with social history. The cases will also offer insight into research and teaching about American literature. Students will then study other periods and literary circles, conducting in-depth research on specific texts and preparing to teach the rest of the class about these eras. In the last few weeks of the semester, students will select readings, provide relevant contextual and critical perspectives, and lead discussion. Assignments will likely include regular blog posts, developing a contextual resource paper, and an individual study of how a single text reflects and helped to shape its historical era.

This course will explore the history of Japanese American incarceration through images produced before, during, and after World War II. Film, photography, and other forms of visual representation were integral to the U.S. federal government's attempts at justifying the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese American residents on the West Coast between 1942 and 1946. At the same time, visual media served as a tool for Japanese Americans themselves to narrate their own experiences, both during and in the wake of internment. Through these visual representations, we will explore how incarceration was conceived and carried out; how the process was understood by both its victims and its perpetrators; and how incarcerated Japanese Americans coped with their experiences in the camps and beyond.

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the contested history, politics, and culture of privacy and surveillance in the United States across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside relevant legal and theoretical writings, we’ll consider literary fiction by George Orwell and David Eggers; films by Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Jonze, and Laura Poitras; and multimedia art by Trevor Paglen—among many others.

Arabs are an under-studied, and often poorly understood, ethnic group in the United States. This course introduces students to the history of Arab immigration to, and racial formation in, the United States from the late-19th century to the present. By racial formation I mean the social, historical and legal processes by which communities are “made into races.” For example, Arabs who came to the United States and other parts of the Americas in the early 20th century were from Asia but were classified as ‘white’ by the US Federal Government. Why and how was this the case? We will explore common themes in Arab immigrant experiences, and discuss salient differences along the lines of class, national origin, religion, gender, sexuality and other factors. The goals of this course are to have students gain an understanding of the political and economic processes that have propelled Arab migration to the United States, to compare patterns of settlement and community building within the Americas, to trace Arab-American ethnicity across generational lines, and discuss challenges faced by Arab immigrants and their children in relation to the state and dominant American culture. Throughout the semester, we will assess how concepts such as race, transnationalism, and diaspora relate to the study of Arab communities in the United States. While primarily historical in approach, other disciplinary approaches, including sociological, cultural and anthropological will supplement our study.

In this course, we will think critically about the role that sports play in reinforcing and sometimes challenging social and cultural norms, we'll examine the intricate relationship between sport and the media and explore the nexus of sports and issues relating to race, gender, sexuality, globalization, and national identity. We'll seek to answer key questions such as: Are sports “more than a game”? Does sport help shape our view of American Culture? What does it mean to be a sports hero? How has new media and technological developments changed how we watch and consume sport, and the world beyond it? This course will draw on scholarly work in order to examine the important cultural, social and political role that sports play in contemporary society. Students will study and learn to apply several analytical approaches of communication and culture to sports in order to critically assess the role that sports play in both popular culture and the media.

Advertising & Social Change investigates the significance and impact that advertising has on American culture.  We analyze how this institution is evolving in a new landscape featuring Social Media; moreover, what is meant by advertising being a “mirror and/or lamp”?   Throughout the semester students explore five constructs: the communication process; the significance of representations and interpretations; the correlation between said representations and cultural attitudes; the effects of time and space; and the emergence of new communication technologies on mass media.

American Indians in the American Imagination Why are Americans so enamored by stereotypical images of Native Americans and their culture— be it dreamcatchers, feathered mascots, or Indigenous Disney princesses? Why is there an Native-inspired figure atop the nation’s Capitol building or 56 busts of an unnamed chief carved into Dumbarton Bridge? This course critically examines how Native Americans have become so curiously central and simultaneously, misrepresented within the American cultural imagination. Engaging in a wide-variety of source materials from film and literature to public monuments and memorials, students will trace the shifting representation, romanticization, and appropriation of Native people in the United States from the early republic to the twentieth century. Our objective is not only to examine and dispel pervasive stereotypes regarding Native peoples, but to understand the foundational role of these images in the formation of an American national identity. Furthermore, we will consider how such portrayals have reinforced the racism, violence, and land dispossession which Native communities still experience today. Most importantly, however, this course uplifts the multitude of ways that Indigenous people have critiqued, subverted, and resisted such depictions—uplifting the diversity, beauty, and self-determination of Indian Country.

This course is about business, innovation, art, culture, and the stories that shape how the past is remembered. Said more succinctly, this course is about power. It is also about three Italians – the men and the myths that have grown up around them. It is no coincidence that three of the men who are widely credited as the first Europeans to encounter America were all born near the Ligurian Sea. Cristoforo Columbo (Christopher Columbus) and his contemporary, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), are believed to be from Genoa, just 245 km or a three-hour drive from Florence. Christopher Columbus claimed the southern part of the Americas for Spain; Cabot claimed the northern regions for England. Amerigo Vespucci, for whom “America” is named, was born in Florence. These Italian entrepreneurs were part of a much bigger system of power that animated the Age of Exploration. By beginning our work with Christopher Columbus and Europe in the 15th century, then broadening our purview, we will begin to see how the money that fueled art, maritime commerce, technological development, sovereignty, and science was intricately intertwined with the business of “discovery.” The destabilization of class structures and new innovations in banking, currency, accounting, insurance, shipbuilding, navigation, and weaponry, opened doors to the sea and allowed money and media to flow in new directions. Contextualizing Columbus and his contemporaries within these historical power-dynamics provides a platform for re-imagining these men and re-imagining the region around the Ligurian Sea in centuries past. It is also a platform for re-examining the stories told in culture today about Columbus and the Age of Exploration, allowing students to go beyond the contemporary Columbus versus Indigenous People binary that dominates discourse in the United States. By standing in Italy, physically and intellectually, students will have the opportunity to wrestle with new questions about Columbus, Italian entrepreneurship, and the connections between art and money, innovation, technology, and the sea. They may find themselves surprised at what they learn by asking, who is Columbus to Italians? How is Cabot remembered? Is Vespucci a big deal? Do their names don street signs and names of cities and college campuses and record companies in Italy like they do in the United States? Do children do skits in grade school to commemorate their accomplishments? Are Italians actively debating their place in cultural memory and holidays right now? What roles do money and power play in determining what gets remembered in public art and culture? Field trips and experiential learning will complement course readings. Locally, there are numerous potential spots to visit as a class, or for students to visit on their own, depending on timing. For example, we may visit the Palazzo Coppini which has an eclectic collection of items from around the world. This will be an opportunity to talk about Cabinets of Curiosity, the first museums, and how and why the items brought back from the Americas created interest, changed long-held views about God and nature, and advanced science. We may visit the Medici Palace as a forum for discussing banking in Florence and the role of this powerful family in the Age of Exploration. We may go to the Amerigo Vespucci statue outside the Uffizi to discuss how he is remembered and who funded 6 this public art. If time and resources are available, we may take a trip to Genoa to contemplate ways that Columbus and Cabot are remembered, opening up an opportunity to discuss the power that their names and their stories play in the United States relative to what we experience in Genoa. While we will walk back in time to earlier centuries, this is not a history class. It is an opportunity to zoom out and reframe narratives of Italian explorers. This will allow students to appreciate that business and culture are not separate enterprises; the dynamic duo of money and art wielded power centuries ago just as it does today.

Facing Georgetown’s History carries on the American Studies Program's longstanding commitment to exploring and commemorating Georgetown’s history of slavery. Students in this course will examine Georgetown’s roots in the Maryland Jesuits' slave economy and its legacies; contribute to the Georgetown Slavery Archive by identifying and interpreting archival materials; and develop memory and reconciliation projects related to Georgetown’s ongoing efforts to reflect on our own school’s history.

Independent research course.

Georgetown’s Senior Thesis Seminar in American Studies is designed to guide 4th-year students through conceptualizing, researching, and finalizing an original and research-based thesis project of which they can be proud. The course is designed to complement the work that students do on a regular basis with their faculty advisers. The Fall semester will provide weekly structure to guide and support the processes involved in shaping a thesis project, conducting research, analyzing research, and crafting an overarching argument. Regardless of whether a student plans to do a traditional written thesis, a documentary, or some other type of project, each will be charged with completing the bulk of his or her research by the end of the Fall semester. This will be important in the Spring semester when students complete the analysis and synthesis of their work. Throughout the semester, students will develop a keener sense of the scope and variety of scholarly projects currently defining American Studies through contact with faculty and advisers and through their exploration of scholarly work on subjects that interest them in the field. There are few limits on the form the thesis can take or the methodologies students can pursue. The expectation is that students enthusiastically pursue research and draw upon multiple sources in order to tell a story about American culture and the American experience. In-class tutorials, workshops, and group discussions will enable students to learn with and from one another as they pursue their individual interests. A student’s specific project, as well as their classmates’ projects, will be sources of edification.

Georgetown’s Senior Thesis Seminar in American Studies is designed to guide 4th-year students through conceptualizing, researching, and finalizing an original and research-based thesis project of which they can be proud. The course is designed to complement the work that students do on a regular basis with their faculty advisers. The Fall semester will provide weekly structure to guide and support the processes involved in shaping a thesis project, conducting research, analyzing research, and crafting an overarching argument. The Spring semester provides weekly structure around the processes involved in moving from research to writing, developing a draft, and revising the draft into a final thesis. Students working on non-traditional thesis will have an opportunity to work through various aspects of their projects as well. Starting in March, students present and defend their thesis projects to peers, faculty, and friends. Throughout the year, students will develop a keener sense of the scope and variety of scholarly projects currently defining American Studies through contact with faculty and advisers and through their exploration of scholarly work on subjects that interest them in the field. There are few limits on the form the thesis can take or the methodologies students can pursue. The expectation is that students enthusiastically pursue research and draw upon multiple sources in order to tell a story about American culture and the American experience. In-class tutorials, workshops, and group discussions will enable students to learn with and from one another as they pursue their individual interests. A student’s specific project, as well as their classmates’ projects, will be sources of edification. Pre-requisite: AMST Seniors Only