American Studies — Advanced Topics

This curriculum branches out from the undergraduate core into specialized subfields, critical frameworks, and methodologies that define contemporary scholarship in American Studies. Self-directed learners are encouraged to choose one or two specialization tracks aligned with their intellectual or research interests rather than attempting to complete all tracks.

Race, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism

This track deconstructs the narrative of American nation-building by centering Indigenous sovereignty, African American liberation, and the racialization of border communities through critical ethnic studies frameworks.

African American Freedom Struggles: African American History: From Emancipation to the Present — AFAM 162 (Yale Open Courses / Jonathan Holloway) - A comprehensive 25-lecture video course examining post-emancipation Black freedom struggles, Jim Crow racialization, and grassroots community resistance.

Settler Colonial Theory: "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native" by Patrick Wolfe (Journal of Genocide Research) - The foundational theoretical essay arguing that settler colonialism is an ongoing structural project driven by the logic of elimination rather than a finished historical event; search for the PDF online.

Indigenous Historiography: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz / Beacon Press) - An essential historical survey that reframes centuries of U.S. history around Indigenous survival, land expropriation, and systemic anti-colonial resistance.

Borderlands and Mestiza Cultural Theory: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Gloria Anzaldúa / Aunt Lute Books) - The canonical text of Chicana/o and border studies, integrating autobiographical theory and cultural critique to conceptualize geographic, psychological, and linguistic borderlands.

Asian American Racialization and Exclusion: The Making of Asian America: A History (Erika Lee / Simon & Schuster) - A definitive narrative synthesis demonstrating how Asian immigration, legal exclusion, and racialized labor shaped the legal and social boundaries of American citizenship.

Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Frameworks

This track investigates how gender, sexuality, and reproduction structure American political economy, legal institutions, and social movements.

U.S. Women's and Labor History: Women Have Always Worked: The U.S. Experience (ColumbiaX / edX / Alice Kessler-Harris) - A structured four-course video sequence exploring women's domestic, agricultural, industrial, and civic labor across four centuries of American history.

Intersectionality Frameworks: "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color" by Kimberlé Crenshaw (Stanford Law Review) - The landmark legal-theoretical essay demonstrating how race, gender, and class systems intersect to produce compound vulnerability within institutional structures; search for the PDF online.

Queer Political Economy: "Capitalism and Gay Identity" by John D'Emilio (Monthly Review Press) - A foundational historical essay analyzing how the expansion of capitalist wage labor enabled the emergence of autonomous queer identities and urban communities; search for the text on university syllabus repositories.

Transgender History: Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (Susan Stryker / Seal Press) - The authoritative chronological account of American transgender organizing, medicalization, and cultural politics from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Empire, Transnationalism, and Hemispheric Studies

This track decenters the continental United States, analyzing American imperialism, extraterritorial governance, immigration law, and transnational cultural circulations.

Extraterritorial Empire and Territory: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Daniel Immerwahr / Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - A transformative historical study revealing how the U.S. acquired, administered, and politically obscured its overseas territories, island colonies, and military points.

The Imperial Turn in American Studies: Cultures of United States Imperialism (Amy Kaplan & Donald E. Pease, eds. / Duke University Press) - The field-defining anthology that dismantled the assumption of American anti-imperial exceptionalism by analyzing the domestic cultural consequences of foreign intervention.

Legal Borders and Undocumented Migration: Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Mae M. Ngai / Princeton University Press) - A landmark legal and cultural history examining how twentieth-century national-origin quotas and immigration enforcement produced the racialized category of the undocumented migrant.

Cold War Geopolitics and Civil Rights: Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Mary L. Dudziak / Princeton University Press) - Demonstrates how federal civil rights policies and desegregation efforts were fundamentally driven by America's geopolitical imperatives during the global Cold War.

Visual Culture, Materiality, and Digital Humanities

This track provides practical methodologies for interpreting non-textual evidence, including visual media, material artifacts, and computational data in American Studies research.

Visual Culture Analysis: "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (BBC / YouTube) - A seminal four-part documentary series introducing foundational methods for interrogating the ideological power, gendered gaze, and commercial manipulation embedded in visual images; search for the BBC broadcast on YouTube.

American Cinema and Mythmaking: American Cinema: A Video Instructional Series (Annenberg Learner) - A comprehensive 10-part video course exploring how classic Hollywood film genres constructed and sustained central American cultural myths and anxieties.

Material Culture and Object Analysis: The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich / Vintage) - A Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize-winning masterclass demonstrating how to read everyday physical artifacts to reconstruct early American labor, domestic production, and cultural memory.

Digital Humanities Methodologies: The Programming Historian (Open Access) - A peer-reviewed, open-access instructional publication offering hands-on, step-by-step tutorials in computational text analysis, geospatial mapping, and web scraping for historical research.