Instructor: Patrick Sylvain
Meeting time: Monday, 9:45-11:45 am
This course explores piratical literature across multiple genres, including essays, poems, short stories, and novels. As we move through centuries we consider multiple definitions of piracy—privateering, filibustering, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—and ask ourselves how these actions have been understood. We also look closely at ships and maritime life as alternative realms where social norms can be reformulated, and categories of gender, sexuality, race, class, and privilege can become fluid. Given the immense popularity of pirate narratives, we consider whether ships serve as laboratories for social change or if they—and the stories about them—function as pressure valves that bolster hierarchies on land. ... Read more about HIST-LIT 90FV: Piracy, Empire, and Race
American Studies is an interdisciplinary effort to understand the complicated social and cultural lives of people in—and in relation to—the United States, both past and present. The intersections of History and Literature shape much of American Studies, but the field has also been marked by forays into music, arts, ethnic studies, economics, anthropology, journalism, and even forestry and climate science. This course will introduce students to the history and methods of the field, exploring evocative cases with a range of guest faculty.
This course will examine nuclear narratives in global contexts as reminders and remainders of empire. Are nuclear futures only tied to whims of unpredictable world leaders, or are they already part of our daily realities? Whose stories of nuclear proliferation are told, and whose are suppressed? Drawing on government propaganda, activist writing, television, fiction, photography, poetry, and film from 1945 to the present, this course will explore the cultural and material legacies of radiation around the world. From American “atomic culture” of the 1940s and ‘50s to Cold War era peace movements in the Pacific Islands to nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, we will assess whether nuclear cultures have changed over time by using a place-based investigation of nuclear... 
This course will explore speeches across the sweep of American history, examining them both as windows into their own era and as texts created to inform and persuade. We will ask who speaks and how and the ways that has evolved over time, and we will seek to identify the enduring and changing elements of effective oratory from Jonathan Edwards to Frederick Douglass to contemporary commencement addresses and political speeches. Assignments include the composition and delivery of a speech. 
“Latin America” refers to a geographical region, a culture, a form of racialization, a mode of being, and even a concept. How have these different characterizations imagined Latin America and its diaspora, and what kinds of myths and discourses emerged as a result? How have these imaginaries constructed Latin America as a homogeneous, cohesive whole, and to what effect? What do these representations erase, especially considering the heterogeneous cultural and linguistic traditions in the region? Throughout the semester, we will analyze a broad range of media, popular culture artifacts, and historical sources from the 20th and 21st centuries that include films, comics, photographs, music, and speeches to... 
We often associate specific tastes and foods with particular places, memories, and experiences. What would it mean, then, to center taste in our study of place and culture? How can places be tasted, and tastes be placed? In this class, we explore the relationship between taste and place within American culture, discussing how elements of nation, region, and identity are created, absorbed, and imagined through foods and their represented forms. The word “taste” has multiple meanings: taste is used as a synonym for flavor, a verb for the process of eating, and as a marker of socioeconomic class. Together, we examine these various modes of taste in American culture to consider the role of food... 
In the summer of 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama infamously declared the “end of history,” marking the “unabashed victory” of liberal market capitalism and defeat of communism. A few months later, East Germans poured through the Berlin Wall. The Cold War was over. But what came after? This course examines the history of Europe since 1989 and questions how the aftermath of the Cold War in Germany, France, and the former Eastern Bloc has shaped politics and culture in contemporary Europe and beyond. Course topics include: post-socialism and Ostalgie, Holocaust memory, neoliberalism, Islam, the 2010s migrant crisis, and right-wing populist and authoritarian movements... 
As a central player in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and widely known as the last of the European powers to let go of its grip on its African territories in 1975, Portugal earned a reputation as one of the most violent imperial powers in modern world history. Over 500 years, tactics of violence and coercion were key tools for building its empire across Asia, the Americas, and Africa, particularly for the purpose of enslavement and recruitment of forced indigenous labor, and to establish colonial "order." In this class we examine Portugal’s violent colonial past while also examining a lesser known history of nonviolent resistance to Portugal’s imperial ambitions. We will read a mix of scholarly and primary... 
As Covid 19 continues to dominate our historical moment, the pandemic has provoked culture wars over personal behavior, political fights over policy and funding, and sharp inequalities of care along national, economic, and racial divides. For the past few years, we have all felt hopeful optimism and then disappointed realism about the latest medical breakthrough, initial concern followed by compassion fatigue, and a widespread sense of helplessness in the face of an unrelenting virus. These dynamics at the intersection of culture, society, medicine, and public health also defined a different global pandemic caused by a different novel virus: HIV. This course considers the global history... 
With the popularity of shows like Inventing Anna and The Dropout, 2022 might be called the year of the scammer. Yet contemporary con artists come from a long lineage of carnival barkers, snake oil salesmen, and self-proclaimed miracle workers. This class examines the conditions of American capitalism and political populism that gave way to a society of schemers and dupes. We will consider how exploitation and self-invention were ultimately bound up in issues of class, race, gender, and religion. How did swindlers create or subvert stereotypes in search of profits? Who were imagined as the most gullible targets for grifters? These narratives of deceit did not simply function as cautionary tales,... 
How has the ocean made the modern world? This course asks how stories of the Atlantic intersect with larger threads of world history such as empire, enslavement, and Indigenous dispossession. Mindful that the very word oceanography combines the Greek words for ocean and writing, we’ll investigate how biophysical conditions mediate cultural, historical, and even economic experience. How did Atlantic currents, prevailing winds, and fisheries facilitate the development of racial capitalism? And how do we write and narrate these stories? As we explore the Atlantic Ocean’s role in the making of the modern world, we’ll navigate an archive that spans from the Viking era to the present,... 
This course examines the Pacific, not as an object of exploration, but as an agent of oceanic relations. We will begin with the ancestral connections between Pacific Islands, travel through the 18th and 19th centuries as we interrogate the entanglements of European imperialism and native Pacific sovereignty, through to the role of the Pacific in World War II and the Cold War, before landing in the 21st century and the modern Indigenous Oceanic connections of environmental movements. Inspired by Banaban-scholar/activist/poet Teresia Teaiwa’s notion of the “polygenesis” of the Pacific, course texts will be drawn from oral histories, navigational charts, paintings, photographs, poetry, fiction,... 
In the twenty-first century, commentators and historians have argued that with the decline of American power, we are entering the “Asian century”. What does it mean for the future to “look Asian”? Techno-orientalist tropes tend to accompany these speculations, while the historical and geopolitical forces that animate them are ignored. How do imagined futures and alternate worlds depend on the histories they come from? In this course, we examine cultural productions by East and Southeast Asians and their diasporas that imagine speculative, science fictional, magical realist, weird realist, or otherwise non-realist worlds. Paying particular attention to the legacies of militarism and empire,...