AMS 2300 American Popular Culture -- Examines American culture through some of its most popular cultural forms--fiction, drama, film, advertising, magazines, television, music, and sports. Considers the economics of cultural production, ways of critically reading popular texts, and how consumers make use of popular culture. Pays particular attention to the ways gender, race, and class influence how popular texts are created and consumed.  Satisfies the core curriculum Humanities requirement.

GST 2300 Introduction to Gender Studies -- An introduction to the ways gender shapes individuals, social institutions and culture. Examines gender, class, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and nationality as interactive systems. Topics include biological arguments about gender and sexuality; the social construction of gender; the psychology of sex roles; the ways gender shapes families, workplaces and other social institutions; cultural representations of gender. Satisfies the core curriculum Social and Behavioral Science requirement.

GST 3300 Gender: Theories and Methods -- An introduction to gender as a category for social and cultural analysis. Surveys the ways new scholarship on gender has transformed academic disciplines, particularly the social sciences. Examines gender, sexuality, class, and race as interactive systems that shape our experiences, our culture, and the social institutions we inhabit. Considers theories about the creation of (objective) knowledge and introduces different research methods scholars and activists have used to study problems related to gender—surveys, interviewing and ethnography, oral history, close textual analysis.

GST 4311 Gender & Education -- An examination of the impact of gender, race, and class on the educational experiences of men and women. Considers the ways educational institutions both empower individuals and reproduce social inequalities based on class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Topics include Enlightenment discussions of gender and reason, the history of education in America, school ethnography, co-ed vs. single sex education, curriculum transformation, feminist and critical pedagogies.

GST 4380 / SOC 4380 Women, Work & Family -- An examination of the relationship between women’s work for pay in the marketplace and their unpaid work in homes across time and in different cultures. Topics include the historical separation of work from home under capitalism; division of household labor; policy initiatives designed to make juggling work and family easier (socialized/commercial housework and daycare, family leave, telecommuting, part-time and flex-time work); the ways class, race, and ethnicity constrain and enable women’s choices.

HUSL 6372 American Popular Literature (a.k.a. Trash-y Books) -- An historical survey of American popular literature from the colonial period to the present and an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of reading, literacy, and the history of the book. Considers Puritan Indian captivity narratives, novels of the early Republic, nineteenth-century women’s sentimental fiction, dime novels and pulp magazines, turn-of-the-century Westerns, and contemporary romances along side studies of the institutions that shaped their production and the readers for whom they were important.

HUSL 6372 American Ethnic Literature -- An introduction to twentieth-century American ethnic literature and a critical examination of how literary canons and sub-canons are constructed. Examines how "American" literary traditions are created and maintained and what is at stake in the creation of alternative literary traditions—African-American, Asian American, Native American, Hispanic, and white ethnic. Considers how the class, gender, and sexuality of authors inflect the reading and writing of these texts. Examines the relationship of ethnic writing to European literary traditions, mainstream/white patronage, proletarian writing, educational institutions, film, television, and mass culture.

HUSL 6372 American Women's Literature -- An historical survey of American women writers from the colonial period to the present and a critical consideration of the place of these texts in the American literary tradition.  Examines how gender, class, and race have influenced women’s access to education and to the literary marketplace. Considers how literary values and literary canons are created and maintained. Topics include the rise of the novel; best-selling 19th-century sentimental fiction; gender and notions of genius; local color writing; proletarian and other "political" writing; the emergence of cultural hierarchies ("literature," bestsellers, and "trash"); national literary traditions; and mass-media tie-ins.

HUHI 7386 Writer in American Society -- Considers the different meanings of authorship in America from the early Republic to the present. Examines how gender, race, class, and sexuality inflect authorship and related ideas about authority, subjectivity, originality, and genius. Topics include the construction of a public sphere in the 18^th century, the ambivalent relationship of women and African-American writers to literacy, copyright, the professionalization of publishing, the emergence of cultural hierarchies, collaboration and multiple authorship.