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2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

AMST 101 Weird
Structures of Strangeness in American Culture - This course investigates how "the weird" shapes American culture, from frontier tales of strange encounters to contemporary political discourse. What makes something "weird" in American society, who gets to decide, and how has "weirdness" been used both to define and challenge the boundaries of American identity and belonging? Drawing on scholars like Mark Fisher and Grace Dillon, we'll explore different ways of understanding strangeness in the American context-from UFO sightings over suburban landscapes to the othering of immigrant cultures. We'll examine how constructions of the weird operate across American cultural and political landscapes, from mainstream media to collaborative digital storytelling platforms like the SCP Foundation. Through analysis of American conspiracy theories, urban legends, experimental media, and other cultural forms, we'll investigate national anxieties about difference, deviance, and the unknown. The course emphasizes how marginalized communities, especially Indigenous cosmologies and ontologies, have historically been categorized as "weird" while simultaneously offering powerful alternative ways of understanding reality and experience. Through engagement with cultural texts ranging from weird fiction and film to video games and digital communities, students will develop tools for analyzing how the weird operates as both a tool of exclusion and a method of reimagining American identity and experience. Students will analyze how "weird" functions in contemporary American discourse, examine strange phenomena in popular culture, and create their own weird encounter narratives that thoughtfully engage our course concepts. Throughout, we'll consider how examining the weird can help us understand and reimagine American cultural boundaries and possibilities.

AMST 303 Indigenous Theory
This advanced seminar explores Indigenous theoretical frameworks that challenge and transcend settler-colonial paradigms of knowledge, power, and being. Moving beyond simplified understandings of decolonization as metaphor, we examine how Indigenous intellectuals and communities conceptualize and enact sovereignty across multiple registers: political, cultural, epistemological, and temporal. The course centers pivotal theoretical interventions from Indigenous scholars while emphasizing their active deployment in contemporary contexts. We begin with Eve Tuck (Unangax^) and K. Wayne Yang's critique of decolonization-as-metaphor before exploring Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (Māori: Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou) foundational work on Indigenous methodologies. Vine Deloria Jr.'s (Lakota) incisive analysis of Western thought and Gerald Vizenor's (White Earn Anishinaabe) concept of survivance provide theoretical frameworks for understanding how Indigenous knowledge systems operate beyond the constraints of settler temporalities and categories. Through engagement with LeAnne Howe's (Choctaw) theory of tribalography, we examine how Indigenous narrative traditions serve as technologies of regeneration and futurity rather than mere representations of the past. The course brings these theoretical frameworks into conversation with tribal legal traditions and Indigenous environmental thought, exploring how sovereignty manifests in governance structures and relationships with land. Special attention is paid to how these theoretical frameworks illuminate contemporary challenges around climate change, resource extraction, and competing claims to authority and knowledge. Drawing from American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies methodologies, students will develop sophisticated analytical and theoretical tools for examining how Indigenous critical approaches reframe questions of power, knowledge, representation, and possibility. Through intensive reading, discussion, and research, we'll explore how Indigenous theory offers not just critique but generative possibilities for reimagining relationships between peoples, systems, and worlds.

AMST 401 Research and Methods in Am St
This integrative seminar focuses on the theory and methods of cultural analysis and interdisciplinary study. Students examine the origins, history, and current state of American studies, discuss relevant questions, and, in research projects, apply techniques of interdisciplinary study to a topic of their choosing. Prerequisite: 303, Senior American studies major, or permission of the instructor.

Spring 2026

AMST 200 Indigenous Futurism
In the field of what scholar Grace Dillon calls "Indigenous Futurism," Native artists from the visual to the literary have found a profoundly ripe stage for the exploration of Indigenous representation and artistic exploration. Following historically on other alternative-futurist projects such as Afrofuturism and Queer Futurism, Indigenous Futurism shares certain sensibilities with these related aesthetic forms, perhaps most strikingly as a strategy of decolonial clapback against the white-washing tendencies of the majority of popular speculative art throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Nevertheless, Indigenous Futurism marshals the field of SF/Futurism in critically different ways unique to the history and relationship of Native America to popular culture. Indeed, this emerging field has a particular strategic advantage due to its temporal and pop-cultural orientation, allowing such art to function as a laboratory of resistance to the colonial project. This course examines Native authors, filmmakers, and visual/multimedia artists in order to evolve an understanding of the character of the field of Indigenous Futurism and why it operates as a critical strategic negotiation site for the representation of Native people in contemporary American culture.

AMST 202 Workshop in Cultural Analysis
This intensive writing workshop focuses on theoretical approaches to the interpretation of social and cultural materials. The course provides an early exposure to theories and methods that will be returned to in upper level departmental courses. Intended to develop independent skills in analysis of primary texts and documents.Prerequisite: Any AMST course or permission of instructor.