This page outlines the courses I teach at UC Davis.
AMS 1E: Nature & Culture
What is nature? What is culture? This course examines concepts of nature and culture in the United States. The core idea in this class is that concepts of nature and the environment are culturally constructed. In other words, nature is an “artifact” of particular cultures, contexts and communities. We explore the relationship between nature and the environment, how artifacts (i.e. the lawn or an orange) contain a set of belief systems about nature and culture, political economies and how pollution creates impacts outside the object itself. Some of the topics we may explore include: meat, natural history museums, teddy bears, water and wilderness, garbage and human waste. We also examine how categories like race, class and gender shape experiences and representations of nature and culture.
This course is an introductory American Studies course. That means two things: the course materials and our relationship to them are interdisciplinary (meaning that we borrow and use insights from many fields such as literature, history, anthropology and folklore, sociology, literary, visual studies etc), and that we are focused on making connections between ideas of nature and culture, and our everyday lives.
AMS 10: Introduction to American Studies
This class is an introduction to the field of American studies, specifically, as an interdisciplinary framework through which to understand American culture. Being “American” means something more than U.S. Citizenship. It is both idea and ideal. How have and do Americans conceive of national belonging, citizenship and culture? Given the racial, geographic and cultural diversity in the United States, the ways in which Americans have imagined our nation has changed over time, place and depending on factors such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and place.
This course will examine the promises and the problems of American identity, around certain themes and questions: How and why do Americans think of themselves as a nation? What ideas of national history, patriotism, and moral character shape visions of American-ness? How are boundaries drawn to define belonging in the nation, who is included and excluded and why? What uses have been made of the claim to American identity and what is at stake in that claim? How do we represent the past and what importance does cultural representation have? The course is divided in temporal and thematic terms. The second half of the course will focus on the postwar era, and particularly on California, which has a particular place in the national cultural imaginary.
We will use an interdisciplinary approach, meaning that we will use a variety of primary and secondary sources including film, art, music, photography, autobiography, and fiction to explore class themes.
AMS 100: Interdisciplinary Skills
This course is for American Studies majors and others interested in interdisciplinary research methods. In it, you will learn about the field of American Studies. What is its history? What does American Studies scholarship look like now? What are the major debates in the field? You will also learn the “how?” That is, what does it mean to “do” American Studies, and by extension, what it means to be an American Studies major through guest speakers who use interdisciplinary methods at UCD and through a final project that demonstrates interdisciplinary skills. At its core, American Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to major topics and problems in American culture, politics and history.
AMS 101G: Environmental Justice
This course examines the concept of environmental justice through interdisciplinary lenses. We begin by examining different attempts to define “environmental justice.” We focus on environmental justice in the United States for reasons of time and scope, although environmental justice issues are also important at the global level. Various frameworks analyze environmental issues through the lens of social justice and human inequality, specifically categories of race, class and gender.
AMS 160: Consumption
This course examines consumption in 20th Century America through interdisciplinary lenses: literary, historical, psychological, anthropological, and environmental. How did a consumer society emerge? What is the relationship between citizenship and consumption, historically and in the present? How do gender, race, and class shape consumption practices, marketing and resistance? This course in interested in several key questions: What do we consume? How do we consume? Where we buy products? Why we consume? What are the benefits and the consequences—positive, negative and ambivalent?