Topics in Cultural Studies

This is a theory-heavy seminar that traces how "culture" has been conceptualized from Arnold and Leavis through Williams, Thompson, Gramsci, and the linguistic turn, asking what cultural analysis can still do under neoliberalism, precarity, and identity politics. You'll wrestle with dense theoretical texts each week, deliver an oral presentation, sit two timed essays plus quizzes, and learn to read class, gender, and ethnicity as overlapping rather than competing frames. It rounds out the AMER core by giving you the methodological vocabulary—hegemony, recognition vs. redistribution, mediation—that underwrites most upper-level American Studies work and any serious cultural criticism after it.