Course Offerings

The program offers three types of courses: the Common Seminar and Colloquium, core courses, and designated courses. Typically, most courses in the latter two categories are crosslisted with other departments and university units, but a few run under CLST auspices alone.

Common Seminar and Colloquium

This course is offered each spring and it must be taken at least once by all MA and PhD certificate students.

Core Courses

(A) Text and Theory

Courses in the group provide training in the study of textual practices and literary theories. They review contemporary critical approaches, identify the rhetorical elements in a variety of textual practices (including film), examine the work of recent criticism and theory, and evaluate the reception of texts and their ideological implications. Included in this group are such courses as:
* 2226 Readings in Cultural Theory: Marxist Literary and Cultural Criticism (HISP)
* 2473 Cinema and Counter History (ENGFLM)
* 2611 Seminar in Musicology: Writing Film Sound (MUSIC)

(B) Disciplines and Intellectual Movements

Courses in this group focus on the relationship between the cultural, the social, and the political; the relationship between interpretation and explanation; the history of intellectual movements beyond national borders; the formation of fields of knowledge, disciplines, and genres; the historical conditions in which disciplines are institutionalized, and the intellectual modes of their assessment. Included in this group are such courses as:
* 2102 Social Theory (SOC)
* 2149 The Eighteenth Century and Disciplinarity (ENGLIT)
* 2216 Performance Historiography (THEA)

(C) Cultural Antagonisms and Cultural Crises

Courses in this group explore, compare, and contrast the nature and consequences of historical moments and intellectual debates particularly rife with cultural and social upheavals. Such crucial confrontations may be geographical (north-south, east-west); they may involve issues of individuality versus collectivity (revolutions, nationalism, ethnicity); or they may explore distinct cultural oppositions (pop culture and high culture, scientific models of knowledge and humanistic models of knowledge). Included in this group are such courses as:
* 2465 Global War: Cultures of Paramilitarism and the Modern World (HISP)
* 2522 Special Topics in the History of Science: Human/Animal in Western Civilization (HPS)
* 2770 Slavery and Abolition in Global Perspective (HIST)

(D) Designated Courses

Each semester the program cross-lists several designated courses offered in various departments, programs, and schools. Designated courses usually are more discipline-based than core-course offerings, but they nevertheless explicitly summon cultural studies approaches and perspectives. Included in this group have been such courses as:
* 2005 [Art History] Methods, Research, and Scholarship (HAA)
* 2226 Media and Cultural Studies: Food, Media, and Culture (COMMRC)
* 2638 Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1896-1934: Lumiére to Lenin (SLAV)