American Studies offers:
USA311H1S: American Capitalism
American Studies offers a powerful set of tools with which to study race, gender, sexuality or class in
daily life. This course joins those to studies of large institutions or forces of economic power, such as
corporations, global capitalism, global race, and empire. The class will draw methods and analytic
approaches from across the field of American Studies to consider how we might develop a toolkit for
thinking, researching, and writing about capitalist economic ideas as culturally embedded, regulated,
and produced. We will explore perspectives offered by American Studies scholars trained in
communications, science and technology studies, literature, anthropology, sociology, history,
musicology, and visual studies, bridging both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Students will be
introduced to classic texts as well as to more recent work that examines the social, cultural,
environmental, gendered, and ethical aspects of economic life under U.S. capitalism.
