American Studies Certificate Program, GC-CUNY: Courses Online

ASCP. 82000 - America in the1920's: Interdisciplinary Perspectives GC: M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dolan, [91608] Cross listed with ENGL 85000. Open to Ph.D. students only.

In the United States, the 1920s was a decade that was labeled, almost from its inception, as “modern”—but what did that mean?

The artistic movements we now think of as “modernist” were strictly fringe movements for most Americans during the 1920s, avant garde in the true sense that they occupied a space where many Americans would be comfortable in some years’ time but not necessarily right now.

And yet the United States was undeniably “modern,” its industrial design and popular music suddenly reference points for many cutting-edge artists throughout the world, its industrial organization and advertising strategies seemingly the naturalized, devouring endpoint toward which global capitalism had been tending for decades. In a way, to be fringe—to resist the presumed standardizing maw of late industrial culture—was to be most modern.

In the newspapers and magazines of the decade, Americans could read about a whole range of cultural subgroups whose visible difference or self-styled resistance set them off from the presumptively faceless mass: recent immigrants and the reborn KKK; jittery jazz devotees and aggressively traditional fans of “hillbilly” music and the country blues; associationalist boosters and railroaded anarchists. In the age of the modern, no one felt as if they belonged, and everyone felt they deserved a little of the spotlight.

This course will examine some, but obviously not all, of these phenomena and will feature in-class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program based in the Ph. D. Programs in Art History, English, History, Music, and Theatre.

In addition, we may consider: the causes of the Crash of 1929; the two or three waves of the Harlem Renaissance; Eugene O’Neill and the Americanization of expressionism; the idea of the college student in popular culture; suffrage, flappers, and the “New Woman”; prohibition and the cult of the gangster; Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic and its trail of cultural traces; how late silent films reconstructed the grammar of sexuality in the U.S.; radio’s journey from crystal sets to network programming. If we’re very lucky, we may even get around to crossword puzzles, miniature golf, and mah johngg.

Course requirements include class participation, a bibliography of secondary sources on a particular aspect of U.S. life during the decade, an oral presentation of original scholarship within that field, and a final paper that expands on the presentation.

ASCP. 82000 - Post World War II American Culture, 1945-1960 GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Giddins, [91609] Cross listed with ENGL 75400 & HIST 75700. Open to Ph.D. students only.

One of the memorable lines ground between the teeth of Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, is a faux-axiom: “Bad news sells best ‘cause good news is no news.”

But in 1951, when that film was released to critical brickbats, Americans could recall when good news sold better than anything: From the summer of 1942, as the Allies began to turn the tide, through September 1945, when Japan surrendered unconditionally, good news was rampant.

Yet the ultimate victory party, emblemized by strangers kissing in the streets, was amazingly short-lived. Within a year, a psychological depression took up where the economic one left off, as the military looked for a new war to fight, Churchill pointed his finger at an iron curtain, atomic bombs blasted Bikini, communist-hunters haunted the shadows, and Hollywood produced a deluge of relentlessly mordant movies questioning the most vaunted principles of American life. These films and much art of the late `40s depicted a national overcast characterized by ennui, hysteria, and guilt.

By the mid-1950s, the old conflict between popular art and high art was, in part, supplanted by the conflict between a complacent and an angry art. At the same time that swing fractured itself into bebop, painting into dribbles and color fields, and literature into howls and Jeremiads, banal novelties consumed pop music, Hollywood rediscovered piety as fool-proof spectacle, the doorstop novel of perfidy in the suburbs reached its peak, and television created a comprehensive, numbing vision of American tranquility.

This course will explore the contradictions in American culture as they played out in the arts in the 1950s, a period considered timid at the time, especially when compared to the 1960s, and now often viewed as adventurous and inspired. It will focus on the way artists approached historical, political, and social issues in an indirect manner that reflecting fears of political and cultural censorship—in movies, music, literature, comic books, and television.

Much of the work we will examine appeared to say one thing while saying something else entirely, raising a question for us: Is the subversion we now read between the lines revisionist or was it always there for anyone with eyes to see?

The artists and works we will look at will be drawn from a list including, from the movies, They Were Expendable, war hero turned film star Audie Murphy, Pitfall, Ace in the Hole, Biblical epics, director Anthony Mann, Anatomy of a Murder, and Shadows; from music, the Jolson revival, the introduction of bebop, the transformation of r&b into early rock and roll, Doris Day, Third Stream and avant-garde jazz; in books, Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, Malamud’s The Assistant, Himes’s The Real Cool Killers, as well as comics, television shows, and an analysis of bestselling book lists of 1944-60.

The course requirements include class participation, an oral report, and a 15-page essay on some aspect of the cultural life of the period in question.

ASCP. 81500 - Topics in American Art and Architecture: Portals On American Art, 1776-1876 GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, [92361] Cross listed with ART 77300.

During the course of the semester, we work toward developing a new model for a survey course offered on the graduate level, and move away from an exclusively sequential historical approach.

In order to gain multiple perspectives on art produced in the United States during the first formative century, we explore five distinct portals (or windows) on the field: (1) Historiography; (2) Traditional historical exploration of artists and works of art across time; (3) In-depth analysis of one era as case study, here focusing on the years between the Civil War and the Gilded Age (1863-1877); (4) Pan-American perspectives; and (5) General public’s perception, use, and reinterpretation of American art of this period in the light of recent academic scholarship.

Here we use tools like web2, responses to exhibitions, and popular accounts of art and artists to judge its reception for a wider audience.

Short student projects on the individual portals will allow students to self-evaluate and be evaluated across the semester.

Participation and interaction among class members are necessary to the group dynamics and success of the class.

The course serves as a useful preparation for orals. Five (5) auditors permitted Information: kmanthorne@gc.cuny.edu

Preliminary Reading (all on Jstor): John Davis, "The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship in the Art of the United States," Art Bulletin 85 (Sept. 2003): 544-580.

Kirk Savage, "Molding Emancipation: J.Q. Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Meaning of the Civil War," Art Institute of Chicago’s Museum Studies (2001): 26-39 +101.

Kirsten Buick, "Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography" American Art 9 (Summer 1995): 4-19.

ASCP. 81500 - Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ewen, [92370] Cross listed with SOC 86800 & HIST 75700. Permission of instructor required for students not enrolled in the Ph.D. Programs in Sociology and History.

Through primary and secondary readings, and employing a range of visual media, the seminar is designed to extend a critical history of dominant ideas. We will look at the relationship between stereotyping as a persistent social, cultural and mental practice, and as components of the rise and development of Western societies from the 18th century onward.

Seminar discussions and assignments will seek to make contemporary patterns of perception, as well as recent scientific theories, somewhat more intelligible.

Of central concern are the way that modern visual media, changing standards of visible evidence and extensive networks of communication have provided new languages and lubricants for propagating ideas of human inequality. The psychic core within these invidious ideas will also be explored.

Evaluation will be based on seminar participation, including short presentations, and on a research proposal and completed project. Seminar projects may employ a variety of forms. Information: drstu@bway.net

ASCP. 81500 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Modern and Contemporary Memorials, Artistic Strategies and Audience Response GC: W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Senie, [92360] Cross listed with ART 86040.

This course will consider the history of modern and contemporary memorials since WWII in terms of commissioning methods and intentions, built solutions (both works by artists and entire museums), and audience response (including spontaneous memorials and issues of controversy).

There will be meetings with directors of public art programs who commission memorials. Students will observe actual memorials in the city, engage their immediate audience, and analyze the range of responses.

Throughout the course we will be considering the ways memory is framed and experienced.

Five (5) auditors permitted but they may be required to do one assignment involving audience response.

Preliminary Reading

Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)

Constructions of Memory,Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 1999 issue

ASCP 81500 – Musical Relations of African Americans & European-Amerian in the U.S., 1985-1970 GC: W, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Blum, [92366] Cross listed with MUS 83400.

The seminar aims at historical inquiry informed by ethnomusicological perspectives. Analysis of recordings, notations, and other documents provides a basis for critique of current interpretations (and enduring misrepresentations) of this 75-year span of American social and musical history.

The seminar attempts to develop an approach to musical analysis that is adequate to the historical complexity of the topic.

In addition to weekly reading and listening assignments (which include ear training exercises), each student is expected to write two short reports and a research paper on an approved topic. The work load is a heavy one, commensurate with the subject (and the music is as good as music gets).

ASCP. 81500 - Race & the Photoessay GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallace, [92364] Cross listed with ENGL 87400 & WSCP 81000.

This course proposes to examine a largely neglected photographic archive as a source of historical and literary re-evaluations of key events and personalities of the century, as well as providing a handy and creative way to think about and revise the presentation of black history and culture (and/or blacks in American history and culture).

A major focus in the course will be upon women photographers and photographs of women, and to further push the already flexible interpretive approaches to the photograph.

The course begins with a re-examination of the collection of photographs on African American life assembled by W.E.B. Du Bois for the Paris Exposition in 1900 with a particular focus on the photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston's The Hampton Album. These photographs will be considered in relation to the texts of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois.

In the 20s, we are looking at James Van Der Zee and Robert S. Roberts.

In the 30s, we move on to James Agee's and Walker Evan's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as other famous works coming out of the WPA, in particular Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces.

In the 40s, our focus switches to Chicago, Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, St. Clair Drake's Black Metropolis: a Study of Negro Life in a Northern City and Maren Stange's Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943.

In the 50s, we look at Roy De Carava and Langston Hughes The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

If there is time, and interest, we will proceed on to Edward Steichen's The Family of Man and the various contemporary re-readings of this crucial MOMA exhibition.

ASCP. 81500 - Recent Trends Jazz Scholarship GC: F, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Taylor, [92367] Permission of instructor required. Cross listed with MUS 86300.

This seminar will examine the variety of ways jazz is currently being studied, with particular emphasis on the influence of scholarship produced since 1990.

Readings will be drawn from critical literature and oral history, as well as scholarship from musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, art history, and other disciplines.

The course is not a jazz history survey, though it will move more or less chronologically and music from a variety of periods will be examined, nor does the course cover the entire sweep of jazz historiography.

Rather, the seminar will examine how tools currently available to the scholar, from both music and related disciplines, help understand and appreciate a living music with a rich history and vibrant future.

Final projects will concentrate on jazz musicians currently living and working in the Greater NYC area.

Some prior experience with jazz and/or popular music studies is preferred, though students with a strong interest in the genre who are willing to pursue outside work to become familiar with the basic outline of jazz history are invited to inquire.

ASCP. 81500 - Religion in America, 1750-1850 GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Scott, [92365] Cross listed with HIST 75000.

This course will examine topics in Religion in America history by approaching religious phenomena as social and cultural formations grounded in various forms of faith and "faith communities.
The major focus will be on the 18^th and 19^th centuries, although there might be few topics reaching into the 20^th century.

Topics will include Formal and Folk religion in 17^th century New England, the First Great Awakening, "Outsider Religions of the Late 18^th Century," the Formation of an African American Religion, The Second Great Awakening and Turmoil of the Burned-Over District, Religious and Gender, Religion and Immigration, The Many Faces of Millenialism etc.

Readings will include studies taking different approaches to religious phenomena as well as key primary documents such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

ASCP. 81500 - Social Movements in the US GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Krinsky, [92369] Cross listed with P SC 72410.

ASCP. 81500 - T. S. Eliot GC: Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brenkman, [92363] Cross listed with ENGL 86200.

For much of the 20th century no poet or critic had as great an impact on poetry and criticism as T.S. Eliot. Recent decades of course have seen his reputation waver.

His anti-Semitism overshadowed his philosophy of culture; his political conservatism outweighed his poetic innovations; his personal cruelties eclipsed his aesthetic impersonality. The enigma, though, is there from the beginning in the work and mind of this poet-critic: experiment and tradition, modernity and hierarchy, humanism and reaction.

Eliot’s turn to religion, beginning with “Ash Wednesday,” baffled many of his ardent followers and advocates. The relation of the secular and the sacred in the symbolic fabric of literature became the central preoccupation of his writing and thought. Today Eliot’s work poses in the most acute form the question of modernism, nihilism, and belief.

This seminar is intended to use that question to explore anew Eliot’s poetry and criticism in the hope not so much of “straightening things out” as following the “crooked timber of humanity” in search of the resources of Eliot’s poetic creativity and critical acumen.

Primary texts: T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays; Selected Prose; Christianity and Culture.

All the sessions of the seminar will be conducted on an intensive schedule January 3-24, M W Th, 2:00-4:45.

Papers will be due at the end of Spring term in May.

ASCP. 81500 - The U.S. Congress GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jones, [92368] Cross listed with P SC 72210.

The United States Congress is one of the most powerful representative assemblies and the most extensively studied political institution in the world.

This course is designed to help students develop a basic understanding of the major works and debates in the study of Congress, as well as the ability to explain, synthesize, and critique them.

The course is targeted for students seeking to complete the department’s first exam in American politics.

Required readings for the course will include all those in the Congress section of the American Politics Reading List, among others.

The course will cover Congress both from the perspective of individual members, including elections and representation, and from the perspective of the institution as a whole, including committees, parties, leaders, and rules.

All students will be expected to complete, and be prepared to discuss, each week’s readings. Students will periodically be required to submit, prior to class, a page or reactions to the week’s readings. In addition, each student will introduce the discussion of at least one of the weeks’ readings.

I intend for the final exam to be similar in format and content to the type of question(s) given on the first exam in American politics, providing good practice for those who later choose to take it.

ASCP. 81500 - Wordsworth, Whitman, & the Prose Revolution in Modern Poetry GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dickstein, [92362] Cross listed with ENGL 80200.

When Ezra Pound argued in 1914 that “poetry should be at least as well written as prose,” he was not only creating an axiom for one wing of the modern movement but also renewing an argument Wordsworth had made in his attacks on “poetic diction” more than a century earlier in his prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads.

The course will explore facets of what Pound called “the prose tradition in verse,” focusing especially on the complex careers of Wordsworth and Whitman, their innovations and their wide influence. We’ll examine how this tradition paralleled the rise of democratic movements, the increasing fascination with the typical and the ordinary (rather than the sublime or heroic), and the growth of realism in the 19th-century novel.

Along the way the course will touch on prose poetry, such as Baudelaire’s Little Poems in Prose, narrative poetry (Crabbe, Browning), and finally the deployment of the plain style and the bare encounter by poets as different as Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams.

Course requirements will include strictly regular attendance, an oral report, and a 15-page term paper.

ASCP. 82000 - Color-Struck: African American Theatre and Performance in the Early Twentieth Century GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wilson, [92377] Cross listed with ENGL 75600 & THEA 85300.

Theatre and performance played an essential role in articulating and reflecting the political, social, and artistic struggles of African Americans in the first part of the twentieth century.

Black leaders and intelligentsia of the era, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Alain Locke, were in agreement over the importance of black theatre, but they were at odds over its propagandistic and aesthetic functions. Thus, the inter- and intra-racial tensions about an "authentic" black art provoked (and continue to provoke) theoretical disputes around modernism, primitivism, and pluralism in the early twentieth-century.

In this seminar, we will pursue these issues through plays and performance texts from the early 1900s through the 1930s.

Titles will include, but will not be limited to, Shipp and Dunbar’s In Dahomey, Du Bois’s Star of Ethiopia, Grimké’s Rachel, Burrill’s Aftermath, Thurman’s Harlem, and Hughes and Hurston’s Mule Bone. While historically contextualizing the works, class discussions will focus on the texts as they represent a range of dramatic genres, such as the folk play, anti-lynching drama, satirical comedy, and Broadway melodrama. We will also examine black pageants, diasporic folk dance concerts, and musical revues.

The course will conclude with a look at how these works influenced playwrights and performers of later decades of the twentieth century. Contemporaneous criticism and theoretical treatises will provide the tools for interpreting and historicizing the texts, and students will be asked to weigh these against recent multidisciplinary scholarship and theory in African American studies (including the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Houston Baker Jr., Cheryl Wall, Hazel Carby, Michael North, and others).

Writing assignments for the course will consist of responses to the reading and an original 15-20 page research paper (which will be preceded by a prospectus, annotated bibliography, and an optional first draft). Students will share their research in a short presentation.

ASCP. 82000 - Am Int History: Civil War-Present GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Diggins, [92373] Cross listed with HIST 75400. Permission of instructor required.

ASCP. 82000 - The Community Studies Tradition in American Sociology GC:   R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kornblum, [92376] Cross listed with SOC 82800.

This seminar will explore the theory and method of community research in the social sciences by looking at two broad areas in which its methods continue to yield valuable insight and to produce enduring literature.

The first of these is the momentous transition, still occurring in many parts of the world, in which people from tribal and rural villages experience the forces of industrialization and urbanization. In this unit of the semester we will compare readings – like Wylie’s Village in the Vaucluse, and Thomas and Znaziecki’s The Polish Peasant in Poland and America, with equally classic documentary film studies including Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi, George Rouquier’s Farrabique, and Meyers et. al The City.

The second area of inquiry, which will take up the follwing two thirds of the semester, will center on the physical, social, and political economic processes that characterize life in the World’s most densely built urban environment, Midtown Manhattan.

Readings will include work from the Chicago school, Richard Wade’s urban history, Manhattan Moves Uptown, Walter Benjamin’s arcades project, Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, readings from Goffman’s Behavior in Public Places and Relations in Public, Mitch Duneier’s Sidewalk Sharon Zukin’s work on department stores, Kornblum and others on the social ecology of Times Square, and studies of the demography of midtown and its transportation network.

The course will also seek to bridge micro and macro perspectives on Midtown, and will consider some of the major changes in the political economy of the area over the past twenty years.

Throughout the semester we will work together in “the field” to address critical questions about life in Midtown Manhattan by gathering qualitative and quantitative data through systematic observation in the streets and subway stations, in the vicinity of the Graduate Center. Information: wkornblum@gc.cuny.edu

ASCP. 82000 - Topics In American Art and Architecture: Mansions, Moguls, and Murals: Art and Culture in America’s "First Gilded Age" GC: M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Webster, [92371] Cross listed with ART 77300.

This course has two related themes: the construction of national identity through Gilded Age buildings and monuments, and the role played by industrialists and bankers, aka the Robber Barons, in the formation of American visual culture.

Lectures will examine the architectural programs of the Albany State Capitol, Trinity Church, Boston (both designed by H.H. Richardson), the Boston Public Library (McKim, Mead and White), the architecture and design of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, and the Library of Congress. Designed by a new generation of European-trained artists and architects, who worked collaboratively, these publicly funded projects developed a visual language in which architecture, painting and sculpture combined to express a new sense of national purpose.

At the same time, these artists and architects worked for and advised a new class of extremely wealthy Americans pejoratively called the robber barons. Over the course of the semester we will discuss the creation of their collections, the design and decoration of their houses, and the establishment of the institutions they endowed with gifts and money.

Auditors permitted.

Preliminary Reading

H. Wayne Morgan, New Muses, Art in American Culture, 1865-1920 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1978).

Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York, Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in the Gilded Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).

ASCP. 82000 - Performance Studies: New York in the 1960s GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2-4 credits, Prof. Levitz, [92374] Cross listed with MUS 86000.

I envision this course as an introduction to performance studies as relevant to music scholarship, set within the context of New York City in the 1960s.

We will become familiar with the history of performance art and dance in 1960s New York, critically interpreting selected performances by Fluxus, the Judson Dance Theater, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (and other proponents of Black Dance), Bill T. Jones, and others (including forays into salsa and the twist). In each case, I will choose performances that interact in fascinating ways with compelling music, which will often be the center of our discussion.

At the same time, we will read classic and intriguing texts on performance studies, from Richard Schechner through Susan Foster to Barbara Browning and Katherine Dunham, discussing issues ranging from representation through identity politics to myriad ways of talking about music and movement.

We will also try to take advantage of the rich archival situation for studying dance and music in New York.

Assignments will include: a small archival project involving dance, a final research paper (on a relatively open topic involving any aspect of dance or movement culture in 1960s New York), and an oral presentation conceived as conference paper.

ASCP. 82000 - Octavia Butler in Her Times GC:   R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Reid-Pharr, [92372] Cross listed with ENGL 85500 & WSCP 81000.

In this course we will treat much of the most prominent work that has been produced by the late speculative fiction writer, Octavia Butler. In particular, we will read all of her three novel series: Patternist, Xenogenesis, and the Parable Series; her short stories collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories; and her "stand alone" novels: Kindred and Fledgling.

We will also read a fair amount of criticism of Butler and her oeuvre. All the while we will pay particular attention to Butler's own methods of critique and self-critique.

Most specifically we will attempt to make sense of why Butler returned so often to the themes of motherhood, merging of "alien" and "non-alien" identity, and forced choice during her career.

Finally, we will ask throughout the course how Butler does or does not fit within established traditions of Afro-American and feminist literature.

Students will be asked to prepare annotated bibliographies of the criticism surrounding Butler and to produce a final seminar paper.

ASCP. 82000 - The Modern American Presidency GC:   T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Renshon, [92375] Cross listed with P SC 82230 & IDS 81630.

What kind of person and what policies will it take to be a successful, effective president as America enters the 21^st century? The country is now trying to answer that question.

Presidential candidates present themselves as they prefer to be seen, making claims about their experience, judgment, vision, policies, leadership and character. Voters struggle to discern the truths behind these competing claims.

The primary season, already underway, puts candidates and the public though an obstacle course in which nomination strategies both reflect and obscure the most important questions about a candidate’s suitability for the presidency.

Is Barack Obama too inexperienced? Is Rudi Giuliani too combatative; should his three marriages be disqualifying? Is Hillary Clinton too liberal or alternatively, not liberal enough? Is John McCain’s political identity as a maverick an asset or a liability? Is Fred Thompson’s persona and Senate career sufficient to merit him becoming president?

Beyond candidate psychology, there are critical policy issues to be addressed. What do candidates think about the big issues and what does their thinking reflect about their likely approaches to presidential leadership? Is the public’s primary concern being safe from 9/11 type attacks, or has the war on terror become only one of many issues it wants addressed and not necessarily the most important? How realistic are candidates’ abstract policy prescriptions when measured against the realities of governing domestically in a highly divided society? What foreign policies can make the United States both safe in a dangerous world and respected in an international system in which the American leadership is often necessary, but frequently questioned.

The course focus will be on the relevant psychological and political literature and the extent to which it helps us to understand and assess individual candidates, the state of American politics and the policy choices that this country faces.