HAS Courses in American Studies
California State University, Long Beach
Brett Mizelle
Animals in American Culture
Interdisciplinary examination of the role of non-human animals in making cultural meaning. Traces the many ways in which animals, not just humans, have shaped American history and culture.
College of William and Mary
Merit Kaschig
Animal Americans: Human Animal Relationships and the Creation of America.
Non-human animals are part and particle of our everyday lives. We depend on them for sustenance, for clothes and for labor. We watch them on TV, read about them in books and magazines, fight them as "pests," nurture them as "helpers," contain them in zoos, draft them for wars, play with them at home, and train them to assist us at work and in emergencies. Most importantly, we project our fears, hopes and desires onto them. Engaging with scholarship across disciplines, this course will study the relationships between human and non-human animals in historical perspective in order to shed light on the construction of US-identities from colonial times to the present. Through the course of the semester, our investigation of literature of history, anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, and biology as well as of motion pictures, cartoons, web-sites, nature shows, and magazines will, I hope, allow us to do the following: First, look at animal bodies as sites of conflict that reverberate in larger social movements. Second, understand human-animal relations not as carefree and casual but as carefully constructed and contested relations of knowledge and power.
UC Davis
Jay Mechling
Animals in American Culture
This course explores the meanings we attribute to animals in our everyday lives. We experience real animals as our pets and in zoos, theme parks, circuses, rodeos, and as hunters. We eat animals (or don't), drink their milk (or don't), and wear their skins and fur (or don't). We consume representations of animals in children's stories, on television, in film, in print advertisements, in Gary Larson cartoons, and more. We look at these animal "texts" and their meanings toward understanding some larger questions in American culture, including questions about gender, sex, race, and the range of values at odds in "the Culture Wars." We shall draw upon a number of disciplines (anthropology, folklore, geography, history, literary criticism, psychology, rhetorical criticism, sociology, and visual studies, among others) to understand the various meanings of these texts in their historical, social, and cultural contexts.
