Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
AAS1100 Introduction to Asian American Studies
This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the study of Asian/Pacific Islanders in the U.S. This course will examine, through a range of disciplines (including history, literary studies, film/media, performance, anthropology, sociology), issues and methods that have emerged from Asian American Studies since its inception in the late 1960s, including the types of research questions and methods that the study of Asians & Pacific Islander peoples in the U.S. as well as politics and historical relations in the Asia/Pacific region have to offer. In this course, we will pay particular attention to the role of culture and its production in documenting histories, formulating critical practices, and galvanizing political efforts. Topics and themes include: war & empire; queer & feminist lives and histories; refugee, adoptees, transnational families, and other forms of kinship & belonging; anti-Asian violence; settler colonialism and postcolonial critique.

Full details for AAS 1100 - Introduction to Asian American Studies

Spring.
AAS2620 Introduction to Asian American Literature
This course will introduce both a variety of writings by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working primarily with novels, we will be asking questions about the relation between literary forms and the socio-historical context within which they take on their meanings, and about the historical formation of Asian American identities.

Full details for AAS 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

Spring.
AAS2641 Race and Modern US History
This course surveys modern U.S. history, from Reconstruction to the contemporary period. It will examine how race has been the terrain on which competing ideas of the American nation have been contested. From struggles over citizenship rights to broader meanings of national belonging, we will explore how practices, ideas, and representations have shaped political, cultural, and social power. A key concern for this course is examining how groups and individuals have pursued racial justice from the late-nineteenth century to the present.

Full details for AAS 2641 - Race and Modern US History

Spring.
AAS3030 Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective
The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a "natural" and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. "Asians" overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the "Asians?" On what basis can we label "Asians" an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category "Asian" itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Full details for AAS 3030 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective

Spring.
AAS4550 Race and the University
What is a university, what does it do, and how does it do it? Moving out from these more general questions, this seminar will focus on a more specific set of questions concerning the place of race within the university. What kinds of knowledge are produced in the 20th- century U.S. university? Why is it, and how is it, that certain knowledge formations and disciplines come to be naturalized or privileged within the academy? How has the emergence of fields of inquiry such as Ethnic Studies (with an epistemological platform built on the articulations of race, class and gender) brought to the fore (if not brought to crisis) some of the more vexing questions that strike at the core of the idea of the university as the pre-eminent site of disinterested knowledge? This seminar will give students the opportunity to examine American higher education's (particularly its major research institutions) historical instantiation of the relations amongst knowledge, power, equality and democracy.

Full details for AAS 4550 - Race and the University

Spring.
AAS4950 Independent Study
Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for AAS 4950 - Independent Study

Fall, Spring.
AAS6818 Race, Performance, and Sound Studies
This course engages with new and foundational writings in sound studies that center the racialized body -- be it of the performer, listener, or critic -- as well as racialized histories, places, and practices. This interdisciplinary course will study methodological tools, critical concepts, and readings drawn from queer, feminist, black, Latinx, Asian American, and postcolonial approaches, to name a few. We will engage with the role of sound and its technologies throughout U.S. history (i.e. slavery, wars and empire, social movements, immigration & migration, militarism) as well as the ways in which racialized performers, listeners, and critics have labored within and against these sonic regimes, imagining new politics, practices, and ways of being.

Full details for AAS 6818 - Race, Performance, and Sound Studies

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