elective courses - weekday studies - first cycle (course group defined by American Studies Center)

• Seminar - 30 hours

• Seminar - 30 hours

Alaska as one of the isolated states from the mainland, characterised with extreme climate and vast wild and uninhabited areas is often imagined as the last American frontier on Earth. Although Alaska became the 49th state in 1959, numerous people still move there in order to lead a pioneer’s life. They settle in off-grid cottages in a forest, some times miles away from the nearest city or a village. They hunt, fish and admire the landscape. Some share their experiences online, some write diaries or memoirs .

How is life in Alaska different today from the one a pioneer experienced in the 19th century? How has narratives about Alaska changed since then? What values and ides are present in the narratives? What identity do they express? How did the concepts of the West, nature and the frontier in Alaska changed?

• Seminar - 30 hours

There are two opposing points of view according to which digital media came to be recognized as either revolutionary or oppressive. On the one hand, in the early 1990s, the Internet symbolized unlimited possibilities of development and a means of equalizing and democratizing relations. On the other hand, taking into account recent criticism of google search engine as reinforcing stereotypes and racism against people of color, new media can be seen as oppressive. This course will revolve around contemporary digital media as well as scholarly debates circulating around the ways in which they can be oppressive or quite to the contrary, liberating.

• Seminar - 30 hours

• Seminar - 30 hours

This survey course will take an in-depth look at how the definitions of horror have mutated and expanded from the moment of its inception in the silent movie era to its contemporary cross-over inter-media manifestations. Through diverse theoretical readings, in-class discussions, analyses and screenings of selected films, students will learn how to read horror critically and how to conceptualize its complex relationship with the human body, gender, class, and race. We will also analyze horror film as a space where social and cultural anxieties can be inspected and challenged, and we will ask ourselves whether these fears are exorcized or rather magnified in the selected horror subgenres.

• Seminar - 30 hours

This course explores American Literary Reportage and its close connection to the rapidly changing sociocultural and political landscape in the United States across the twentieth and twenty-first century.

• Seminar - 30 hours

The aim of this class is to familiarize students with main concepts, currents, and traditions in American political thought. In the course of the class students will learn about the most important debates in American political thought. The departing premiss of the class is that political thought is a reflection on politics and hence it is a kind of political action. Accordingly, students will read primary sources - articles, pamphlets, correspondence, and documents - by the most important politicians, activists, and theorists. Initial meetings will be dedicated to historical issues (colonial thought, thought of American revolution, debates regarding the character of the Union, abolitionism), further meetings will be problem-based (freedom, equality, democracy, civil disobedience, feminism, identity politics).

• Seminar - 30 hours

W czasie wykładu zapoznamy się z pochodzeniem i rozwojem science fiction w Stanach Zjednoczonych w XX i XXI wieku (ale rzucimy też okiem na inne tra-dycje sf), zapoznamy się ze strategiami, dzięki którym gatunek ten jest narzędziem krytyki kulturowej oraz omówimy szereg kluczowych tekstów.

• Seminar - 30 hours

The purpose of the course is to present and discuss selected sociological takes on important social, political and cultural issues in contemporary American society. The main idea is to introduce students to particularly important works that have sparked lively public debate because of their innovative perspective or the importance of the issue addressed. In addition to analyzing the works themselves, the course aims to familiarize students with a critical analysis of public debates and the infrastructure within which these debates take place.

• Seminar - 30 hours

One of the defining aspects of interwar Paris was the massive influx of American expatriates, flooding the city with literature, art, and music. Writers from Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound took up residence, while many others visited to engage in the international arts community. This course will look at American literary production connected to Paris from this time to explore the various racial, gender, and political dynamics which arose. Specifically, we look at fiction, memoirs, magazines, maps, and other visual and audio materials to explore Paris as a space as it was lived by American authors active in this period.

• Seminar - 30 hours

A survey of the history of male cinematic Blackness in the US, from World War II until the 2010s, with particular focus on the changes in the sociopolitical landscape of “race.”

• Seminar - 30 hours

This course will be co-taught with instructors from Indiana University, Indianapolis and will include both OSA UW students and American students. Each week, we will meet for an hour on Zoom with the American group, and for the remaining 30 minutes, we will have classes on our own (on Zoom). The joint classes will run for 8 weeks, until April 17. Beginning in mid-April, classes will be conducted exclusively with the Polish group - American students will then finish the semester.

The aim of the class is to reflect on such terms as health, illness, body and the ways in which culture shapes their meanings. We’ll think of body image, the ideas of self-care and wellness as well as fatness and disability. In this class, we’ll focus both on the US and Poland and will oftentimes compare the ways in which body, sickness, and health are understood and represented in these two countries.

• Seminar - 30 hours

From superhero stories, through intimate comics about everyday life, to moving memoirs, the course will explore the role and importance of comics in American culture in the late 20th and 21st centuries. By examining comics published in the last 40 years, this course will also serve as an introduction to comics as a medium. Students will read and analyze key texts in American comics since the 1980s on the examples of both mainstream and independent publications.

• Seminar - 30 hours

This class invites students to think of body and disability in the context of technology. We will ask what is access, investigate its politics, and explore how technology and science participate in building accessible world (and for whom). We will familiarize ourselves with the concept of universal design and its history in the United States and think of both access and design through race and gender. We will also investigate the concept of prosthesis and its cultural meaning as well as discuss the ideas of built and natural environment and see how science and technology shape the expression or elimination of disability, illness, and madness.

• Seminar - 30 hours

This course focuses on famous American court cases as material for cultural and social analysis. We will start with an introduction to rules of criminal procedure and legal order, and move on to analyzing specific cases and the public attention they garnered.