Course encourages rethinking of Unites States, U. and AMS program

Using a collection of Michael Jordan shoes, rock songs and child-rearing manuals, a new American studies course taught for the first time this spring will try to teach students U.S. history and how Americans come to know themselves through sounds, texts, images and archives. AMS 101: America Then and Now is part of the Program in American Studies’ efforts to remodel its curriculum to reflect the nature of America — and Princeton — today.

Team-taught by English and African American Studies professor Anne Cheng ’85, art and archaeology professor Rachael DeLue and history professor Hendrik Hartog, the course is divided into weekly themes like “American Landscapes” and “Borders and Movement,” through which students will study a mix of objects, such as paintings, patriotic songs and the World Trade Center memorial.

The course, which currently has 196 students enrolled on SCORE, fulfills an Epistemology and Cognition requirement. It also functions as a prerequisite for students who wish to pursue a certificate in the Program in American Studies, taking the place of the previous introductory course, AMS 201: American Places.

Compared with AMS 201, which focused on how to describe a “place” and what constitutes “place” in America, the new course has a “much more specific and substantive focus,” explained Hartog, who is also the director of the Program of American Studies. “In some ways they are continuous with each other.”

While the central question of the course revolves around what every Princeton student should know about America before graduation, the evolution of the course — and on a broader level, the American studies program itself — was prompted by a question of narrower scope: “What is Princeton?”

The answer, according to Hartog, has changed “dramatically” over the last 30 years.

“It’s a more diverse, interesting, complex place,” Hartog said. Along with a change in the University’s makeup, the academic programs have evolved as well, resulting in a sort of identity crisis for the American studies program, he said.

“We’ve always been a place where students and faculty could go to have interdisciplinary conversations in a school where the traditional departments are so very, very powerful,” Hartog said. Yet with the increase in Princeton’s diversity, these “traditional departments” have also engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship. As a result, Hartog explained, “it’s hard to know what our goal is within the campus. That raises a continuing set of questions for this program.”

The question, according to Hartog, was one of “how to reorganize the program both to meet what is Princeton today and at the same time to create a distinctive community for a group of students who want to talk seriously about interdisciplinary scholarship.”

Hartog remembered asking these questions with Cheng shortly after she was hired in 2006 and he had recently become director of the Program in American Studies. The two put together a faculty and administrator workshop in 2008 titled “Thinking About Diversity, Ethnicity and Difference in the ‘New’ Princeton,” which prompted a rethinking of the American Studies curriculum to reflect the evolving diverse world of Princeton and the field itself.

In spring of 2011, Cheng and Hartog co-taught an experimental seminar, AMS 402: Remaking American Studies. Through their discussions in this course, Cheng and Hartog developed a syllabus for AMS 101, which they refined last summer with DeLue. The trio met semi-weekly and focused their efforts on determining the “essential facts, narratives, ideas and debates with which students should be familiar when they graduate in terms of the history and culture of the United States,” DeLue said.

The course is funded by the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, which supports departmental or program proposals for curriculum changes that aim to strengthen course offerings.

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One of the “areas of innovation” the fund encourages, according to its website, is “interdisciplinary course sequences at the introductory level.” AMS 101, with three faculty members from three different departments and disciplines, fits the criteria, as do other University offerings such as the Humanities Sequence and Integrated Science. Hartog acknowledged that American studies tries to emphasize co-teaching and is aiming to increase the practice in upper-level courses.

“It’s a great way to model interdisciplinary inquiry for the students for it to be happening at the podium before their eyes,” DeLue said.

Aaron Javitt ’15, a prospective molecular biology major who is taking the course for his EC requirement, said the focus on history and combination of professors teaching made it an exciting alternative to other EC courses.

“I like the fact that they’re using a lot of different types of materials in teaching the course,” Javitt said. “It seems like they put a lot of thought and effort into exactly what we should be doing.” Javitt is a former member of the design staff for The Daily Princetonian.

Cheng explained that she and her co-professors meet before every lecture to roughly outline what they will discuss, but they do not write their lectures together. Each professor gives an individual lecture during the 80-minute session, and Cheng, DeLue and Hartog all emphasized the importance of balancing coherence with a sense of surprise.

“On one hand, we’re trying to develop themes in every lecture that cohere but we want things to tangle in funny and surprising and even shocking ways,” DeLue said. In one recent lecture, DeLue spoke about a series of photos of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Hartog lectured on Brown v. Board of Education and current immigration issues in Arizona.

The interdisciplinary nature of the course is what Hartog hopes will eventually be one of many in both the American studies program and the University curriculum in general.

“One of the things in the humanities and social sciences, particularly at Princeton, is that there’s less conversation than there should be,” Hartog said.

While Hartog did not discount the significance of the emphasis on “solitary work” such as the junior paper and senior thesis, he also expressed the need for more conversational learning that “comes out of engagement with other people who don’t think exactly how you think.”

“We’re a guinea pig, in a way, which is nice,” said Hartog. “I think this is for the American studies program a rethinking of the program and the curriculum itself that will take three to four years to develop.”