American and Canadian Studies (Study Abroad)

This module involves in-depth independent study of a subject in American and Canadian Studies. It encourages both student-centred and student-initiated learning. The topic you choose must be appropriate for your course and must be approved by the module convenor. You are assigned a supervisor with expertise in your chosen area of study.

The completed dissertation should be 5,000-7,000 words in length for the 20 credit module and 10,000-12,000 words in length for the 40 credit module. The 20 credit dissertation is for one semester only and the 40 credit version is year-long.

Recent dissertation titles include:

• To Ban or Not to Ban: Changing Motivations Behind Efforts to Censor African American Literature in America’s Public Schools, 1976-2018
• The Development of Television in the Canadian North and its Role in the Preservation of Inuit Culture
• The Feminist Justification for the Afghanistan War: The Cooperation Between the Bush Administration and the Feminist Majority Foundation
• "The Teeth of the World are Sharp”: James Baldwin’s Protest Novels
• Towards Humane Borders: Activist and NGO Responses to the Militarisation of the US-Mexico Boundary
• “A Blended World … A Safe Space for Everybody”: A Case Study of Underground Ballroom Culture
• “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues”: The Empowerment of Black Female Blues Singers - Romance or Reality?
• “Older Arts and Newer Technology”: Cultural Recoding in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

This module examines North American short stories and novels and their film adaptations, paying attention to the contexts in which both the literary and the cinematic texts are produced as well as to the analysis of the texts themselves. In particular, the module takes an interest in literary texts whose film adaptations have been produced in different national contexts to the source material.

This module will challenge students to critically engage with the period that Henry Luce referred to as the “American Century”. It will cover a range of case studies between Luce’s injunction and the subsequent US entry into World War Two in 1941 and the recent twin-crises marked by the 2008 Great Recession and the Covid-19 global pandemic. In doing so, it will prompt students to consider both the projection of American power on a global scale after 1941 and the considerable challenges that this project faced. Incorporating a series of focused case studies and reflections on the wider contexts relating to them, it will give students first-hand experience of weighing up the practical challenges US policymakers faced and the way that historians have subsequently assessed their efforts and understood their actions. 

Explore US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period.

You will examine the historical narratives of American international relations, considering the drivers behind the foreign policies of Presidents George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

More specifically, we will consider:

• Whether the post-1989 period constituted a break from previous traditions in US foreign policy, or whether there has been an essential continuity through the war on terror and beyond
• The impact of economics, geopolitics, ideology and security issues on post-1989 strategy in different regions of the world
• The impact of a new international environment, marked by the demise of bipolarity and the rise of globalisation

You'll spend around three hours per week in lectures and seminars on this module.

This module is worth 20 credits.

What is a film, television or literary classic? How has this term come under pressure and fractured over the past half century or so? In this module you will consider the concept of the mid and late twentieth century American “classic” in a variety of contrasting and overlapping contexts. These contexts will be elaborated on the basis of their formal, generic, period and/or cultural designations that will cover university and exam curricula reading lists, popular opinion and widespread critical consensus (such as the currently prevalent view, for instance, that the early twenty-first century constitutes a ‘golden age’ of US television).

This module will explore, in the broadest sense, politics and visual culture:

• how films, television, art and online forms of visual communication can be understood politically (i.e. how they say particular things about the societies they represent)
• how they present and, in some cases, comment upon specific political events and changes around the world
• how certain forms of visual culture have been produced and designed in order to act as agents of political change and activism, sometimes challenging the political structures of our society
• how individual artists, filmmakers and content producers can be said to have deliberate political motivation and intent, and the ways they interact with and are challenged by the organisations and institutions to which they are often beholden.

We will be looking at different genres, modes, forms and styles to examine how we can understand the interaction of politics and visual culture.

The magazine has been one of the most accessible and influential cultural forms in America since the mid-18th century. From the wide-ranging political and literary magazines of this founding period through the emergence of specialised and mass-market periodicals in the 19th century to the counter-cultural and consumerist magazines of the 20th century, this distinctive mode of publication has reflected the tensions and ideals of a rapidly developing society.

Using a broad range of representative magazines from different eras, this module will encourage students to get to grips with how American culture has shaped, and been shaped by, the periodical, and it will also introduce them to some of the unique literary and institutional qualities of the magazine. Primary sources covered on this module are likely to include The Dial (est. 1840), Harper's (est. 1850), The New Yorker (est. 1925), Life (est. 1936) and Rolling Stone (est. 1967).

Looked at in the context of their times, such sources show us how Americans have long engaged with and debated their own identity through the prism of print, as well as the ways in which this self-definition has changed across time. Moreover, alongside the magazine's regular testing of new political and cultural concepts we will be able to see how the periodical form itself embraced other emerging media, including illustration, photography, and popular music.

The main content-spine through each week will be a focus on changes in the nature of American journalism, the rise of modern advertising, and the development of the short story as a form, as well as the interactions between these three elements. In addition to the standard lecture/seminar set-up, the module will also incorporate a series of workshops focusing on hands-on study of hard copies of particular publications.

Jazz covers a multitude of styles from trad to free, plus any number of contemporary ‘fusions’.

We'll start by looking at its origins in ragtime and blues and then delve into a wide range of contrasting styles from 1917 to the present day. These might include:

• New Orleans and Chicago ensemble jazz
• Harlem stride piano
• swing bands
• be-bop and hard bop
• the ‘cool’ school
• modal jazz
• free jazz
• symphonic jazz
• jazz-rock and other fusion styles

We'll also take a look at jazz film scores.

Throughout the module we'll explore cultural, racial, analytical and aesthetic issues at each stage in jazz's development.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Why did National Prohibition officially begin in the United States in 1920?

What were the goals and intentions of the powerful women's reform movements and religious pressure groups calling for dramatic restrictions on alcohol?

Why was there so much political support for state and national restrictions, particularly during the First World War? Why was prohibition so hard to police during the 1920s?

The restrictions on what and how you could drink reshaped American society, politics, and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. Prohibition transformed alcohol consumption, opened up new leisure activities, and increased bootlegging, smuggling, and other criminal activities. However, popular histories and media representations of the prohibition years are full of myths and stereotypes. On this module, you will challenge these to build a better understanding of an important period in the 20th century United States.

This module is worth 20 credits.

From the Puritans to Playboy, sexuality has been a focal point in the culture, politics, and society of the United States. This module will examine Americans' differing attitudes over time toward sexuality. Representative topics covered may include marriage and adultery, homosexuality and heterosexuality, nudity, abortion, birth control, prostitution, free love, and rape.

This module examines the role played by American popular music in countercultural movements. We focus on the ways in which marginalised, subordinate or dissenting social groups have used popular music as a vehicle for self-definition and for re-negotiating their relationship to the social, economic and cultural mainstream. We explore how the mainstream has responded to music countercultures in ways that range from repression to co-optation and analyse how the music and the movements have been represented and reflected on in fiction, film, poetry, journalism and theory.  Among the key moments examined are the folk revival and the 1930s Popular Front, rock 'n' roll and desegregation in the 1950s, rock music and the 1960s counterculture, and postmodernism and identity politics in the music of the MTV age.

The way we write about art is as changeable as art itself.

Practiced by artists, poets, curators and art historians alike, art writing served a variety of purposes and audiences throughout twentieth-century America.

This module explores how art writing changed, examining it both as the crucial frame to understand twentieth-century American art, as well as an art form in its own right.

Each week you will focus on a different episode that provoked a change in art writing. You will look at key exhibitions (for example the Armory Show of 1913), artworks (for example Jackson Pollock’s first ‘drip’ painting in 1947), and texts (such as Tom Lloyd’s text ‘Black Art Notes’ from 1971).

You will learn about the transformations in the exhibition review, catalogue essay, and artist statement that followed in the wake of these events. We also track the wider socio-political developments that similarly put pressure on the form and content of art writing, ranging from the rise of the Popular Front to the Women’s Movement.

This module is worth 20 credits.