Expressway Worlds: Landscape and Life on the Margins of U.S. Highways

This course explores the history, legacy, and material presence of U.S. highways from the mid-twentieth to the present. Bridging diverse fields and ways of knowing, from cultural history to road ecology, it endeavors to de-familiarize a ubiquitous feature of life and landscape in the contemporary United States, the federal highway system, and invites students to critically re-encounter the same. We will practice seeing, hearing, and feeling the lively traces of human and multi-species habitation in our midst. And we will consider the effects of interstate roads across time and space; on societies, ecologies, and landscapes.