The Transnational Practice of U.S. Popular Culture

This graduate seminar examines popular culture within a transnational framework, exploring both the founding texts in the field and the latest works by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and communications scholars. Topics include the economics of the culture industry, globalization/cultural imperialism/domestication, audience research, and the history of cultural flows, from circuses to Bollywood. Students can take the class as either a reading or project course. Assignments include a short theoretical paper considering definitions (popular culture v. mass media, for example) and either a research paper/project or an annotated bibliography.