Does San Diego State Offer a Masters Degree in American Studies... Yes! It's Called MALAS!

We often get asked here at MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences, if San Diego State offers an MA in American Studies.

Technically, the answer is no. While the Department of English and Comparative Literature used to offer a program in American Studies, that went the way of the world about the time SDSU's amazing Americanists, Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory went emeritus on us.

Today, in 2014, however, there is a way to do American Studies and receive an MA in Cultural Studies with an American Studies emphasis.   You guessed it! MALAS.  Go to our website, look around and contact our graduate director, Dr. William A. Nericcio; his email address is bnericci@mail.sdsu.edu. You will soon see that building an American Studies MA from the host of classes offered across the College of Arts and Letters and beyond is easy with MALAS. While our acronym is not officially Master of Arts in Lively American Studies, you will feel that it is by the time you finish your MA.

PS: MALAS has sent 5 graduate MAs on to PhD programs in the last two years--two in American Studies, one in Education, one in Literature, and one in Media Studies.

Today! Wednesday March 12, 2014! A MALAS Co-Sponsored Event | Christie Herring @ SDSU!!!!!

MALAS! Co-sponsoring ERIKA LOPEZ @ SDSU!!!!

more info!

https://www.facebook.com/events/1424539401123785/

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH & COMPARATIVE LITERATURE (with MALAS!!!)

IN COLLABORATION WITH SDSU DOWNTOWN GALLERY PRESENTS: 

PERSONAL NARRATIVES gallery talks featuring SDSU School of Art & Design Faculty: 

CRAIG CARLSON, DAVID HEWITT, SUSAN MERRITT

AND A SPECIAL READING/PERFORMANCE BY THE AUTHOR/ARTIST 

OF THE GIRL MUST DIE: A MONSTER GIRL MEMOIR

ERIKA LOPEZ

**Limited Seating** 

Please arrive promptly

Erika Lopez's reading is sponsored by:
SDSU Department of English & Comparative Literature
M.A.L.A.S. The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences
LGBTQ Research Consortium
SDSU Press
SDSU School of Theatre, Television, and Film
Women's Studies Department, SDSU

Watch that Pitchfork!!!! New Seminar for MALAS @ SDSU: Satan and Satanism!!! Spring 2014 with Professor Rebecca Moore, Religious Studies, SDSU

Spring 2014
Satan and Satanism
Professor Rebecca Moore, Religious Studies
4pm-6:40pm, Mondays

This course goes beyond the fiendish man in the red suit to examine a number of historical, philosophical, religious, and moral issues. These include the nature of evil, the personification of evil, and the projection of evil described by Jung as the “shadow side” of the human personality. It tracks the historical development of the character called Satan and various movements of his followers. It considers how the Other is demonized by association with the devil. It concludes by studying contemporary uses and appropriations of Satan in popular culture.

Rebecca Moore has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Marquette University (1996), where her specialty was Jewish and Christian dialogue. She has written and published on medieval Christian theologians and their debt to Jewish biblical commentary. In the past five years she has turned her attention to the study of New Religious Movements, where she has concentrated on explicating a group called Peoples Temple and the events at Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978. This effort can be seen on the website http://jonestown.sdsu.edu. Recently she has returned to questions of inter-religious dialogue. She co-authored the book A Portable God: The Origin of Judaism and Christianity, with SDSU colleague Risa Levitt Kohn. The book examines how first-century Judaic groups interpreted Israelite religion in a new historical context. Home Page: http://kali.sdsu.edu

New Spring 2014 Seminar on Social Justice and the Environment! MALAS 600B: Water Wars: Environmental Exploitation, Resource Scarcity, and Human Rights | Dr. Michael Tiboris, Philosophy @ SDSU

MALAS 600B: Water Wars: Environmental Exploitation, Resource Scarcity, and Human Rights

Dr. Michael Tiboris

Southern California should be impossible. Annual rainfall here is similar to Iraq, and the main sources of water are a vast and expensive system of aqueducts (some of which are 1,400 miles long, drawing water from the Colorado River basin) propped up by a massive energy system and a management system which is not entirely democratic or technocratic.  And yet, it is one of the most successful desert civilizations in the history of the planet.  As the population swells, water consumption is on pace to far exceed current supply.  In other parts of the world, for example India and Bolivia, similar crises have degenerated into, at times, violent political conflict.  Why does this seem unlikely to happen here, or is it just a matter of time, or of history repeating itself?  What does the history of water conflict in California's past say about the same in its future?

This course blends resources from history, philosophy, economics, environmental science, and a little bit of poetry to investigate issues of justice in times of resource scarcity. Students will learn about the surprisingly fraught history of water reclamation in the western United States. They will confront questions about whether water is a private commodity or a public good, what it means to "preserve" a "natural" environment, and whether access to water is a basic human right. Course texts include works of social history, environmentalist journalism, economics, philosophy, and contemporary research in the natural sciences all aimed at answering the question: who owns the water and what do we do when it runs out?

Michael Tiboris, Lecturer in Philosophy

Dr. Tiboris's work is broadly ethical, focusing on issues of moral responsibility and autonomous agency in juvenile justice and education.  He also has significant research interests in the ethics and economics of resource scarcity.  After completing his graduate degree at UCSD (2012) he was awarded a UC postdoc with support from a grant by the Spencer Foundation to write about autonomy as a goal in educational policy.  This year he is a fellow at the SDSU Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs specializing in ethics in educational policy.  He teaches courses in ethical theory, applied ethics, and political philosophy. An example of his recent work can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/japp.12046/abstract.  

NEW Spring 2014 MALAS Seminar: "God's Fist! Religion in United States Empire" with Professor Ed Blum, History, SDSU

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Religion in United States Empire is a reading-intensive course that focuses upon intersections of religion, colonialism, imperialism, and foreign relations throughout "American" history. Our emphasis will be on secondary sources to obtain theoretical understandings of these subjects and enough historical evidence to evaluate the theories.

Edward J. Blum (University of Kentucky, 2003) is a historian of race and religion in the United States. He is the author (with Paul Harvey) of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America(2012), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet(2007), and Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005). He is also the co-editor (with Paul Harvey) of The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History (2012), (with Jason R. Young) The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections (2009), and (with W. Scott Poole) Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (2005). Blum has been awarded the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities by the Council of Graduate Schools for the best first book by a historian published between 2002 and 2009 (2009), the Peter Seaborg Award for the best book in Civil War Studies (2006), and the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in southern history (2004). Twice he has been recognized by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights and in 2007 was named by the History News Network a “top young historian.” He has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the classroom, Blum engages the past in a variety of ways, whether through music and images or debates and historical simulations. His courses include Antebellum America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, American religious history, and history through biography. He is a co-editor of the teaching blog and with Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman and Jon Gjerde of Major Problems in American History.

Our Newest MALAS Alum! Danielle Johnson!

Post by M.A.L.A.S. The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

REBOOT: 21st Century Digital Lit | Spring 2014 MALAS Seminar!!! JESSICA PRESSMAN @ SDSU with the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences!

REBOOT: 21st Century Digital Lit

Are you digitally literate? You use digital technology, but do you think critically about how and why you use it? Do you understand how your digital tech use, patterns, and online persona impacts the way you think, read, and write? Enroll in this new, experimental course, and you'll learn how to think critically about 21st- century digital culture and its place in media history. This class pursues digital literacy as a concept and a practice, a topic and a skill-set. Our goal is to gain the critical perspective and literacy tools needed to understand, critique, and actively participate in—rather than just blindly and passively use—our contemporary digital media. We will study contemporary discourse about attention/distraction, hyper/deep reading, mobile/stationary media, convergence culture, etc. by putting it in context and tracing its precursors. We will read and view a wide range of genres across medial formats: media studies scholarship, cultural criticism, digital literature, youtube animations, interface design, and more. In the process, we will learn to think critically and creatively about cultural, communicative, and cognitive consequences of digital technologies and our contemporary technoculture. We will not only study digital literacy but acquire it.

Jessica Pressman researches and teaches twentieth- and twenty-first century experimental American literature, digital literature, and media theory.  She is currently a Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at UCSD. She was Assistant Professor of English at Yale University (2008-2012) and received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA (2007). Her monograph on digital poetics, Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (2014); Transverse Reading: a Collaborative Case Study of William Poundstone’s “Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit],” co-written with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, is under contract with Iowa University Press; Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in a Postprint Era, co-edited with N. Katherine Hayles, was just published with Minnesota University Press (December 2013). She is currently working on a manuscript that examines the fetishization of the book object in 21st-century print and digital literary culture.  Pressman is Associate Editor of Fiction for Contemporary Literature and Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly. She is Board Member for both the Electronic Literature Organization (www.eliterature.org) and the online journal of digital art Dichtung-Digital (http://www.dichtung-digital.de/).  Her full CV can be found at www.jessicapressman.com

Jennifer Terry ON BEING NAKED @ SDSU | Another MALAS Co-sponsored Lecture!

ALVARO HUERTA Reading/Signing his New SDSU Press Book!!!

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MALAS Fall 2013 Featured Lecture: Mark Schwartz on Disability Studies and TOUCH OF EVIL

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Traversing the Corporeal Borders Between the “Half-Breed” and The Ice Cream Soda

A Disability Studies Critique of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil by Mark Schwartz

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 7, 2013 @ 11am in GMCS 333 on the SDSU Main Campus

“Traversing the Corporeal Borders Between the ‘Half-Breed’ and The Ice Cream Soda” examines how Orson Welles’s film noir masterwork Touch of Evil (1958) embodies several major tensions in disability studies critical discourses. Schwartz provides a brief primer on eugenics and disability history, and shows how they relate to Welles’ film. Welles managed to jam a litany of challenging and still timely ideas into one narrative: drug culture in border towns, racial stereotypes, subjugation of the disempowered through abuse of power. It is a thick and textured work that yields great fodder for critical analysis. As the film noir genre frequently offers an antagonistic view to the norms of the community, Touch of Evil functions to disturb notions of class, gender, and race. While Welles may not have had eugenics on his mind when he rendered this tale of corruption and murder, he certainly plays with some central ideas in disability critical theory, like how the hegemonic role of the middle class helps to reinforce perceptions of normalcy, and how those with different bodies are often relegated to the margins. Welles offers a complex view of the border, unsettling how the viewer thinks about citizenship, power and the body.

 
Mark Schwartz has worked for over twenty years in the disability services field in New York City and earned a Master of Arts in Disability Studies from the City University of New York’s School for Professional Studies. He currently works as the assistant director of the Clinic Program for the Shield Institute, an outpatient clinic that serves children and adults with intellectual disabilities. He has written extensively about complex and frequently deleterious representations of disability in culture and language, and how these representations often reinforce dangerously reductive and demeaning notions about disability.  He has also produced videos exploring these themes that have been used as training material within his field.

A Fall 2013 Feature Lecture from MALAS! The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences @ SDSU

MALAS Co-Sponsors STINSON Lecture @ SDSU

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Alondra Nelson: Featured Co-Sponsored MALAS Lecture @ SDSU | Sisters in Black Berets and White Coats: Engendering the Black Panther Party's Health Politics

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