What is Cultural Studies?

'Culture,' writes Raymond Williams, 'is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.' He says this because the word can refer to so many different things: art and literature, national identity, language, community, food, even the habits and routines that comprise our everyday lives. How then should we study it? This course explores multiple answers to this question by tracing the history of Cultural Studies in its interdisciplinary disposition across the humanities and interpretative social sciences. Course materials will engage literature, film, contemporary media, and ethnographic writing to explore what Cultural Studies has come to know about the complexity of its primary object of study. There are no prerequisites.