This course will focus on the interdisciplinary, and still-emerging, field of cultural studies. Moving through the evolution of the critical discipline, which integrates its Marxist inceptions in 1950s Britain, its post-colonial and post-structuralist inclinations on the Continent in the 70s and 80s, and its contemporary multidimensional applications in places as different as the US and Hong Kong, this course will utilize the various discourses of culture and pop culture (including theory, the novel, and film) to excavate topics like stardom, the chic, the bourgeois, urbanism, democracy, globalism, reality television, mass identity, and eroticism. Students will be encouraged to develop their own informed ways of reading “culture” in its numerous modalities.