It is a highly complex psychological, social, and philosophical experience that we will consider in this course, through a range of novels, films, and artworks from the 1860s to the present day, with an emphasis on American popular culture. We will not spend much time worrying about the unresolved question of extra-terrestrial life; rather, we will use the term "alien" in order to take a close, critical look at our own world and discuss how interactions with aliens (direct or indirect, benign or hostile) affect our suspicious, hospitable, ethical, or exotic fascination with other worlds. We will discuss mass migrations, wars, and the current refugee crisis, and how these political problems are reflected in fictional representations of alien invasions. A major, and recurring, theme of the course will be the use of modern technology and networked media to contact and visualize far-flung strangers. We will discuss Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds (Halloween, 1938), Albert Camus' existentialist novel The Stranger (1942), Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Ridley Scott's film Alien (1979). We will also touch on some musical performances that embrace the iconic appearance and sound of the alien as a form of resistance, for example in the work of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra and Janelle Monáe.