Director: Lisa Gail Collins;

Steering Committee: Lisa Brawley (Urban Studies and Associate Dean of the Faculty ), Amy Chin (American Studies and Asian Studies), Lisa Gail Collins (Art), Eve Dunbar^ab (English), Gordon Hall^b (Art), William Hoynes^ab (Sociology), Jonathon S. Kahn^ab (Religion), Erin McCloskey (Education), Molly S. McGlennen (English), Justin Patch (Music), Hiram Perez^ab (English), Allison Puglisi^ab (History), Tyrone Simpson, II^a (English), Mallory Whiteduck (Political Science), Kimberly Williams Brown (Education).

Participating Faculty:  John Andrews (Sociology), April Beisaw^a (Anthropology), Colleen Ballerino Cohen (Anthropology), Brian Godfrey (Earth Science and Geography), Wendy Graham (English), Maria Hantzopoulos (Education), Amitava Kumar (English), Candy Martinez (Latin American and Latinx Studies), Rachel Silverbloom (Philosophy), David Tavárez (Anthropology), Luisa Valle (Art).

^a   On leave 2024/25, first semester

^b   On leave 2024/25, second semester

^ab On leave 2024/25
 

American Studies is an interdisciplinary field defined both by its objects of study - the processes, places, and people that comprise the United States - and by a mode of inquiry that moves beyond the scope of a single disciplinary approach or critical methodology. American Studies majors develop a rich understanding of the complex histories that have resulted from the conflict and confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultures throughout the Western Hemisphere, and explore U.S. nation-formation in relation to global flows of American cultural, economic and military power. An individually designed course of study, which is the hallmark of the program, allows students to forge multidisciplinary approaches to the particular issues that interest them.

The American Studies program offers both core program courses and cross-listed electives via the following inter-related rubrics:

The United States in a global context: the role of the United States outside of its national borders, the flow of peoples, ideas, goods and capital both within and beyond the United States; explorations of historic and contemporary diasporas; contexts and cultures of U.S. militarism and anti-militarism.

Spaces, places, and borders: explorations of particular places and processes of place-making in the U.S.; focus on borders and borderlands as contested geographical and figurative spaces of cultural, political, and economic exchange.

U.S. cultural formations: investigations of literary, visual, audio, and performance cultures, and their interaction; U.S. popular culture, music and media.

Identity, difference & power: the contest to extend the promises of abstract citizenship to the particular experiences of embodied subjects; shifting politics of U.S. immigration; explorations of the production, representation and experience of race and ethnicity in the U.S., including structural dimensions of race and racism; investigations of the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, and other systems of difference.

U.S. Intellectual traditions and their discontents: explorations of American religious, cultural and political thought; traditions of social and political protests; discourses of sovereignty, liberty, federalism, individualism, rights.

The program also offers a correlate sequence in Native American Studies which enables students to examine Indigenous cultures, politics, histories, and literatures, in a primarily North American context. Students electing the correlate sequence are trained in the methodology of Native American Studies as a means to critically assess colonial discourses, examine the many ways Native peoples have contributed to and shaped North American culture, and analyze and honor the autonomy and sovereignty of Indigenous nations, peoples, and thought.

The American Studies program values close faculty-student interaction. Courses utilize a range of collaborative learning strategies; mentored independent senior work is an integral component of the major.

Programs

Major

• •  American Studies Major

Correlate Sequence in Native American Studies

• •  Native American Studies Correlate Sequence

Approved Courses

• •  Approved Courses for the Native American Studies Correlate Sequence

Courses

American Studies: I. Introductory

• •  AMST 100 - Introduction to American Studies
• •  AMST 102 - Introduction to Asian American Studies
• •  AMST 105 - Introduction to Native American Studies
• •  AMST 160 - Art and Storytelling
• •  AMST 170 - Introduction to Native American History
• •  AMST 177 - Special Topics

American Studies: II. Intermediate

• •  AMST 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms
• •  AMST 204 - Intersections of Our Homes, Schools, and Communities
• •  AMST 207 - Commercialized Childhoods
• •  AMST 208 - Demilitarizing the Pacific
• •  AMST 213 - Indigenous Environmental Activism
• •  AMST 214 - History of American Jazz
• •  AMST 215 - Global Indigenous Film
• •  AMST 216 - Language Revitalization
• •  AMST 217 - Studies in Popular Music
• •  AMST 219 - Queer of Color Critique
• •  AMST 222 - The Politics of Borders
• •  AMST 231 - Native American Literature
• •  AMST 232 - Asian American Women’s Oral History
• •  AMST 233 - Museums, Collections, Ethics
• •  AMST 235 - Picturing Transnational Indigenous Sovereignty in the Americas
• •  AMST 236 - Native North America
• •  AMST 239 - Feeling the Present: Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Social Life
• •  AMST 240 - Italy and its Migrations: Stories of Italian Emigration and Immigration
• •  AMST 241 - Asian American Women and Gender History
• •  AMST 248 - The Book in America
• •  AMST 250 - American Empire, Culture and Labor
• •  AMST 251 - Introduction to American Art
• •  AMST 254 - Memory and Justice in Latin America and North America
• •  AMST 262 - Native American Women
• •  AMST 264 - Apocalypse Now: Finding Agency and Hope in a Deteriorating World
• •  AMST 265 - Decolonizing the Exhibition: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Indigenous Art
• •  AMST 266 - Art, Urgency, and Everyday Life in the United States
• •  AMST 267 - Topics in Gender, Media, Culture
• •  AMST 271 - Native American Visual Sovereignty
• •  AMST 273 - Critical Ethnic Studies Curricula for Secondary Schools
• •  AMST 274 - Reading and Writing American Memoir
• •  AMST 276 - How to Write a Black Memoir
• •  AMST 280 - Reading New York City: Landscapes of Power
• •  AMST 284 - History of American Environmentalism(s)
• •  AMST 287 - Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Modern America
• •  AMST 290 - Community-Engaged Learning
• •  AMST 298 - Independent Study

American Studies: III. Advanced

• •  AMST 288 - Public Health and Social Welfare Policy in Modern America
• •  AMST 302 - Senior Project Intensive
• •  AMST 313 - Multidisciplinary Research Methods
• •  AMST 314 - History of Asian American Social Movements
• •  AMST 316 - Senior Project Lab Intensive
• •  AMST 317 - Museums in a Time of Change
• •  AMST 329 - American Literary Realism
• •  AMST 336 - Black Ecologies
• •  AMST 338 - Debt and Indebtedness in Asian America
• •  AMST 340 - Dave the Potter
• •  AMST 352 - Indigenous Literatures of the Americas
• •  AMST 355 - Twenty- and Twenty-First Century Poetry
• •  AMST 359 - Who Cares?
• •  AMST 360 - Memory Work
• •  AMST 365 - Racial Borderlands
• •  AMST 366 - Art and Activism in the U.S.
• •  AMST 369 - Thinking Doing: Research and Creative Practice
• •  AMST 379 - War and Adoption
• •  AMST 380 - Race, Nation, and Religion in America
• •  AMST 383 - Indigenous New York
• •  AMST 385 - Seminar in American Art
• •  AMST 399 - Senior Independent Work