American Studies

Professors Chapman (Music), Herzig (Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies), and Rice-DeFosse (French and Francophone Studies); Associate Professors Beasley, Ellasante (Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies), and Shrout (Digital and Computational Studies and History); Assistant Professor Garrison (Psychology); Sr. Lecturer Plastas (Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies, chair).

What does it mean to be “an American?” How does our understanding of American culture, and our relation to it, differ depending on historical context, social position, and the interpretive and ideological perspectives we bring to bear? American Studies pursues these questions using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, texts, performance, and material culture as points of departure for a wide-ranging exploration of American culture. While it focuses on the United States, American Studies situates the United States in a wider transnational context. In particular, American Studies explores the various ways that institutions, values and practices shape, maintain, and challenge relations of power. American Studies courses are designed to elucidate what has been rendered socially invisible.

Such discussions interrogate realities and discourses that have been deemed natural in order to expose their socially contingent character. Through their critical engagement with race, gender, sexuality, social class, disability, and other sites of identity, and with their own relation to them, students interrogate the meaning of belonging, privilege, and exclusion. Current American Studies courses focus on cultural geography and cultural politics, borderlands, diasporas, film and media, gender, history, literature, music, performance, queer theory, and race theory.

American Studies is a diverse body of interdisciplinary intellectual inquiry. This allows students to engage and direct their area of specialization in consultation with their program advisor. Below are some optional suggestions for areas of specialization within American Studies:

• Identity and Intersectionality
• Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies
• Performance
• Power and Structure
• Material Culture

More information is available on the American Studies department website.