American Studies

Professors Bruce (Religious Studies), Chapman (Music), and Rice-DeFosse (French and Francophone Studies); Associate Professor Beasley (American Studies, chair); Assistant Professors Evans (Dance), Garrison (Politics), and Shrout (Digital and Computational Studies); Visiting Lecturer Petrella (American Studies)

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.