专业描述

American Studies will teach you how to think expansively and critically about American culture. Our courses will allow you to understand the patterns of American culture as they have changed over time, and as they are reflected in the particular experiences of Americans from different regions, social classes, races, ethnicities, genders and national backgrounds. The major will immerse you in the subject of American culture, as well as in the interdisciplinary methods of American Studies, which seek insight through multiple perspectives on phenomena, events, or currents in American culture. You will be exposed to several disciplinary perspectives through the Contributing Courses and also to models for integrating such perspectives in the Core Course, the Introduction, and the Senior Symposium. Our major is designed to help you explore the borders of American nationality as well as the contexts in which the American experience has unfolded. Our faculty have a wide range of scholarly interests and are affiliated with the English, Women's Studies, Sociology, Religion and History Departments at Emory. The major will emphasize the interdisciplinary study of cultural forms, practices, institutions, technologies, and social movements in American history and culture. Both individual courses and the program as a whole will give special attention to the interactions of gender, place and region, race and ethnicity, and social class as cultural patterns. While we take the United States as our primary field of reference, we do so understanding that the internal borders of region and the external borders of nation have changed over time. We thus encourage work that explores America as a place, a population, and a set of historical events, and we will encourage each major to include courses with a comparative dimension or ones that offer an international context for the development of American culture. We seek to give students a broad base in the sweep of American history (in our introductory course and in the requirement of one other course in American History) and exposure to the way that different disciplines offer insight into American history (hence the requirement to take one contributing course in social science and one in humanities). In the core courses, students will choose from a range of deeply interdisciplinary courses as they learn to apply the basic models of the introductory course to a variety of events and social phenomena in American history. The senior symposium will function as a capstone seminar, one that will bring students to a certain level of sophistication about American Studies as a scholarly field. In that seminar, students will learn about the history of American Studies and participate in a research seminar around a common theme (such as the legacy of slavery or the Vietnam War). American Studies began as an intellectual movement in universities and colleges and there are over two hundred American Studies programs in the United States (and even more abroad). It is therefore a degree that is recognizable to professional schools, gradaute programs, and employers. It can prepare students for a wide range of careers: in law, business, teaching, journalism, the arts, philanthropy and museums. Our majors will be taught how to think critically about the complex social system in which they live, which is an exemplary way to combine a liberal arts education with vocational interests.