Interdisciplinary Thinking
Students interested in understanding American experience often find themselves stimulated equally by their courses in American history, literature, art history, women’s studies, sociology, and so on. However, the prospect of having to choose one of those disciplines as a major may seem too restrictive. The American Studies major offers an interdisciplinary solution to this problem.
American Studies takes as its subject American culture. Our aim is to make each student a culture critic, a person capable of bringing a thoughtful and humane approach to bear upon our understanding of the varieties of American experience. Making connections is the way we like to characterize our work in American Studies, and we see three related ways of doing that.
First, the major teaches interdisciplinary thinking. The present organization of the university separates intellectual approaches to American experience into discrete departments, or “disciplines.” American Studies works to reconnect the disciplines that study “culture” as they converge and contribute to our understanding of American practices, beliefs, values, and institutions. Students come to understand, for example, how the study of “cultural discourses” connects historians, literary critics, mass media critics, rhetoricians, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and others in their study of American culture.
Second, the major shows the student how to understand the connections between American cultural systems. Students learn to perceive the relationships between ideas in several cultural systems (science, religion, social thought, political thought) and expressive texts in art, architecture, music, dance, poetry, drama, and fiction. Students come to understand the various realms of culture—high culture, popular (or mass-mediated) culture, and folk culture—and the complex relationships between and among these realms.
Third, the major seeks, in C. Wright Mill’s words, “to connect private troubles with public issues.” We do this on several levels. American culture criticism is a reflexive study; that is, we study ourselves as well as other political and social communities. Students learn to engage in culture criticism that shows how private lives and local cultures are enmeshed in larger public cultures. Private and public cultures sometimes are in conflict, so we also study the continuities and discontinuities between the two.
For more information, please see our handbook.