Majors

Foundation Requirements   

During their sophomore year, students in this major should take the following
sequence of courses:

- AMS 200 or one from the U.S. History Sequence HST280/281/282
- AMS 201, American Experience I (Winter)
- AMS 202, American Experience II (Spring)


During their junior year:
        - AMS 392, Internship --or--
        - AMS 300, Domestic Studies

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Concentrations

Students will choose from among the following six concentrations:

Cultural History and Literature
Nature, Environment, and Culture
Politics, Institutions, and Values
Popular Culture
Race and Ethnicity
Work, Technology and Society

Students are required to take six courses within the concentration and to submit a portfolio on the concentration courses.

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Electives and Distribution Requirements

In consultation with an advisor, students will select three additional courses from outside of the concentration. For both the concentration and electives, the courses must be distributed among at least three departments.

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American Studies 301: Senior Seminar

Course Objectives: The overall objectives of the AMS Senior Seminar are to synthesize or select from multidisciplinary experiences to provide the background and climate for informed, independent research in American Studies. Within that overall objective, this section has six basic goals:

• To reflect on the contributions of different disciplinary understandings and methods.

• To formulate a multicultural perspective informed by critical reading and thinking skills.

• To understand the theories and methodologies, both historical and current, within culture studies/culture theory/cultural criticism as they apply to American Studies and to current controversies within the field.

• To place others' work and our own in the spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches to American Studies.

• To conceive and carry out a project of theoretically informed independent, interdisciplinary research, related to the question--"What does it mean to be an American?"--presenting first the concept, then work in progress, and finally a scholarly paper to the seminar for other participants' response and criticism.

• To integrate our individual multidisciplinary experiences and research in class discussions which illuminate and enlarge the understanding of our individual projects.

Description: The Seminar will move through a four-part structure:

• We begin with readings which outline and discuss the contributions of various disciplines to American Studies and the history of and conflicts within "schools" of American Studies cultural criticism--from the traditional "image and symbol" school of synthetic generalizations about America (e.g., Smith, Marx, Lewis); through dissenting voices, reconstructing image and symbol; through universalist vs.particularist, hegemony vs. pluralism, culture vs. cultures; to the possibility of new syntheses; to deconstruction's claim of the impossibility of generalization.

• Class members choose from these outlines those critics and works which complement their own research interests--reading and reporting on their insights and problems.

• With the first presentations of concepts for individual research projects, the class members decide on the readings we will share in common to integrate our separate projects and to prepare ourselves as responders and critics. This program of reading will be the basis of class discussion as seminar participants work on individual research.

• Individual research projects will be presented to the seminar--for response, ideas, and criticism--as work in progress and as completed projects (last two weeks of the quarter).
  
  

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