The preceding diagram presents an overview of the department's
intellectual interests. At the center are the two large themes, the cultures
of everyday life and cultural constructions of identity and difference,
which simultaneously focus and connect the individual research programs
of both faculty and students. On the periphery are several "lenses" through
which we explore the central themes. Each of these lenses is comparable
to an area of concentration with a particular set of questions and methodology.
As American Studies is an interdisciplinary field, faculty and students
combine two or more of these concentrations in research and teaching. For more information about how our faculty engage in research areas, please visit their individual pages. Our list of current graduate students also provides a selected overview of graduate research.
In addition to the interdisciplinary connections that faculty make in
their own research, faculty and graduate students also benefit from collaborating
with one another. Much of this exchange takes place within and between
the Department's working groups, individuals' own research programs, and
our pedagogical workshops and innovations. For example, one particularly
vital locus of interdisciplinary exchange has centered on cyberculture
studies and the application of new information technologies to both research
and teaching. Three collectives support this work: the Cyberculture Working
Group (CWG), the Virtual Greenbelt Collaborative (VG), and The Mini-Center
for Teaching Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (Mini-Center).
Student research on online communities and student/faculty introduction
of information technologies (e.g. web-based teaching for material culture
classes) in AMST classes stimulated our initial interest in cyberculture
studies. From this interest several projects developed: Virtual
Greenbelt, a virtual museum that we use for both research and teaching;
the Resource
Center for Cyberculture Studies, founded by recent AMST Ph.D. David
Silver and still the central scholarly site available online for research
in cyberculture; a series of cyber-ethnographies undertaken by faculty
and graduate students; and two national cyberculture conferences, which
have drawn leading scholars in the field. On the basis of our collaborative
work harnessing information technologies to pedagogy, a group of faculty
and graduate students won the campus award for Innovation in Teaching
in 1998. Our research and teaching on cyberculture have provided the Department
with an international profile as a vital location for pursuing cyberculture
scholarship.
A second locus for interdisciplinary interaction in the Department focuses
on a group of faculty and students whose research explores the connections
among cultural landscape studies, ethnography, foodways, historic preservation,
heritage tourism, and race. This work centers on the Material
Culture/Visual Culture Research Program Area at the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, the Life
Writing Project, and a series of graduate seminars, including AMST
603, Current Approaches to American Studies. Students and faculty have
discussed common readings, presented and critiqued each others' research,
and sponsored invited speakers whose research supports these topics. The
MC/VC, Life Writing, and Cyberculture working groups co-sponsored a national
conference in March, 2002 entitled "Sites of Memory: Race, Ethnicity,
Place, and Life Stories."
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