American Studies

American studies at Smith is an interdisciplinary program that studies the history, culture and society of the diverse peoples who inhabit the contested and complex geographical, political and cultural space(s) named "America." The program brings together faculty and students from a variety of academic fields, including history, English, music, art, film and media studies, indigenous studies, Asian American studies, African American studies, politics, education, women and gender studies, critical disability studies, material culture and museum studies. Thoughtfully choosing among and combining these approaches, we seek a complex and nuanced understanding of American culture that will enable students to become deliberative, critically engaged participants in the United States and the world.

Students majoring in American studies are expected to:

• Interpret culture critically, attentive to the politics and aesthetics of cultural forms, and to the social construction of taste, pleasure, desire and anxiety.
• To understand how power shapes and disguises common‐sense or taken‐for‐granted practices, assumptions and modes of expression.
• Understand how to read ideologically.
• Study history in order to understand the origins of present systems, values, desires.
• Become attentive to the different reading and interpretive strategies required of different cultural forms: textual, visual, auditory, material objects, technologies, built environments and more.
• Engage theory, through reading and writing about theoretical texts.
• Approach problems and questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
• Conduct original, contextualized and independent research, which requires the student to:
  • Identify and locate primary sources for cultural analysis.
  • Navigate archives effectively.
  • Describe—in terms of content and form—primary sources.
  • Interpret primary sources by reading them for indications of their expression of broad cultural values, anxieties and desires.
  • Formulate a research question in light of issues currently debated in the field and learn how to conduct independent research.
  • Identify and locate scholarly and critical materials relevant to research questions.
  • Understand and critique scholarly and critical arguments in the field.
  • Situate research in ongoing debates in the field.
  • Communicate persuasive and well‐grounded arguments orally and in writing.