Department: American Studies
Coordinator: Professor Ava Chin
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Email: americanstudies@gc.cuny.edu
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Americanstudies
FACULTY
Ammiel Alcalay, Herman Bennett, Martin Burke, Kandice Chuh, Alyson Cole, Cathy Davidson, Marc Dolan, Duncan Faherty, Michelle Fine, Ruth Gilmore, Matthew Gold, Cindi Katz, Thomas Kessner, Wayne Koestenbaum, Gail Levin, Eric Lott, Ruth O'Brien, Richard Powers, David Reynolds, Joan Richardson, Robyn Spencer, Jeffrey Taylor, Lucia Trimbur, David Waldstreicher, Amy Wan
THE PROGRAM
The Certificate in American Studies is available to all students. Students do not necessarily have to be working toward the certificate to take courses offered by the American Studies Certificate Program.
The American Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center prepares students to teach and research in American Studies by providing grounding in the genealogies, key questions, and research practices comprising the field. Because American Studies is a thoroughly interdisciplinary field, students in the certificate program gain experience and training in interdisciplinary methods. Students and faculty from the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. programs participate in the certificate program, including those from Anthropology, Art History, Earth and Environmental Science, English, History, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Theatre and Performance, and Urban Education. Students enrolled in any of the Graduate Center’s programs are eligible for enrollment in the certificate program.
Resources for Research and Training
American Studies Certificate Program students have access to the rich and diverse resources available in New York City. These include not only the New York Public Library, with its archival collections and dedicated branches like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, but also the Morgan Library and Museum in near proximity, as well as access to the numerous major museums comprising New York City. Faculty members teaching both at the Graduate Center and across the CUNY system also serve as vital resources for American Studies students, representing as they do the enormous breadth and diversity of work unfolding within American Studies. Students also have opportunity to engage scholars from both within and outside of the CUNY system through lectures, seminars, and other events regularly organized by the program. The American Studies program at CUNY also brings American Studies scholars from outside the University to the Graduate Center in a continuing program of guest lectures and seminars.
SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CERTIFICATE IN AMERICAN STUDIES
Required Courses Successful completion of four courses is required of certificate students, including ASCP 81000: Introduction to American Studies Genealogies and Methods; ASCP 81500: Key Questions in American Studies; ASCP 82000: Research in American Studies; and, a fourth course that addresses American Studies, broadly construed, chosen by the student and approved by the program coordinator.
Research Statement In the semester in which they anticipate completion of their degrees and certificate program requirements, students are required to submit to the coordinator a maximum 500-word statement reflecting on the relationship of their research to American Studies, broadly construed.
Courses
Required Courses
ASCP 81000 Introduction to American Studies: Genealogies and Methods
3 credits
ASCP 81500 Key Questions in American Studies
3 credits
ASCP 82000 Research in American Studies
3 credits
ASCP 89000 Dissertation Workshop
30 hours, 0 credits
Recent Representative Courses
19th-Century American Women Writers
20th-Century Black Intellectual Thought
American Aesthetics
Art in America Between the Wars
The Black Pacific
The Body in American Visual Culture 1750–1950
Cyborgs and the Cinematic Imagination
Ethnology and Ethnography of the U.S.A
Federal Period: Architecture and Material Culture
Film Noir in Context
Hawthorne and Melville
History of American Theatre
History of Women and Families: U.S., 1820–Present
Integration and Its Discontents
Jazz and American Writing
Material and Visual Culture of the U.S.
Minstrelsy from the Civil War to the Present
Modern American History, 1945–90
Painting and Sculpture in the Gilded Age
Racial Capitalism
Realism and Naturalism in Film and Literature
Religion in Early American Republic 1797–1844
Social History of the Roots of Mass Culture
Spaces and Cultures of the American Empire
Themes in American Culture (ASCP 81500)
The U.S. as a Welfare State in Comparative Perspective
U.S. Public Policy