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

Department: American Studies