American Studies at Hampshire College

American Studies is an interdisciplinary investigation of history, literature, politics, and culture in the United States and larger Americas in an increasingly complex, interconnected world. American Studies is a form of critical citizenship. Students are encouraged to draw from a range of disciplines in their efforts to analyze and interpret America’s past and present. We believe that the study of the United States must be pushed into a hemispheric context and global context, positioning the U.S. against as well as exploring its links to Asia; Canada and Latin America; the Caribbean; and Europe. We weigh the significance of empire in "our" history. We ask students to ponder the significance of diaspora, migration, and globalization, or the cross-border flows of people, information, and commodities, for national cultures and nationalism. We develop interdisciplinary methodologies that encourage a careful, critical reflection on the meaning of the terms "United States," "America," and "American." American Studies no longer borrows exclusively from English and history, but also incorporates approaches and ideas from, for instance, anthropology; religion; critical theory and philosophy; folklore; ethnomusicology; visual studies and art history; gender; ethnic and race studies; film and media studies; and the study of other languages and literatures, thus forging fresh and creative syntheses. We seek to prepare students to become literate, critical, and creative thinkers; effective writers; and responsible citizens in an increasingly complex world.

Many courses offered through Hampshire’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies and School of Social Sciences encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the study of American history, politics, literature, and culture.

Students in American Studies engage in an interdisciplinary approach to American literature and culture. Several core seminars on models, methods, and materials for interdisciplinary study, plus courses from other relevant disciplines, provide the groundwork for students to pursue theoretically informed, integrative research into their special interests.

Student Project Titles

 * Austin Highway: Twilight of an American Main Street
 * Histories of Little Compton, Rhode Island
 * Nazis and Cowboys: A Comparison of Lebensraum and Manifest Destiny Ideologies
 * Buried Sunshine: Gender, Power, and Silence in the West Virginia Mine Wars
 * The Trotters of Boston: Fighting Jim Crow from “Freedom’s Birthplace”
 * On 23rd Street: A Psychological Portrait of a Chinese American Family from Brooklyn
 * Musical Communities and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

Featured Faculty Profiles
Susan Tracy Professor of American Studies

Wilson Valentin-Escobar Assistant Professor of Sociology and American Studies

Rebecca Miller Assistant Professor of Music of the Americas

Sample First-Year Course
Reimagining American Literature and Identity This class is an introduction to and expands conventional understandings of twentieth-century American literature. It focuses on representations of diverse American experiences. How would typical approaches to American literature change when we incorporate literature written by women, immigrants, and persons of color? How would we consider racial, national, gendered, and classed identities as part of American literature?

We will begin with short stories by Flannery O?Connor, Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, and Philip Roth that address these questions. Then we will read novels written by American immigrant and exile writers, such as Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manuel Puig, and Edwidge Danticat as well as mainstream Anglo- and African-American writers, such as John Updike and Colson Whitehead, to interrogate how these voices engage questions of nation, exile, home & belonging. This course investigates and recasts what is American Literature. It is also writing intensive and includes writing workshops.

Sample Courses at Hampshire

 * American Literary Landscapes
 * American Strings: Old Time & Bluegrass
 * American Voices, American Lives
 * Border Matters: Mexico & the United States
 * The Contested American Countryside
 * Directing Contemporary American Drama
 * Ecology of New England Old Growth Forests
 * Introduction to American Studies
 * The “Good War:” Interrogating the History of the Homefront During WWII
 * Mapping Jewish-American Generations
 * Media in a Time of War: WWII & U.S.
 * Popular Culture
 * One Nation Indivisible: Federal Indian Law,
 * Tribal Sovereignty & Individual Rights
 * The Politics of the Second World War
 * Southern History and Literature
 * Southern Writers: A Sense of Place
 * This Land is Your Land: Land & Property in America
 * U.S. Labor History
 * U.S. Literature Between the Wars
 * U.S. Literature Since 1960
 * Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives: Biocultural
 * Dialogues of Women’s Health in America

Through the Consortium

 * The American Dream (AC)
 * Asian Pacific American Studies (AC)
 * Globalization and Culture in the U.S. (SC)
 * Methods in American Studies (SC)
 * Seminar in American Orientalisms (MHC)

Facilities and Resources
The Five College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas (CISA) is dedicated to new teaching and scholarship on the Americas. Instead of adopting a North-South approach, CISA has developed a triangular model for its work, where the three sides are formed by the Old World (Africa, Asia, Europe), the polities of the New World, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

This conception of the Americas as a crossroads seeks to promote an awareness of the historical and material inter-relationality of citizenship, migration, diaspora, and nationhood. In addition to a series of public events, CISA hosts a seminar series open to all Five College faculty. CISA also sponsors an annual student symposium with a comparatist focus, held each spring, which gathers students from the Five College region together in order to share their work and ideas in a public forum.

The Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program enables students to pursue concentrated study of the experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the Americas. Through courses chosen in consultation with their campus program advisers, students can learn to appreciate Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) cultural and artistic expressions, understand and critique the racial formation of Asian/Pacific/Americans, and investigate how international conflicts, global economic systems, and ongoing migration affect A/P/A communities and individuals and their intersections with others.

Drawing upon diverse faculty, archival, and community-based resources, the Five College program in Asian/Pacific/American Studies encourages students not only to develop knowledge of the past experiences of Asian/Pacific/Americans, but also to act with responsible awareness of their present material conditions.

The U.S. Southwest and Mexico Program, housed by the Hampshire College School of Natural Science, provides support and opportunities for students and others to learn about and carry out research in the Greater Southwest, an area encompassing the American Southwest and Mexico. This distinctive program directs and supports interdisciplinary research done largely in collaboration with partnership organizations on both sides of the border. Hampshire College is committed to engaging in the international debate concerning migration and displacement of people, and the transnational implications and consequences of living within national and political borders.

In a departure from “area studies,” this program seeks to examine boundaries and borders using the Greater Southwest as a starting point and to provide a productive arena where this can take place. This program facilitates active engagement of students with their education by “moving the classroom” to locations in the Southwest and in Mexico where educational opportunities in this area of study are exponentially expanded.

Information Quoted From http://www.hampshire.edu/hacu/8594.htm and http://www.hampshire.edu/admissions/american_studies.htm