American Studies 2009-2010
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Overview
American Studies is an interdisciplinary field of concentration in the liberal arts relating to the United States as a geographic area and a cultural and political space. Drawing on courses from twelve departments students learn to move among and connect history, art, politics, religion, popular culture, literature, and other features of American life. Through either the American Studies major, interdepartmental major or minor, students are encouraged to explore the diverse character of the American experience, shaped as it is by gender, race, class, sexuality, geography and ethnicity, and to situate that experience in a context of global economic, cultural and political relations. Students are asked, however, to develop a coherent approach to the study of American culture, politics and society, past and present. To accomplish these tasks, students in the American Studies program collaborate closely with their academic advisor to work out a thematic core around which to build a unique and innovative course of study that knits together the methods and perspectives of several disciplines. Themes may be centered on a specific era (e.g. antebellum America or the United States since the Cold War) or a topical focus (e.g. the emergence of mass culture or ethnicity and race in American life).
Courses Offered
The current Academic Register lists more than ninety courses that can be taken to fulfill the American Studies requirements, and new courses are added regularly. Not all courses are offered every year, but there are more than enough to enable students in the program to select both wisely and well. The Departments of English, History, and Political Science offer the largest number of courses.
Life after Union
The American Studies major develops essentially the same skills as any other major in the social sciences and the humanities, and therefore opens up similar career paths. Recent graduates of the program have found positions in business, teaching, and government service. They have also gone on law school and MBA and PhD programs in various disciplines, including history, literature as well as American Studies graduate programs.
Faculty
The Interdepartmental Program in American Studies draws its faculty from the Departments of the Anthropology, Arts, Dance, Economics, English, History, Modern Languages, Music, Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology, and Theater. Among the members of those departments who regularly offer courses applicable to the program (with their major teaching areas) are:
VISUAL ARTS
Lorraine Morales Cox
Associate Professor of Art History
Director of American Studies Program
Ph.D., University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
Contemporary Art & Theory
American and Latin American Art
MUSIC
Jennifer Matsue
Associate Professor of Music
Ph.D., University of Chicago
American Popular Music
Timothy Olsen
Associate Professor of Music
Ph.D., Yale University
All aspects of American music--folk, popular, classical--with a special emphasis on jazz.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Clifford Brown, Jr.
Professor of Political Science
Ph.D., Harvard University
American government and politics
Bradley Hays
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ph.D., University of Maryland.
U.S. politics; law and courts; constitutional and political development; constitutional theory
Terry S. Weiner
Professor of Political Science
Ph.D., University of North Carolina
Political sociology
Thomas Lobe
Lecturer/DC Program Director
Ph.D., University of Michigan
International relations, CIA, politics and film
Zoe Oxley
Associate Professor of Political Science
Ph.D., Ohio State University
U.S. elections and voting behavior, political psychology and public opinion, media and politics
SOCIOLOGY
Deidre Hill Butler
Associate Professor of Sociology
Ph.D., Clark University
Sociology of African American Culture; American Family; Black Feminist/Womanist Practice
African American Culture and American Family.
David Cotter
Associate Professor of Sociology
Ph.D., University of Maryland
Methods of social research; community; stratification
Melinda Goldner
Associate Professor of Sociology
Ph.D., Ohio State University
Medical sociology; race, class, and gender roles; public health; social movements
HISTORY
Kenneth Aslakson
Assistant Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin
African-American; American colonial history; Southern history; legal; race and the Constitution.
Andrew Feffer
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
American intellectual and cultural history; recent United States history
Andrea Foroughi
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
American women’s and gender history; American Indian History; American Civil War; cartography of North America
Melinda Lawson
Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Ph.D., Columbia University
U.S. history in the 19th century, slavery, abolitionism, reform movements, African American, public history
Andrew Morris
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Virginia
20th century U.S. political history, public policy, welfare state, the Depression and the New Deal, environmental history, the history of disasters.
Robert V. Wells
Chauncey H. Winters Professor of History
Ph.D., Princeton University
American colonial history; demography and the family; folk songs.
MODERN LANGUAGES
William Garcia
Associate Professor of Spanish
Ph.D., Rutgers University
Caribbean, Latin American, and Latino-American literature and theater
Victoria J. Martinez
Associate Professor of Spanish
Ph.D., Arizona State University
Latin American, and Latino-American literature
ECONOMICS
J. Douglass Klein
Professor of Economics
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
American economic policies, current and historical
Bradley Lewis
Professor of Economics
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Financial analysis, economic history
Stephen J. Schmidt
Professor of Economics
Ph.D., Stanford University
US public policy issues; Industrial organization; economics of education; economic history
ENGLISH
Brian Hauser
Assistant Professor of English
Ph.D., Ohio State University
Film Studies, Film and American Literature.
Katherine R. Lynes
Assistant Professor of English
Ph.D., Rutgers University
African-American literature; poetry and poetics; ecocritcism and ecopoetics
Jillmarie Murphy
Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Ph.D., University at Albany, State University of New York
Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature; Colonial American Literature
April Selley
Lecturer in English
Ph.D., Brown University
American literature of the Romantic period through the 21st Century; American literature and religion; American literature and popular culture; creative writing
Jordan Smith
Professor of English
M.F.A., University of Iowa
American poetry
Bunkong Tuon
Assistant Professor of English
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts
20th-Century U.S. ethnic literature; Asian American studies; Southeast Asian American literature and history; folklore studies
Brenda Wineapple
Doris Zemurray Stone Professor in Modern Literary and Historical Studies
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
American literature
Among recent books published by this group are Prof Foroughi’s Go if you think it your duty: The Civil War Correspondence of a Minnesota Couple, Prof. Feffer’s The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism, Prof. Smith’s The Household of Continuance, Prof. Wells’s Uncle Sam’s Family and Life Flows On in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History, Prof Murphy’s, Hawthorne in His Own Time, Prof. Wineapple’s Genet, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein and Hawthorne: A Life, and Prof. Morris’s The Limits of Voluntarism: Charity and Welfare from the New Deal Through the Great Society.
For more information
Prof. Lorraine Morales Cox
Director of American Studies
302 Visual Arts Building
Union College
Schenectady, N.Y. 12308
(518) 388-8038