The Graduate Certificate in American Culture Studies (AMCS) enables doctoral students to develop multidisciplinary expertise and encourages them to bring that added competence to bear in dissertation research that, while satisfying the demands of their principal disciplines, is broad-based and informed by studies from across the humanities and the social sciences.
AMCS brings together a community of graduate students and faculty with overlapping interests in American topics. Through formal and informal intellectual exchange, they share knowledge, methods, and ideas across the boundaries that define the traditional academic disciplines. This intellectual community promotes the give-and-take of ideas, making graduate study more stimulating and graduate research more original and creative.
Students who satisfy certificate requirements will receive the Graduate Certificate in American Culture Studies along with the award of their PhD. This certificate is one of several interdisciplinary certificates offered by the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences. The certificate helps its holders to build academic careers — including careers that involve interdisciplinary teaching — and to develop distinctive research profiles.
Contact Info
| Contact: | Noelani Kelly, Graduate Program Administrator |
| Phone: | 314-935-5216 |
| Email: | n.kelly@wustl.edu |
| Website: | http://amcs.wustl.edu |
Director
Elaine Peña
Professor of Performing Arts, American Culture Studies, and Anthropology
PhD, Northwestern University
Assistant Director
Noah Cohan
Lecturer in American Culture Studies
PhD, Washington University in St. Louis
Director of Graduate Studies
Ila Sheren
Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Karen Skinner
Academic Coordinator
PhD, Saint Louis University
Program Faculty
Sabnam Ghosh
Lecturer in Asian American Studies
PhD, University of Georgia
Zachary Manditch-Prottas
Lecturer in African and African American Studies and American Culture Studies
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Dave Walsh
Lecturer in American Culture Studies
MA, Washington University in St. Louis
AMCS 5000 Independent Study
By permission of instructor
Credit 3 units.
Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring
AMCS 5190 Engaging the City: The Material World of Modern Segregation
Credit 1 unit.
AMCS 5371 Music and Performance: Pleasure and Politics in Popular Music
Christopher Small has asserted that music is not a thing but an activity--something that people DO. Starting from this premise, this course explores popular music in performance and introduces students to the flourishing scholarship at the intersection of performance studies, sound studies, and popular music studies. We will attend to sound, music, listening, and voice-and we will consider these elements of performance in combination with costume, choreography, stage design, and audience participation and interaction. Exploring the choices of performers and the expectations of audience members in settings from gospel churches to Radio City Music Hall, this course moves through a wide variety of musical genres, including cabaret, blues, opera, musical theater, and rock. We will consider the pleasure and politics embraced by everyday people and activists who have used music in protest movements from the labor movement to Black Lives Matter. We also attend performances around St. Louis, guided by the interests of the class. Upper-level undergraduates and graduate students (enrolled under a 500-number) with an interest in music, theater, dance, cultural history, American studies, and African American studies are especially welcome.
AMCS 5790 On Location: Exploring America
Every summer, AMCS travels to a new location to explore fundamental questions of national identity and meaning through the study of the interdependent relationship between culture and place. By visiting landmarks, historic sites, museums, memorials etc.-- sites best understood through direct engagement with consideration of their rich material, historical, political, and social meanings-students become in-the-field observers and learn from local experts and faculty. Past On Location destinations have included: California, Hawaii, New York City, Washington D.C., the Industrial Southwest, and American Indian landmarks. For more information and description of past travel sites, please visit http://amcs.wustl.edu/courses/on_location.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
Typical periods offered: Summer
AMCS 6000 Introduction to American Culture Studies
An introduction to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of American culture. The class will examine the relationship between cultural criticism and scholarship on American culture, the history of the American Studies and cultural studies movements, the simultaneous turn to historicist approaches in literary studies and to textualist approaches to historical studies, the moral and interpretive implications of the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist stance in cultural inquiry, and the challenges that multiculturalist and trans-national perspectives pose to the study of a national American culture. Many of the readings will emphasize trends in cultural history, but will also include works in anthropology, art and architectural history, literary history, media studies, political and social theory, and religious studies.
Credit 3 units.
Typical periods offered: Spring