- Early American Seminar
- Lifewriting Project
- Material Culture/ Visual Culture Working Group
- Project on Religion, Culture, and Globalization
- Virtual Greenbelt
Resources
The preceding diagram presents an overview of the department's intellectual interests. At the center are the two large themes, the cultures of everyday life and cultural constructions of identity and difference, which simultaneously focus and connect the individual research programs of both faculty and students. On the periphery are five "lenses" through which we explore the central themes. Each of these lenses is comparable to an area of concentration with a particular set of questions and methodology. As American Studies is an interdisciplinary field, faculty and students combine two or more of these concentrations in research and teaching.
- Mary Corbin Sies explores the design and culture of everyday life in historic suburbs by combining the methods and questions of architectural, policy, planning, and social histories, performance theory, and material culture studies to explain how turn-of-the-century white, upper-middle-class American culture was created and codified.
- Sheri L. Parks examines literature and popular culture images as sources for understanding racial and gender differences, identities, and aesthetics. Along with David Zurawik (UMCP AMST Ph. D., 2000), TV critic for the Baltimore Sun, Dr. Parks also hosts the highly respected, award winning radio show, "Media Matters," on WJHU (Baltimore's NPR station). Discussion topics frequently link her scholarly interests in social policy, children, and popular culture.
- John L. Caughey uses the methods of ethnography and life history to study the multiple ways in which groups and individuals conceptualize their identities and experiences, including ways in which media engagements affect cultural constructions.
- Myron Lounsbury explores movies, literature, and archival sources in his study of New York's mid-twentieth-century film culture, and the impact of this culture on ordinary life.
- R. Gordon Kelly has produced a book about the nature, role, and significance of mystery fiction in modern life and is currently exploring the knowledge claims of literary theory in the context of the development of the discipline of American Studies.
- Jo B. Paoletti has used material culture to examine historic trends and cultural differences evident in popular consumer culture, in addition to her current research on humanities pedagogy.
- Lawrence E. Mintz employs both literature and ethnography to examine the nature and role of humor in popular culture and everyday life. His work is now buoyed by the large grant he received to launch the Art Gliner Humor Center and his editorship of the International Journal for the Study of Humor.
- Nancy L. Struna is exploring the transformation of everyday life, social relations, and cultural formations during the late colonial and early national decades though the lens of taverns. Probate records and other archival sources, newspapers, popular literature, and iconography serve as the basis for examining how and why these centers of everyday life both affected and were affected by the transition to capitalism and the discourses of democracy.
- Sonya Michel has recently published several books on gender and public policy. She also co-founded and edits the journal Social Politics.
In addition to the interdisciplinary connections that faculty make in their own research, faculty and graduate students also benefit from collaborating with one another. Much of this exchange takes place within and between the Department's working groups, individuals' own research programs, and our pedagogical workshops and innovations. For example, one particularly vital locus of interdisciplinary exchange has centered on cyberculture studies and the application of new information technologies to both research and teaching. Three collectives support this work: the Cyberculture Working Group (CWG), the Virtual Greenbelt Collaborative (VG), and The Mini-Center for Teaching Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (Mini-Center). Student research on online communities and student/faculty introduction of information technologies (e.g. web-based teaching for material culture classes) in AMST classes stimulated our initial interest in cyberculture studies. From this interest several projects developed: Virtual Greenbelt, a virtual museum that we use for both research and teaching; the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, founded by recent AMST Ph.D. David Silver and still the central scholarly site available online for research in cyberculture; a series of cyber-ethnographies undertaken by faculty and graduate students; and two national cyberculture conferences, which have drawn leading scholars in the field. On the basis of our collaborative work harnessing information technologies to pedagogy, a group of faculty and graduate students won the campus award for Innovation in Teaching in 1998. Our research and teaching on cyberculture have provided the Department with an international profile as a vital location for pursuing cyberculture scholarship.
A second locus for interdisciplinary interaction in the Department focuses on a group of faculty and students whose research explores the connections among cultural landscape studies, ethnography, foodways, historic preservation, heritage tourism, and race. This work centers on the Material Culture/Visual Culture Working Group, the Life Writing Project, and a series of graduate seminars, including AMST 603, Current Approaches to American Studies. Students and faculty have discussed common readings, presented and critiqued each others' research, and sponsored invited speakers whose research supports these topics. The MC/VC, Life Writing, and Cyberculture working groups co-sponsored a national conference in March, 2002 entitled "Sites of Memory: Race, Ethnicity, Place, and Life Stories."