About the Center

The Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies (APCCS) has a long history of fostering interdisciplinary approaches to the study of varied cultural forms. APCCS is located in UT Austin’s Department of Anthropology, the only anthropology program in the US that offers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees with a graduate concentration in Folklore and Public Culture. Graduates leave the program with a degree in Anthropology and a doctoral portfolio in Cultural Studies. APCCS offers graduate students unique and creative outlets for their research, including a journal and yearly research colloquia.

Drawing together students and faculty from various disciplines (Literature, Radio-Television-Film, Ethnomusicology,  Theatre and Drama), APCCS provides a forum for engaging with scholarship from a variety of fields and working to synthesize them in the pursuit of distinctive research. Our starting point is ethnographic approaches to performance, representation, visual culture, aesthetics, affect, space, and publics. Our principal attention is geared towards how people perform, produce, and project cultural forms through verbal, visual, musical, kinesthetic, material, and dramatic means. But we cultivate and draw upon innovative approaches from a variety of disciplines to track emergent phenomenon.