About Us

Overview of the Department

One of the first institutions to offer courses in American Studies, the University of Texas began its long association with the emerging field in 1944, when Henry Nash Smith taught its first course. American Studies at Texas has grown steadily over the decades in national reputation, in the number and interdisciplinary breadth of its course offerings, and in the influence of its graduates in a wide range of endeavors.

The University's American Studies faculty exhibit considerable breadth, including social and cultural historians, a cultural geographer, two art historians, a historian of social science, another of religion, a scholar of youth culture, a historian of music; experts on African American, Asian American, and Mexican American cultures; and on law, literature, photography, popular culture, design, and technology.

While the faculty maintains national visibility as scholars, winning research grants and publishing books, all of them teach undergraduates and graduate students in small courses that encourage free exploration of ideas. Owing to the small size of the department relative to larger traditional departments, undergraduates often do not discover the American Studies major until the junior year when they are looking for a concentration that will allow them to combine a variety of interests in a uniquely personal vision. At the same time, the department has sought ways of introducing its interdisciplinary approach to a wider range of undergraduates. For the past several years, "Introduction to American Studies," a lower-division course with about 200 students, has employed traditional lecture techniques and digital technology to introduce students to the major. This course augments a series of lower-division seminars that introduce small groups of students to interdisciplinary American Studies methodologies applied to topics as varied as architecture, film, Latino/a culture, American education, popular culture, religion, and science fiction. At the upper-division level, the department requires students to take a year-long cultural history survey from the colonial period to the present and three specialized seminars taught by senior faculty in their areas of expertise.

The Department of American Studies attracts graduate applicants from across the United States, with more than a hundred competing each year for about fifteen places. In the past five years, the Program has also enrolled graduate students from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Japan, Korea, Liechtenstein, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Although a few seek only the M.A., returning to positions in such fields as journalism, historic preservation, and museum work, most eventually enroll as doctoral students. Our graduate students display impressive diversity in their personal backgrounds, prior educational tracks, and previous career experiences, with the result that graduate seminars are refreshingly interdisciplinary simply in their enrollment. Given the small faculty and the relatively small number of incoming students each year, faculty and students work together closely, and the department enjoys high morale and a definite esprit de corps. The most promising doctoral candidates are invited to teach carefully supervised lower-division seminars in the areas of their dissertation expertise usually for two years. While giving them a definite advantage in the tight job market faced by new Ph.D.s, these courses also expose undergraduates to the enthusiasm of new scholars and teachers. The department is proud of the fact that its graduate students are required to conceive and write dissertations that are expected to be ready for book publication with only minor revisions.

Although the field of American Studies is too small to be included in national surveys that rank large departments or professional schools, the Department of American Studies at Texas is widely regarded as one of the top American Studies programs or departments in the United States, out of a total of about 150 at four-year institutions, of which twenty-eight award the Ph.D. About half of the department's Ph.D. recipients since 1970 have published their dissertations as books. Most have entered college and university teaching, with two serving as college presidents, at least three as university deans, and several as department chairs. Many have won awards for their work, including one MacArthur Fellowship. Others are active as journalists, public servants, and museum curators.

The department's undergraduate majors have attained success in an even wider array of occupations: teaching, journalism, public service, business, software development, literature, filmmaking, and music performance and recording. We believe that American Studies encourages boundary-jumping interdisciplinary modes of perceiving, thinking, and acting that have enabled our graduates to understand and to negotiate the multicultural diversity of contemporary American life, and to thrive in virtually all areas of cultural work.