Program Goals and Objectives
- Goal 1: To advance the documentation and interpretation of the American experience, past and present, through research with a variety of evidence, including objects, still and moving images, practices and performances, and oral and written texts.
- Objective 1.1: To examine multiple forms of evidence including objects, images, events, and texts to identify themes, ideas, patterns, scenes, and sources of American experience in a historical period, geographical and environmental area, or social and cultural group.
- Goal 2: To build on the intellectual legacy of American Studies as an interdisciplinary movement and emerging discipline with its own theories, methods, and applications.
- Objective 2.1: To identify major movements and approaches in the study of the American experience and provide major scholarly bibliographic sources for those movements and approaches, and to discuss causes, consequences, contexts, and correlations of American practices and performances using American Studies methodology such as historical and geographical comparison, symbolic and systematic analysis, ethnography, and rhetorical and literary criticism.
- Goal 3: To prepare students for careers in American Studies by developing knowledge, skills, attitudes, and ethics that can be applied to work in schools, archives, museums, galleries, media organizations, and governmental, commercial, and cultural agencies.
- Objective 3.1: To effectively communicate American Studies perspectives in scholarly and public writing, exhibition, community programming, oral presentation, and media presentation.
