MPG

This is a “roughed out” quals list for graduate students interested in the history of American Studies. The list should be supplemented with texts and essays that exemplify the various approaches, practices, and “methods” described in this history.

Daniel Aaron, The Americanist. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Lynne M. Adrian, “An American Studies Contribution to Social History.” Journal of Social History23.4 (1990): 875-885.

John J. Appel, “Historiography and the Study of the American Image.” Mississippi Quarterly 16.1 (1963): 23-34.

Richard Bauman, Roger D. Abrahams, and Susan Kalčik. “American Folklore and American Studies.” American Quarterly 28.3 (1976): 360-377.

Michael Bérubé, “The Loyalties of American Studies.” American Quarterly 56.2 (2004): 223-233.

Lawrence Buell, “It’s Good, but is it History?” American Quarterly 41 (1990): 496-500.

———. “Literary History without Sexism? Feminist Studies and Canonical Reception.” American Literature March (1987): 102-114.

Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Allen F. Davis, “The Politics of American Studies.” American Quarterly 42.3 (1990): 353-374.

Phillip Deloria, “American Indians, American Studies, and the ASA.” American Quarterly 55.4 (2003): 669-680.

Michael Denning, “‘The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies.” American Quarterly38 (1986): 356-80.

Sandra K. Dolby, “Essential Contributions of a Folkloric Perspective to American Studies.” Journal of Folklore Research 33.1 (1996): 58-64.

Richard Mercer Dorson, The Birth of American Studies: Inaugural Address Delivered at the Opening of the American Studies Center, Warsaw University, October 5, 1976. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1976.

Emory Elliott, “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies is Transnational?” American Quarterly 59.1 (2007): 1-22.

Philip Fisher, The New American Studies: Essays from Representations. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.

Susan Gillman, “The New Newest Thing: Have American Studies Gone Imperial?” American Literary History 17.1 (2005): 196-214.

Henry Glassie, “Meaningful Things and Appropriate Myths: The Artifact’s Place in American Studies.” Prospects 3 (1977): 1-49.

Karen Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place—Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 58.1 (2006): 1-15.

Nancy Isenberg, “The Personal Is Political: Gender, Feminism, and the Politics of Discourse Theory.” American Quarterly 44.3 (1992): 449-458.

Richard Jensen, “Quantitative American Studies.” American Quarterly 26.3 (1974): 225-240.

Richard Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies, Anyway?” Social Text 16 (Winter 1986/87): 38-80.

Amy Kaplan, “A Call for a Truce.” American Literary History 17.1 (2005): 141-147.

Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

Seymour Katz, “‘Culture’ and Literature in American Studies.” American Quarterly 20.2 (1968): 318-329.

Deirdre Keenan, “Trespassing Native Ground: American Indian Studies and Problems of Non-Native Work.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33.3 (Autumn 2000): 179-189.

Mary Kelley, “Taking Stands: American Studies at Century’s End.” American Quarterly 52.1 (2000): 1-22.

Alice Kessler-Harris, “Cultural Locations: Positioning American Studies in the Great Debate.”American Quarterly 44.3 (1992): 299-312.

Rob Kroes, Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999.

Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies.” American Quarterly 24.4 (1972): 435-450.

T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities.” American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567-593.

Guenter H. Lenz, “‘Ethnographies’: American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology.”Prospects 16 (1991): 1-40.

———. “American Studies and the Radical Tradition from the 1930s to the 1960s.” Prospects 12 (1987): 21-58.

Caroline Field Levander and Robert S. Levine. Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Insiders and Outsiders: The Borders of the USA and the Limits of the ASA—Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 49.3 (1997): 449-469.

George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies.” American Quarterly 47.3 (1995): 369-387.

Leo Marx, “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies.” American Literary History 17.1 (2005): 118-134.

———. “American Studies: A Defense of an Unscientific Method.” New Literary History 1.1 (1969): 75-90.

Elaine Tyler May, “The Radical Roots of American Studies—Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 48.2 (1996): 179-200.

Louis Menand, American Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002.

John Muthyala, “Reworlding America: The Globalization of American Studies.” Cultural Critique47 (Winter 2001): 91-119.

Susan Scott Parrish, “The ‘Hemispheric Turn’ in Colonial American Studies.” Early American Literature 40.3 (2005): 545-553.

Donald E. Pease, “From American Studies to Cultural Studies: Paradigms and Paradoxes.”European Journal of American Culture 19.1 (2000): 5-11.

Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. The Futures of American Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

Peter C. Rollins, “Film, Television, and American Studies.” American Quarterly 31.5 (1979): 724-749.

John Carlos Rowe, Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000.

José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

George Sanchez, “Working at the Crossroads: American Studies for the 21st Century: Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 54.1 (2002): 1-23.

Thomas J. Schlereth, “American Studies and American Things.” Pioneer America 14.2 (1982): 47-66.

Peter Schmidt, “The Liberty Weathervane Points Left.” Mississippi Quarterly 57.2 (2004): 313-327.

Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman. “Introduction,” in Shukla and Tinsman, eds., Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame. 1-33. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.

Robert Sklar, “The Problem of an American Studies ‘Philosophy’.” American Quarterly 27.3 (1975): 245-262.

Henry Nash Smith, “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 197-208

Robert E. Spiller, “Unity and Diversity in the Study of American Culture: The American Studies Association in Perspective.” American Quarterly 25.5 (1973): 611-618.

Richard E. Sykes, “American Studies and the Concept of Culture: A Theory and Method.” American Quarterly 15.2 (1963): 253-270.

Cecil F. Tate, The Search for a Method in American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Mary Helen Washington, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?—Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 50.1 (1998): 1-23.

Steven Watts, “The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststructuralism, Language, and Politics in the Age of Self-Fulfillment.” American Quarterly 43.4 (1991): 625-660.

Laura Wexler, “Language and Difference in American Studies: The View from Here.” Massachusetts Review 25.4 (1984): 673-679.

Christopher Wilson, “Containing Multitudes: Realism, Historicism, American Studies.” American Quarterly 41 (1990): 466-495.

Gene Wise, “An American Studies Calendar.” American Quarterly 31.3 (1979): 407-447.