American Studies American Studies is an interdisciplinary program concerned with cultures and societies of the United States. The study of American culture goes on all around us every moment, in every corner of the world. Journalists report and analyze the latest in popular or avant-garde arts and styles. Film critics comment on the relations between box-office hits and American attitudes to race, gender, class, war, and sexuality.
Historians interpret the past.
Businesses both here and abroad risk fortunes on their understanding of changing demographics, economic behavior, social structure, and cultural trends within the United States. Foreign governments try to comprehend, anticipate, and sometimes manipulate developments in American domestic affairs as well as international diplomacy. And authors provide us with an unending supply of theories about who Americans are, where they have been, where they might be headed. Few, however, have had the benefit of a systematic and multidisciplinary education in the subject. A nation which has such enormous global impact as the United States must know itself in all its complexity.