American Studies Department at The George Washington University

04/14/2021

GW AMST Professor Melani McAlister was featured in The GW Hatchet and on GW Today for her project on how the COVID-19 crisis has shaped modern history. Congratulations to Professor McAlister!

Read the Hatchet article here: https://www.gwhatchet.com/2021/04/12/american-studies-project-documents-pandemic-experiences-with-interviews-photos/

Read the GW Today story here:
https://columbian.gwu.edu/archival-project-tells-gws-covid-story?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Archival%20Project%20Tells%20GW’s%20COVID%20Story&utm_campaign=April-2021-Spotlight

Faculty and students are capturing the GW community's pandemic experiences with interviews and documents like photos and drawings.

01/13/2021

Join the GW Humanities Center for a timely panel discussion on "Democracy Under Siege: Explaining the MAGA Uprising" tonight (5/13) at 5:30pm EST. Panelists will include Professors Amber Musser, Elaine Peña, Elisabeth Anker, Jamie Cohen-Cole and Daniel Schwartz. Link below:
https://gwu-edu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gCGyK5gTS5GS9fGFnE0IDg

12/07/2020

Attention First-Year AMST Majors and Minors!
If you're still looking to fill your Spring 2021 Course Schedule, be sure to check out Professor Cohen-Cole's Dean's Seminar, "The Nature and Culture of Children." The class will be held virtually on Wednesdays from 3:30-6:00pm EST.
See flyer below:

03/20/2020

Please follow us on Instagram . Every day we have students and faculty posting about their experiences of the current crisis.

03/02/2020

Prof. Gayle Wald was quoted in Rolling Stone last week, commenting on the influence of Sister Rosetta Tharpe on Elvis's career.

Yola joins Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Maggie Gyllenhaal in the upcoming film

02/27/2020

GW AMST PhD candidate Sara Awartani discusses the global dimensions of the Puerto Rican liberation movement in her essay with Society and Space Magazine. Read it here:

While the demonstrations leading to the ousting of Ricardo Rosselló’s can certainly teach us the necessity of popular protest in the United States, they also illuminate the global dimensions of Puerto Rican liberation: how the island has long been a source of inspiration and solidarity to interna...

02/24/2020

AMST Department Chair, Gayle Wald, was quoted in a Rolling Stones magazine article about music artist Yola playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrman's upcoming flim, 'Elvis'.

Check out the article here:

Yola joins Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Maggie Gyllenhaal in the upcoming film

02/18/2020

Recent AMST PhD graduate Kimberly Probolus wrote a letter entitled, "Men, You Need to Listen to Women", for The New York Times Opinion Section. Read it here:

Kimberly Probolus, who a year ago urged women to raise their voices and write more letters to the editor, now discusses the importance of listening.

02/18/2020

Congratulations to AMST PhD candidate, Zaynab Quadri, on recently winning the Waging Peace in Vietnam Essay Contest with the Elliott School of International Affairs! To read her essay and an interview with Quadri, click here:
https://americanstudies.columbian.gwu.edu/zaynab-quadri

02/06/2020

Join Prof. Nicole Ivy on February 12 at 5:30 PM at the GW Museum and Textile Museum for a reflection on her museum experiences in which she'll share thoughts about the future role of museums and arts organizations in promoting equitable futures.

02/04/2020

Alumni Spotlight: Prof. Noriko Ishii, who earned her Ph.D. and M.A. here at GW, was highlighted on Sophia University's webpage. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. Check out the spotlight:

Professor Noriko Ishii lived in San Francisco for four years during elementary school. Those experiences lingered with her after coming back to Japan and she

10/21/2019

Join us on Wednesday, Nov. 20, for a talk with
Prof. Matt Jacobson of Yale University on "I'm On My Way": The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History. To RSVP, please visit our website at the link below.

We hope to see you there!

Description:
“I could sing things that I couldn’t say,” Odetta once noted of a folk repertoire that carried a palpable air of protest and rage from both before and after emancipation. “We were bigger than Jim Crow,” Sammy Davis, Jr. recalled of the moment when he and his trio broke the whites-only rules of the Las Vegas strip. This talk analyzes the political work that culture did in the long Civil Rights era through the middle decades of the twentieth century—cultural forms that eloquently spoke a rising brand of racial egalitarianism and social justice; cultural workers who helped to break down barriers and to forge a Civil Rights “public”; cultural genres and industries that became sites of struggle in and of themselves.

Matthew Frye Jacobson is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University. He is the author of seven books on race in US political culture, including Odetta’s One Grain of Sand and The Historian’s Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present.

“I could sing things that I couldn’t say,” Odetta once noted of a folk repertoire that carried a palpable air of protest and rage from both before and after emancipation.  “We were bigger than Jim Crow,” Sammy Davis, Jr. recalled of the moment when he and his trio broke the whites-only ru...