Required Courses

A. Coursework

ILA Foundations (4 credit hours). Required.

This seminar, shared with CHT, will be required of all AS students in the first semester of their first year. From the CHT description: “To permit as much leeway as possible for individual faculty members to design this course, we have agreed on a series of principles about what the course should do.

• It should encompass an historical perspective that extends beyond the compass of European modernity.
• It should train students in reading practices teaching them to read critically, analytically, with an eye toward applying what they learn in other contexts.
• It should engage with key texts from a variety of critical traditions”

 American Studies Proseminar (4 credit hours). Required.

This seminar, taken in the spring of the First Year, introduces students to the history and methodologies of the field. Approximately half of the course will be devoted to major intellectual, scholarly, and theoretical issues in American Studies since the end of WWII, one quarter to a special topic selected by the instructor(s), and one quarter to new developments and trends of the current moment. Required of all AS students, but open to others.

Pedagogy (2 credit hours). Required.

This practicum, taken in the second year, will train students in the basic principles and methods of interdisciplinary teaching at the undergraduate level. It will have the specific goal of preparing students to teach AMST 112, IDS 113 and/or IDS 216 as part of the student’s TATTO program. Support of teaching will continue in the third year and fourth year as these courses are taught on the staff model the ILA has developed over the last eight years.

Elective Courses

Students will be advised closely during their first two years to obtain expertise in both topics and methods that they can build into a dissertation. Students will be allowed a great deal of flexibility in selecting electives from outside the ILA.

We also wish to add the mechanism used by the Department of History, in which students in designated reading seminars may elect to continue the course as a research tutorial into the following semester, producing a substantial paper under the direction of the professor who taught the original reading seminar. We expect that many students will elect to produce their first-year portfolio paper (below) under this rubric.

B. First Year Portfolio. Required.

Each first-year student will submit a portfolio of work to the core faculty of American Studies by the end of the Spring Semester. The portfolio should contain one or two papers that the student has written over the course of the first year, at least one of which should be a substantial, scholarly, interdisciplinary research or critical essay (i.e. the student's best seminar paper). It will also contain an essay by the student about why s/he has selected this work as "the best" and a plan for continuing to gain the skills and knowledge needed for general training in American Studies and the probable dissertation. Portfolios to be evaluated by the core American Studies faculty in May of each year.

The following fall, students will make a formal, public presentation of the research portions of their portfolios to the faculty and graduate students of the program (and any others who wish to attend).

C. Evaluation and Advising

The main mechanism of evaluation after admission and before the Ph.D. Qualifying exam, below, will be the First-Year Portfolio. Students who are unable to produce a satisfactory portfolio (one that shows strong evidence of scholarly capability and promise sufficient to produce a doctoral dissertation) will be advised that they may not continue in the program or that they may continue only to the terminal MA.

Each student will be assigned an advisor upon admission to the program, who will work with him or her closely in selecting courses and in preparing the portfolio. Students will be encouraged to begin formulating committees to prepare for the Ph.D. exams in their second year.

All students will be evaluated at least once a year by the core faculty in American Studies, who will solicit comments from faculty outside the program with whom students may be working.

D. TATTO

(See Teaching Assistant Training and Teaching Opportunity Program.)

E. Research Assistantship

During the first year, all students on fellowship will be required to serve as a research assistant for a core faculty member in American Studies for a maximum of 8 hours a week.

F. PH.D. Qualifying Examination

(See General Requirements for Ph.D. Examination Requirements.)

G. Dissertation Process

(See General Requirements for Doctoral Dissertation Prospectus requirements.)

Presentation of the Dissertation After all committee members are satisfied with the dissertation, and after the student has submitted the dissertation to the Dean of the Graduate School, the student will schedule a public presentation of his or her research for the purposes of celebrating the achievement, for sharing his or her findings, and for edifying more junior graduate students about the process of successfully completing a doctoral dissertation.

PROGRESS THROUGH COURSEWORK & SERVICE

(assumes students entering in advanced standing;
students in full standing, see Appendix B1)

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