The English Department at the University of Chicago has a tradition of pursuing innovative work that is both historically and theoretically informed. For those interested in American literatures and cultures, we draw upon the department's commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry to provide students with the opportunity to explore several dimensions of scholarship and critical inquiry.

The faculty and graduate students in the program in American literatures and cultures address a variety of literary traditions and cultural practices (such as the visual arts, religion, politics, and law) from national and transnational perspectives. We have strength in all historical periods. Our methodological approaches range from formal analysis of poetic, narrative, and generic structures, through comparatist approaches, to the historical analysis of gendered and racial subject formations in local and global contexts. Theoretical orientations include Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, materialist phenomenology, and aesthetic theory. Such orientations and approaches do not necessarily exclude one another; indeed, their principled convergence often enables especially productive analysis.

Given this plurality of interests, our fields of critical investigation are wide-ranging. In addition to more traditionally defined areas of scholarship, our work addresses a variety of media (including print, sound, photography, and film) and discursive genres (including confessional literature, political treatises, and legal cases). We have particular strength in African American literary and film studies, gender studies, cinema and media studies, and histories and theories of the public sphere, as well as of privacy and intimacy.

Coursework in the program proves more intensive than extensive, focusing on specific periods of literary and cultural production, on questions about modernism and modernity, the avant-garde, aesthetic experience and sensory affect, technologies of representation, consumer culture and object relations, reception and spectatorship, minority literatures and cultures, and the role of the aesthetic in nation and state formation. In addition to courses offered by the Americanist program in English, students are encouraged to take classes in other departments (such as History, Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, Music, Romance Languages, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, or Political Science). Typically, students also involve themselves with one or more of the interdisciplinary centers (such as the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture or the Center for Gender Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies). And, as all graduate students are expected to do at Chicago, they join at least one graduate workshop (where work-in-progress, readings, and occasional lectures are discussed by students and faculty), such as the American Cultures Workshop, the Poetry and Poetics Workshop, and the Workshop on Mass Culture. Finally, students take advantage of the University's and city's extraordinary scholarly resources -- the Regenstein Library and its Special Collections; the Newberry Library; the Chicago Public Library; the DuSable Museum of African American History; the Chicago Historical Society; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Gene Siskel Film Center.

The program in American literatures and cultures aims to produce scholar-critics who appreciate the historical, formal, and material specificity of different media and genres; who are well-versed in the histories of and debates on aesthetic and cultural theories in literary studies; who are skilled at research in a variety of archival sources and media; and who, through the course of their study and research, are primed to formulate original and significant questions about American literature, culture and society.




Note: The American Field is not a distinct program, but rather an area of focus within the English Department. Prospective applicants interested in the study of American literature and culture should follow the application procedures described on the Department's homepage.