The six-course American Studies Minor allows you to take classes centering on American culture in English, History, Sociology, Fine Arts, Political Science, Psychology, Theater, and other departments, as well as cross-listed classes in other minors (such as Women's Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies).
As this list suggests, the Minor is rigorously interdisciplinary, meaning that it requires one to think beyond the disciplinary range of any single department. Under the general rubric of analyzing American culture past and present, American Studies minors investigate such overarching subjects as the effect of city life on cultural expression and social organization; the historical interaction of class, gender, race, and ethnicity; how cultural expression and forms of high culture, popular culture, and mass media shape and interpret historical transformation; the character of mass migration within and across national borders; the development of borderlands, especially in the Southwest; and the notion of American empire, both in the worldwide expansion of American cultural influence and in U.S. efforts to control territories beyond the national borders.
The introduction to such culture-shaping and often hotly contested issues in American life afforded by the American Studies Minor provides one with a good preparation for careers in law, teaching, government, journalism, and many other professions. Since interdisciplinary work is now a standard feature of graduate education, this minor also provides an essential preparation in working in cultural analysis across the humanities and social sciences.
OTHER FEATURES OF THE AMERICAN STUDIES MINOR
Special concentration in Asian
American Studies
The Nijmegen
Exchange Program--a chance to study American culture in international perspective
The Nijmegen Exchange Program offers a special opportunity for those students
interested in American Studies. The cooperating university in the Netherlands,
Radboud University of Nijmegen, is a European center of American Studies scholarship
and teaching; it offers an unusual opportunity to explore American culture from
an international perspective. To get more information on this program, contact
the director of American Studies at BC and/or BC's Office of International Programs.
(We also provide advisement for other international exchanges which involve
sending BC students to American Studies programs abroad.)
Advisement for a University Independent Major
The University offers an Independent Major Program for which American
Studies has, in the past, provided advisement. Normally, you need a 3.0 GPA;
you plan a program of 12 courses, 10 of which must be upper-division courses,
spread over no more than 3 departments. Proposals must be submitted to the Dean’s
Office before March 1 of the student’s sophomore year; the proposal will
then be submitted to the university's Educational Policy Committee for approval.
