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American Studies

For students entering IWU in fall 2021 and beyond, American Culture Studies is no longer available as a major or minor.

American Culture Studies aims to understand the multiplicity of the social and cultural lives of people in the United States, and in relation to it. The multiple cultures that make up the United States do not exist soley within the boundaries of the nation-state. From first contact, cultural practices have flowed back and forth across borders, both national and internal, both real and imagined.

Students at Illinois Wesleyan University who major or minor in American Culture Studies will develop connections across time and space that exemplify the complicated fluidity of America in process. They will build upon the analytical tools they develop in concentrations on African-American Studies, Native-American Studies, or Latinx Studies. Students will encounter courses that investigate power, inequality, and agency through intersecting structures of race, class, ethnicity, gender and/or religion, and which place the United States in a transnational and comparative framework. The program provides breadth and depth that place the nation-state in a global context and emphasize the diversity of social and cultural experience.