Meredith Murphy

American Studies:

American Studies is a team-taught, interdisciplinary course that presents history, literature, and the arts as strands within a complex cultural fabric. The course begins with the first European encounters with new lands and peoples in the late fifteenth century. It concludes with the global economies and virtual communities of the present. In examining the American experience from multiple perspectives, students develop a more nuanced sense of what America is and what it means to be an American. Making use of tools from many disciplines to analyze what they are reading and seeing, students also learn to think and speak with greater clarity, power, and elegance. The writing component of the course centers on the academic essay, which invites students to wrestle with texts and contexts and, in the process, to articulate what they have learned and why it is important.