Author: Laura Spautz

American Studies in the News: 9/11 shaped the U.S. in unimaginable ways. This class helps Gen Z students grasp how

This news story originally appeared in UC Berkeley News, September 11, 2024 Twenty-three years after the 9/11 terrorist attack, UC Berkeley Professor Michael Mark Cohen is teaching a course that examines how disastrous its consequences have been for the U.S. “I think students finally understand why the country lost its mind after this disaster,” said Professor Michael Mark Cohen. By Anne Brice Unless you lived through the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it’s hard to know what it was like, said UC Berkeley Professor Michael Mark Cohen. Especially because […]

American Studies Majors in the News: Brandon Fellows and the Re-Emerging Scholars Program for formerly incarcerated individuals

Students in the Re-Emerging Scholars Program

American Studies major Brandon Fellows (’24) was recently featured in “Community college program helps formerly incarcerated students find opportunity,” in the Sacramento Bee. Here is an excerpt from the article: If you ask Brandon Fellows where he learned the most in his life, he’ll point to his time spent on the streets or when he was incarcerated. After he was released, he enrolled at Sacramento City College when he was 35. There, he found and helped build a community of acceptance — the Re-Emerging Scholars program, a cohort-based learning program for […]

American Studies Major Brittany Postle Wins 2024 Haas Scholarship

Brittany is a junior with a concentration in Disability and Human Rights in America. Her Haas project is called “William O. Douglas and Fight for Pristine Wilderness in a Damaged World: How Ableism in the Supreme Court Shaped Our Ideas of Nature,” and her research questions are (to quote her application materials) “how the advocacy of Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas used his powers in office to create pristine wilderness spaces. Using the methodologies of Professor Sunaura Taylor’s disturbed ecologies, I seek to answer how the idea of the […]

Emma Gerson, American Studies graduate (class of 2023), has won the 2023 American Cultures Student Prize!

Image of Emma Gerson

American Studies is proud to announce that Emma Gerson, a graduate of our program (class of 2023), has won the 2023 American Cultures Student Prize! This prize recognizes exemplary student projects developed in American Cultures courses “that promotes understanding of U.S. race, ethnicity, and culture and exemplifies a standard of excellence in scholarship.” Emma’s award-winning submission, “Alcatraz: A Carceral-Colonial Space,” was the capstone project she created in my class, American Studies 102AC (Beaches in Mind: The Beach in American Culture), in Fall 2021. The prize committee praised the impressive nature of Emma’s research […]

We are proud to announce that Sarah Gold McBride has won the 2023 American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award!

Image of Sarah Gold McBride

This coveted prize recognizes “inspiring and sustained commitment” to address the “multivocality of America’s diverse social fabric; the scales of geographic assemblage that support political and economic ways of being; the often contested nature of the political nation; the intersectional vectors that operate through everyday life.” It rewards “great creativity, ingenuity, and courage” in the classroom. For those of us who have been lucky enough to learn from and/or teach alongside Prof. Gold McBride, this is a much-deserved acknowledgement of her profound contributions to teaching in American Studies and in […]

American Studies Spring 2024 Conference – Twice Told Tales: May 3, 2024, at the Women’s Faculty Club, Lucy Ward Stebbins Lounge

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9:30 AM  Coffee and Informal Welcome 10:00 Steven Lee (English) / “Cold War Subcultures: Viktor Tsoi and William Gibson’s Cyberpunk International” 10:40 Christian Paiz (Ethnic Studies) / “Walking with the comrades: a five year public history project on the UFW Movement” 11:20 Louise Mozingo (Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning) / “From Persuasive Generosity to Expendable Commodity: The Future of the Modernist Corporate Estate” Noon-2:00 Break 2:00 PM Alec Stewart (Architecture) / “Meet Me at the Swap Meet”: Asian American Commerce and the Emergence of West Coast Hip Hop” 2:40 Laurie […]

American Studies Senior Thesis Showcase: Thursday, May 2, 2024, 12:00– 3:00 pm, 3335 Dwinelle

Please join the American Studies community for our annual celebration of the fantastic research and writing conducted by UC Berkeley’s American Studies majors this year! The 2nd Annual American Studies Senior Thesis Showcase will feature short presentations from 11 senior thesis students and an afternoon Q&A roundtable with presenters, who will share more about their senior thesis experience and their advice for future thesis students. The day will end with a reception for all attendees in Ishi Court from 3–4 pm. Join us to see a range of what’s possible […]