Dear Friends,

Thank you for your interest in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC.

Created in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, ASE was conceived as a new way to examine the diversity and complexity of the United States, North America, and the Western Hemisphere, by blending the study of race and ethnicity into research and teaching about the American condition. Since then, we have complicated that vision by thinking comparatively and expansively about the production and circulation, and pleasures and limits, of difference. As you will see from our faculty and student profiles, our research agenda is ambitious. We enjoy an unusually creative collegiality that is reflected in our course offerings, graduate student training, and general departmental atmosphere. ASE faculty publications and Ph.D. dissertation topics demonstrate the range of exciting questions that motivate us.  

We have graduated seven Ph.D. students and will enroll our eighth doctoral cohort in August 2008. Graduate students work closely with faculty in seminars and directed research. Guidance committees employ a collective approach that combines encouragement with rigor. Proposed and in-progress dissertation projects encompass a variety of thematic, regional, and methodological approaches. ASE students have won a number of national and university awards –– including National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Haynes Fellowships –– because they are promising scholars destined to join the ranks of faculty, researchers, and cultural workers.

ASE offers undergraduate majors and minors in American Studies, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Chicano/Latino Studies, as well as a minor in Jewish American Studies. All undergraduate majors take three courses in common: a gateway introduction plus the junior and senior seminars. ASE has an honors option and abundant opportunities for research. We do a lot of work about, with, and in Los Angeles –– engaging with this astonishingly diverse city as partner, resource, object of analysis, and laboratory.

As a department, we cooperate with the Center for Democracy and Diversity, directed by George Sánchez, and our faculty has initiated important campus-wide events in the "Visions and Voices" Program. This year we will host events dealing with prison reform, a performance and exhibition by Guillermo Gómez-Peña at USC’s Fisher Museum, and a reading by the Native American (Spokane) writer, Sherman Alexie.

Enjoy our new Web site. Send us your comments. Contact by email faculty whose work is of interest to you. Visit us. If you wish to apply to the Ph.D. program, please note that all materials must be received by December 1, 2008.

Warmly,

John Carlos Rowe, Chair