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Register here for the 2010 annual meeting
Events
Mar. 25 | Mid-America American Studies Association Conference– Call for Papers
March 25-27, 2010 - University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
New Deadline: Jan. 11, 2010
Apr. 1 | Call for Nominations: Standing and Prize Committees
Nominations for ASA Standing and Prize Committees due. For details, click here
May. 20 | 2010 Gabriel Prize
Nominations for 2010 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in American Studies due
Prizes and Grants: Community Partnership Grant Program
Community Partnership Grant Program Existing Projects
Introduction and Details | Application Form | Existing Projects | Resources
“The Culmore Literacy and Popular Education Project”
This community partnership grant will allow George Mason University to offer literacy lessons and computer skills to Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Culmore community of Falls Church, Virginia. Influenced by the philosophies of popular education and interdisciplinary work in American Studies, the grantees’ courses place a special focus on historical consciousness, encouraging students to frame their local experience within the larger history of Latino and Spanish speakers in the United States. The project now has a total of 25 students in two course in Beginning Spanish and one course in Advanced Spanish/Beginning English and computer literacy. The American Studies Association’s Community Partnership Grant will help George Mason University expand the program by recruiting community members and Spanish and Latin American Studies undergraduates at George Mason to become experts in, and teachers of, Spanish for heritage (native) learners, popular education, and American and Latino Studies. A cohort of trained teachers will allow the project to open more classes to a larger number of students who want to join the program.
“Illinoistown: A Cultural History of East St. Louis”
This project seeks to bring together East St. Louis High School and McKendree University students to analyze the history, literature, culture, and politics of East St. Louis. The grant will assist professors and teachers and both institutions in developing a sophomore-level high school class and a university freshman honor’s class analyzing the cultural history of East St. Louis and building a website to tell the complex, often painful, but rich history of a small city known today by most Americans as the epitome of urban blight.
“Honoring and Inspiring Community Action: American Studies and Environmental Justice Movement”
The Regents of the University of California, John Muir Institute of the Environement’s grant will help to create a photographic and theatrical exhibition of women leaders from poor communities in the environmental justice movement in California’s Central Valley. The exhibition is intended to honor current community leaders, publicize the challenges and achievements of the environmental justice movement in the Central Valley, inspire others to action and facilitate campus/community interactions. The project uses American Studies methods and themes, in this case, on the central role of story-telling in fragile places and environments, and with politically and culturally disenfranchised populations.
“Promoting Service Learning in American Studies: A Collaborative Student Internship Project with the New Mexico Office of the State Historian”
The American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico’s grant will establish a number of paid internships for undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of American Studies. Interns will serve in the Office of the State Historian conducting research, interpretation, and content development, gaining skill in archival research, methodology and document preservation, technology and media-assisted dissemination of cultural materials, and insight into community-based history projects.
“Summer in the City: An Exhibit Celebrating Arbor Hill Youth Accomplishments.”
The project, sponsored by the College of St. Rose in Albany, NY, celebrates the accomplishments of young people in Arbor Hill by exhibiting works they created during the summer of 2004. As a predominantly African American neighborhood, Albany’s Arbor Hill has been shaped by many of the forces that characterize African American life in the United States. Stories of resistance, migration, racial violence, spiritual resilience, de facto segregation, cultural innovation, economic exploitation, political militancy, and family bonds contribute to understanding Arbor Hill in the past and in the present. Although children and young people who participated in the “Summer in the City” project may not have explicitly articulated their lives and concerns using the concepts mentioned above, their lives are nevertheless affected by the political, social, economic, and cultural realities that have defined Black experience in the United States. Many of the works that the participants created portray, comment upon, and interrogate their own African American urban experience. The project brought American Studies practitioners into the community, working to uncover, preserve, and increase knowledge of diverse cultural heritages.
Clay County, Minnesota Web Museum
This ASA grant has enabled the creation of an online museum composed of exhibits created as independent research projects by American Studies students at Minnesota State University Moorhead. The online museum uses materials and artifacts from the Clay County Historical Society’s Museum and Archives. The Historical Society has thousands of items that it can not display regularly. This online museum is intended to be an alternative display site so that more material from the Collection, and far more people, can access it. A final report (PDF) on this project, written by project director Dr. Helen Sheumaker, offers a fine example of this part of the project.
Making History: A Pedagogical Preservation Partnership
This partnership brings together Purdue University faculty from American Studies, English, Sociology, History, and the Library, the director and archivist of the Tippecanoe County Historical Association, as well as graduate students taking the course “Archive Theory and Practice”. The partnership considers conceptual, theoretical, and practical issues surrounding the creation and use of archives, and addresses questions such as: Why are some items saved and others not? How are collections organized and described? What can be learned about past times and what eludes us, given uneven archiving practices? What ethical matters and professional practices govern who can gain access to and use fragile remains of the past? Grant monies assist in developing faculty expertise and interest in archival research courses, and in the public dissmination of student work from those courses.
Historic Fountain Square: Past Present and Future
This project focuses on the Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis in order to document the “common lives” of its residents, to discover the historical trends that shaped the community, and to investigate the social forces that are transforming the community today. The project has created a web site that fosters an appreciation of local history through the active involvement of Fountain Square residents. Student research will be presented to the community both on the web site and in poster sessions at the Fountain Square branch of the Indianapolis Public Library.
“Living Traditions: A How-To Guide for Teaching Texas Folklore”
This partnership grant allowed Neill Hadder and Cory Lock to revise and prepare for web publication “Living Traditions: A How-To Guide for Teaching Texas Folklore,” Texas Folklife Resource’s folklore curriculum for fourth through eighth grade classrooms. Further, in sponsoring their work in the nonprofit sector, the ASA Community Partnership Grant gave Hadder and Lock the opportunity to apply their academic training to local community issues, an experience invaluable to both of them as they neared the completion of their doctoral programs.
“University of California, Davis: Enviromental Justice Project”
“Illinoistown: A Cultural History of East St. Louis in the Twentieth Century”
The semester-long collaboration between McKendree and East St. Louis Senior High was one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences of our professional careers. Dr. Martha H. Patterson, associate professor of English, and Dr. Ann V. Collins, assistant professor of political science, partnered with Mary Lofton, an Emerson-award winning social studies teacher at East St. Louis Senior High School (ESLSH) of East St. Louis to develop a course analyzing the cultural history of East St. Louis and to build a website telling the complex, often painful, but rich history of this small city known today as the epitome of urban blight.
“The Culmore Literacy and Popular Education Project”
In 2009-2010, the Culmore Literacy and Popular Education Project, a university-community partnership offering free bilingual ESL classes for Spanish-speaking immigrants, was sustained by the generous support of an ASA Community Partnerships Grant. The grant funded teacher stipends for two George Mason University students of Spanish - one undergraduate and one graduate, both recruited by myself through our Mason Spanish program - to teach this course to residents of the Culmore (Falls Church), Virginia community in the AY 08-09 academic year. Classes were held at the Culmore Family Resource Center, a county social services agency. Instructors received training in the teaching of ESL and methodologies of sociolinguistics and American (particularly Latino) Studies from local ESL trainer Ms. Lynda Terrill and Mason Spanish professors Jennifer Leeman, Michelle Ramos-Pellicia, and myself. The training sessions were subvented by matching funds for the ASA CPG from administrative units at George Mason University. Free child care was provided by a concurrent class in Spanish for Young Heritage Learners taught by Mason undergraduate Margaret McAteer, who received internship credit in Spanish for her work.
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