Publications: Directory of Graduate Programs

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Center for the Americas

Degrees Awarded: B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

Academic System: Semester

Tuition: In-state $3,450 per semester, out-of-state $5,460

Deadlines: Deadline for receipt of Ph.D. applications is January 15, 2008. Deadlines for receipt of M.A. applications are February 1, 2008 (first round) & April 7, 2008 (second round).

Financial Aid: Schomburg Fellowships and Teaching Assistantships are awarded on a very limited basis. http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/americanstudies/

Enrollment:

Affiliations and Internships: Graduate groups in feminist studies, industrial heritage policy, justice in democracy, African American studies; Asian studies

Program Specializations: The American Studies Program at SUNY Buffalo works to develop an understanding of American life in the context of modern world history. Through interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, practical approaches we want to assess the place of the United States and its peoples within a worldwide framework of social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The program includes components in Native American studies, women’s studies, Puerto Rican studies, and intercultural studies. The MA program has been offered to students in New York State correctional facilities; on-campus students have opportunities to work within prisons.

Description: The Department of American Studies is an interdisciplinary department that offers B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees based on rigorous, socially engaged scholarship. We take a hemispheric approach to the Americas, examining local cultures, nations, and regions within geopolitical contexts. Building on our traditional strengths in American Indian studies, critical race theory, feminism, class analysis, and community engagement, the department encourages scholarly investigations into history, politics, visual cultures, literary and oral cultures, environmental and agricultural practices, religions, gender, sexualities, kinship systems, geography, and economics.

Reclaiming the repressed voices, histories, and cultures of muted peoples in the Americas has been a central mission of American Studies Departments since the 1960s. UB’s Department of American Studies coordinates one of the strongest American Indian Studies programs in the United States. In addition, our faculty’s creation and implementation of new technologies that open up powerful possibilities for accessing and documenting such histories has situated our department at the forefront of historiography in the Americas. Our research strengths include American Indian, especially Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) history, art, and culture; the Black Atlantic and the African diaspora in the Americas; the Asian diaspora in the Americas; Chicana/o, Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American studies; Canadian studies; immigrant cultures; oral history and documentary studies; feminist and queer studies; working-class history; public policy; urban studies; popular culture; visual cultures; transnational approaches to American history, politics and culture; critical race theory; border studies; and the history and literature of transatlantic slavery, resistance, dissent, and revolution.

MA Requirements: 32 credit hours are required, as is completion of a variant of at least one of the major requirements of the PhD program--a significant piece of work, the design and teaching of a course, or a major fieldwork project in a second culture.

PhD Requirements: 72 credit hours beyond the Bachelor’s degree must be completed for the PhD. Required courses include Fieldwork Methods and Cultural History. Course work may include offerings from ancillary departments and should include at least 12 hours in a minor field outside the student’s major area of concentration. Fieldwork outside mainline American culture is required to increase awareness of social institutions and cultural determinants of consciousness. Students are expected to design and teach a course in a major area of American Studies. Students must also complete a comprehensive exam and dissertation.

American Studies Faculty

DIMITRIADIS, Greg, Associate Professor of Educational and Leadership and Policy

ELDER, Sarah, Professor of Media Studies; non-fiction theory, digital documentary, visual anthropology, ethnographic media, editing, ethics, story-telling

FRISCH, Michael (PhD, Princeton Univ.) Professor of American Studies and History; American social/urban history, oral and public history

GRINDE, Jr., Donald A., Professor, specializes in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History, US Indian Policy since 1871, Native American Thought, and Environmental History

LYONS, Oren (MA, State Univ. College at Oneonta; LLD, City Univ. of New York) Professor of American Studies; Native American art, law, philosophy, international relations

McCARTHY, Theresa (PhD, McMaster University) Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies - Native American Studies, Haudenosaunee citizenship/clans, Haudenosaunee women, Historiography of anthropological research on the Iroquois

MEYEROWITZ, Ruth (PhD, Columbia Univ.) Associate Professor of American/Women’s Studies; U.S. women’s history, labor history, women in professions

NIGHITNGALE, Carl, Associate Professor; intersections of history and race, world history, urban history

RUNSTEDTLER, Theresa (PhD, Yale University) Assistant Professor of American Studies - U.S. Cultural and Social History, Reconstruction to the Present, Race, Popular Culture, and the Media, African American and African Diaspora Studies

STEVENS, Scott Manning, Assistant Professor of English, and Adjunct Professor of American Studies; early modern transatlantic literature, seventeenth century British culture, and Native American literatures

TEDLOCK, Dennis (PhD, Tulane University, 1968) Professor of English; indigenous languages, verbal arts, writing systems, and religions of the Americas, poetics, linguistics, orality, and literacy, hermeneutics, dialogue, translation

WHITE, Barry (MA, State Univ. of New York, Buffalo) Lecturer in American Studies; Native American education, urban Indian communities

WINTER, Kari J., Professor of African American and American Indian Studies; identity, power, race, African Americans, and American Indians

Contact

Center for the Americas
College of Arts and Sciences
University at Buffalo
1010 Clemens Hall
North Campus
Buffalo, NY 14260-4630
Telephone: 716-645-2546
Fax: 716-645-5977
E-mail:
http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/americanstudies/

Chair: Donald A. Grinde, Jr.
Director: Carl Nightingale

Admissions

State University of New York, Buffalo
Center for the Americas
College of Arts and Sciences
University at Buffalo
1010 Clemens Hall
North Campus
Buffalo, NY 14260-4630
Telephone: 716-645-2546
Fax: 716-645-5977
e-mail:
http://www.grad.buffalo.edu/pros-stud/