Finding a Path from AMCS to Grad School by Kierstan Carter
The wonderful and terrible thing about graduate school is that it really can be whatever you want. In the six months since starting graduate school, I’ve met people who study everything from the construction of space suits to a group of ancient Greek hippies called the Stoics to pre-colonial African economies. I study African-American political thought, a topic I never took undergraduate classes in and never wrote about until I put together my application for graduate school, largely, because AMCS gave me access to advisors, graduate students, and other undergrads who helped me hone my ideas.
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Straight to the Source: Archives and AMCS by Jordan Dubin
At an AMCS alumni event I was unsure of my summer 2018 plans. With the help of AMCS alumnus Kelsey Johnston, I ended up with a fantastic experience working as an archival intern for The L-A-D Foundation in downtown St. Louis. Named after the initials of its founder Leo A. Drey, the non-profit manages and protects over 150,000 acres of land in the Ozarks. I was tasked with attempting to make a functioning archive out of their historical documents, which included early organization photographs, correspondence about land acquisition, abstracts from the early 20th century, and much more.
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A Reflection on the AMCS course, On Location Portland Beyond Portlandia: Creative Cities and the New Economy by Paige Steinberg
This summer, I took the AMCS On Location course in Portland, taught by Anthropology professor Kedron Thomas and AMCS Department director Peter Benson, and assisted by Anthropology graduate student Brad Jones. I felt excited to embark on this free trip to the city, study community development by meeting real urban planners, and make more friends in the American Culture Studies Department. But I soon realized that the course would teach me on much deeper level than the goals I had in mind.
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AMCS to PBS: Research and Storytelling in Action by Abby Gordon
My name is Abby Gordon and I graduated from the AMCS department in the spring of 2017. Since graduating, I worked first as a researcher and now as an associate producer on the genealogical documentary series,
Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on PBS. If you are not a PBS regular, you might know us as that show that revealed to the world that Larry David and Bernie Sanders are actually biological cousins and not just SNL look-alikes!
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Lynne Cooper Harvey Writing Prize Winners
Every year, AMCS seeks to recognize academic excellence with The Lynne Cooper Harvey Undergraduate Writing Prize, which acknowledges outstanding writing on a topic in American culture. We look for essays and research papers that that reveal analytical depth and agile multidisciplinary thinking, and we are particularly interested in work that demonstrates innovative interpretation of sources, methodological sophistication, and creative conceptual framing. This award carries a cash prize of six hundred dollars.
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AMCS Spring 2019 Research Colloquium
On April 5, 2019, we had our AMCS Spring 2019 Research Colloquium where our AMCS senior majors presented on their Capstone projects. Each student was introduced by their faculty advisor or mentor and it was a full day of fascinating research, with many friends and family in attendance.
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