How did you come to understand your place in the United States?  What role did media, politics, history, family, and community play in shaping your understanding of the nation?  Do your ideas match your friends or neighbors?  What is the impression of people outside the United States?  The Department of American Culture is proud to announce a new minor for students interested in learning how to answer those questions.  American Culture gives skills, information, and techniques from a wide variety of perspectives and disciplines.  Students engage comparative ethnic studies, history, literature, film/media studies, religion, music, art, digital technologies, women's studies, folklore, sexuality studies, and ethnography.  Our curriculum allows students a better understanding of the nation's diversity and the U.S.'s role in a global context.  We explore what it has meant -- and continues to mean -- to claim to be an "American."

This flexible minor allows students to chart their own path catered to their interests.  By the time of graduation, students will need to have completed a minimum of 15 credits in American Culture.  In particular, students need one course (3 credits) at the 200 –level, or higher; AMCULT 350: Approaches to American Culture (3 credits); and three additional courses (9 credits total) at the 300-level or higher.  To learn more information or to make an advising appointment, e-mail Tammy Zill or phone 734-763-1460.

The Department of American Culture is the top American studies program in the world.  It is also home to the Latina/o Studies, Arab American Studies, Asian Pacific/Islander American Studies, and Native American Studies programs.