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American Studies
amstdy@umn.edu
612-624-4190
amstdy@umn.edu
612-624-4190
Department of American Studies
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Crossings: Spoken Word Performance
Please join CROSSINGS next Monday, Nov. 2, for a spoken word performance featuring Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria, Marisa Carr, and Charlotte Albrecht. It's Monday, 11/2, from 3:30-5:00pm, in Scott Hall room 4. Refreshments will be provided.
Crossings: Spoken Word Performance
Please come to Crossings next Monday, Nov. 2, to hear three fantastic spoken word artists! And spread the word to your friends, students, and colleagues!
BORDERS AND BELONGING
a spoken word performance
Monday, Nov. 2
3:30-5:00pm
Scott Hall, Room 4 (in the basement)
Refreshments will be provided
Featuring:
Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria
Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria is a writer and spoken word poet of Peruvian heritage heavily involved with Palabristas, a local Latin@ poets collective. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and an involved activist in the Latin@ community.
Marisa Carr
Marisa Carr grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but currently resides in Minneapolis. She is, among other things, a writer, performer, musician, artist and organizer. Marisa is Turtle Mountain Ojibwe from the Turtle clan. She is 22 years old.
Charlotte Albrecht
Charlotte Albrecht is a mixed-heritage Arab American queer femme newbie poet originally from Louisville, Kentucky. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.
The Department of American Studies is one of the most renowned American Studies departments in the country. In 2007, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s "Faculty Productivity Scholarly Index" for top research universities listed American Studies at Minnesota as second in the entire field. Indeed the work of our faculty has garnered acclaim both nationally and internationally, shaping conversations in fields such as American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, Film Studies, Jewish Studies, History, Anthropology, Literature, and Sociology.
In its most recent interdisciplinary experiment, the department has trained its skills on evolving what has become known within the larger field of American Studies as "post-nationalist American Studies." Popularized by the eponymous anthology in the year 2000, proponents of this iteration of American Studies called for a redoubling of the field’s efforts to think beyond the geopolitical and historical parameters of the U.S. nation-state and called for work with a transnational fluency. In the year 2001, the faculty within American Studies decided that we would make "post-nationalist American Studies" the center of our departmental vision. Uppermost on the departmental mind was how to institutionalize that interest in the domains of curricula, graduate recruitment, publishing and hiring. Soon thereafter faculty within the department reshaped our curricula at the graduate and undergraduate levels, redesigned our admissions and hiring priorities, and retailored our scholarly pursuits to boldly engage and direct the field’s new direction.
Despite the sometimes fragile nature of this interdisciplinary errand, it has allowed us to generate a departmental climate that—at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels—models a dynamic engagement with the histories and literatures of various fields. The point of this interdisciplinary direction is to produce an American Studies that is not passive or imitative but one that is self-initiated. This interdisciplinary iteration is our way of saying to students and faculty—in a paraphrase of James Baldwin—that the disciplines and interdisciplines are stretched out here before you and you needn’t take them or leave them the way they were before you came in.
