Studying the Americas

How does attention to the American hemisphere as an overarching conceptual framework, and the comparative and connective analysis such a framework encourages, effect issues of institution building, research method, academic practice, and pedagogy?  How does one teach or research the Americas? How do courses with traditional US foci (U.S. Literature Survey and the U.S. History Survey, for example) engage other, often lost or marginalized stories? What different methods of analysis are needed when these stories become part of our teaching toolbox?  How do research databases address the challenges of multi-lingualism that an Americas approach raises?  Is it possible to develop research tools and to teach the more complex, multi-layered, and often obscured literary, religious, and social histories of the Americas given existing institutional and curricular constraints?

The essays in Studying the Americas explore critical dimensions of these very questions. The collection introduces students and faculty working in traditional disciplines to the new possibilities for Americanist study opened up when “America” is understood not as a synonym for an isolated United States but as a network of cultural influences that have extended across the hemisphere from the period of colonization to the present. Collectively, the essays comprising Studying the Americas explore the points of contact between and across the individual disciplines of history, religion, sociology, and literary studies.  The essays are more than the sum of their parts, because they explore larger questions of disciplinary as well as national boundaries within an Americas paradigm.  These authors contemplate the disciplinary boundaries that can at times separate fields of knowledge, but they also explore the evolving methods that emerge once national boundaries are understood as overlapping and multiform.