Master of Arts in American Studies - Virtual Information Session

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. We're just going to wait one second as I think we have everybody entering the room and getting their audio all set up. For those of you who are joining us live, we're very excited to have you all here. My name is Jen Radwanski and I am the associate director for graduate admissions here at Stockton and we're so happy that you are either here with us live or possibly watching this pre recorded session. We're going to be doing an overview of our masters of our Master of Arts.

American studies and I am joined by my colleague Doctor John O'Hara, who is the program chair who will be reviewing the program and telling you all the wonderful things and why you should come and join us here at Stockton. So without further ado, I'm going to turn things over to John. I will mention to you all actually first there is a chat feature. So if you're watching this live, you have the ability to ask questions as we go. But I would say if you could referring to putting anything in there until the end because we may cover your question as we go through. We found that.

That's happened many times, but we will do a live Q&A. If you're watching this recorded, we're going to give you instructions on how to send questions to us electronically at the end of the session. So again, without further ado, I'm gonna turn things over to you.

Thank you, Jen, and thanks everybody for joining us today. As Jen mentioned on John O'Hara, I'm the chair of the Master of Arts and American Studies program here at Stockton and I'm happy to share some information today about the program and about what we do here. So let me get started here. What is American studies, American studies as an area of study at over 500 colleges and universities.

Where various disciplines converge toward a deeper understanding of American history, society, culture, and politics, past and present, within and beyond the United States. So it's a pretty wide definition of a field of study, but it's been cemented in American universities for at least the past 70 years. With the founding of the American Studies Association. In 1951, they published the prominent.

Journal, American Quarterly, and there are dozens of academic journals in the field of American studies.

I went to many of I went to about a dozen or more program web pages in American studies at various universities and copied the language they used to introduce their programs and put them into a word cloud. And then I shaped the word cloud into the shape of the American flag. But I thought it would be interesting because it's such an expansive kind of field that involves many different disciplinary approaches. It's I thought it would be interesting to look at the cloud.

Of words that are used to describe it among some of the major programs. So if you just take a look there, you can see the kind of collision of discourses that constitutes American study, American studies, as it's really all-encompassing and it is open and inviting to different kinds of questions from different kinds of scholars. I always compare American studies to a kind of intersection where different scholars and different discourses meet.

Um, here at Stockton. Our faculty come from a variety of our programs, africana studies, history, literature, languages, visual arts, photography, sociology and anthropology, philosophy and religion, political science and communications. And it's all sort of under the philosophy that no single approach, methodology, or perspective would be adequate to fully survey and explain the expansive.

Elements of American Life, society and culture. And if you kind of look at the border I created in this slide, I'm just trying to kind of convey the sense that whether you're talking about history, literature, anthropology, sociology, politics, media and so many elements of what constitutes a culture, this is what American studies involves, a sort of branch of cultural studies itself.

Some of its central questions involve trying to come to some resolution about what it means to be American, what it means to have an American identity, whether you're a person or whether it's a work of literature or film that we're talking about. What does it mean to be a work of American literature? What does it mean to be a work of American cinema? That adjective American seems to hold a lot of diverse and sometimes conflicting elements. And so, but.

We routinely use it. So what kinds of standards and what kinds of practices do we use to designate things American? What kinds of cultural materials define and describe the country?

But moreover, how do those materials shape and produce culture? And how do those materials challenge and contest notions of American culture?

And I think that's one of the crucial questions that American studies tries to deal with. So we ask as scholars, how can we, through our scholarly activities, collect, compose, curate and contribute to understandings of American history, culture and politics and their intertwinement? Its in the past, present and future. So like I said, it's a very expansive definition of a field, by definition interdisciplinary.

And I think that accords very well with Stockton's founding mission of interdisciplinarity and reducing the silos that occur between academic departments at many traditional universities. In fact, I don't think it's a coincidence that American studies really finds its accelerating moment in the 1960s, the same decade that Stockton University was founded.

There was tremendous energy at that time about interdisciplinarity itself and the limitations of approaching problems or issues from 1 limited perspective or methodology.

Our faculty at Stockton who contribute to the American studies program, I sometimes characterize them as a sort of super group or a powerhouse or an All Star team of our best scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Again, we draw from a variety of programs and departments, and on the left side of this panel here you can see some of our faculty expertise. And then in the rest of the slide you can see a number of recently published.

Works by people who teach for us and do American studies scholarship.

We are also tightly affiliated with the South Jersey culture and History Center, which is housed in our university library and directed by our literature faculty, Tom Kinsella. The South Jersey culture and History Center really brings our regional and even local focus on the preservation of the of the past in our region and really highlights the rich cultural.

And historical heritages of South Jersey by paying attention to the places and spaces and peoples and populations and stories that have emerged in South Jersey throughout our throughout American history. The South Jersey culture and History Center has partnerships with dozens of South Jersey.

Historical preservation and heritage tourism sites, many of which we.

Many of which sponsor internships for our programs, so a lot of our students will end up working for places or interning at places like the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey and other.

Organizations and institutions.

SJCC, as we call it, also has its own.

Biannual journal called Sojourn, which is a journal about South Jersey history and culture and it also does periodic publications of otherwise lost texts such as the ones you see right under the heading here in the slide so.

I got let me advance one more slide so we.

Are tightly affiliated with the South Jersey culture and History Center, is what I wanted to say.

We also sponsor an annual lecture here on campus, the Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture series. Paul Lyons is a beloved and late Stockton faculty member who was in the group that had originally founded our program. And after his passing in 2010, we started this memorial lecture series, which has now been 12 years running. So in that lecture we usually bring a prominent scholar, national or international.

Caller to campus to work with students and faculty throughout the day and then to give an evening lecture each spring. Some of our recent lecturers include Lonnie Bunch, who was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History. Michael Rothberg, who's the chair of comparative literature at UCLA and whose works have been published around the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. WD Airhart, Vietnam War.

Combat poet who was prominently featured in the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War. And this year, down in the bottom right corner, you'll see Donald Yacovone, a Harvard historian whose recent book teaching white supremacy has made a big splash this year in trying to understand the relationship between the teaching of history and civics and race in America. So we have a lot of activities in our program and.

I can't say enough about how exciting and vibrant we all are as a team coming from different areas of the school. So that's just a little bit of an overview of what the program is about. I know many students who are thinking about coming to Graduate School want to know something else. You know, what can I do with American studies? And so it's really limitless. Anything involving American history, society, culture, politics, economics and and the conjunctions.

Between those categories is fair game for an American studies scholar. I think one of the most unique things about our program is that students can kind of chart their own paths through the program and really focus on the areas that they are interested in. I'm teaching my final session of our professional seminar tonight, and students are giving presentations on things that are quite distinctive but yet fall under the category of our field one.

Woman in our class is.

Talking about urban archaeology and people who explore abandoned shopping malls and retail discount stores and then post those videos on the Internet, they're calling it urban archaeology, while another is looking into, you know, a prominent woman who was married to a Freudian psychologist in the 40s and ran an asylum basically for what they called at the time, wayward girls. So you can really take your interests and your focus.

And find a place in American studies. Our graduates have moved on to really interesting careers. Some of our graduates have taken PhD, some of them work in secondary education. And you can see a four of our recent students, Eric Anglero, who's working at Princeton University, Christina Noble, who heads up the stories of Atlantic City project, Jesse Kraft, who is an ex, became an expert.

And coins and the history of money and now works in New York City at the American Numismatics Society, the largest collection of antique coins and paper money in the United States. And then our recent student, who's actually completing her thesis this semester, is working with the office of Phil Murphy as the head of briefing. So she's been sort of Phil Murphy's right hand person for the last year, but it's not limited to those kinds of things.

So down the list, you can kind of see a whole bunch of other kinds of opportunities you might consider exploring with an American studies degree.

Our curriculum here at Stockton is 30 credits over the two year program. And unlike our undergraduate programs, which are four credit courses, ours are three credits each. So a 30 credit curriculum is the equivalent of 10 courses over two years. Most students take three per semester if they're going full time. We have two core courses that are required. The first is the American Studies Pro seminar.

Short for professional seminar which we offer each fall, and then our American studies research methods course which we offer each spring. So every student takes those two courses and.

As far as taking your other courses in the curriculum, you can mix and match electives up to the 24 additional credits. You can see there's a subsidiary requirement there that students do a coverage of certain areas in American studies, one being a periods elective, 1 being a topics elective, and the third being and approaches elective.

So, but there's plenty of plenty of room in the curriculum to get that done. And if students are interested, there are other opportunities to do.

Academic work outside the classroom through independent studies, internships, study tours, and thesis projects.

These are just some of the courses we've run in the past three or four years.

You can ignore the highlights. I took a screenshot from a different document, but just looking down those you can see some of the subjects that have come up in our program recently.

Independent studies. Independent studies are three credit courses established between a student and an American studies faculty member to pursue unique projects. So just as I was talking a minute ago about how you have the opportunity to kind of carve out your own niche in the field while you're here, sometimes the electives we offer don't adequately address your interests.

If that were to occur, we welcome students to match themselves with departmental faculty members and to design A unique research or writing project. We could do that through an independent study form. Basically, you get together with your faculty member and map out a kind of singular and unique syllabus for you for the course of the semester. And that's all approved by the the chair of the program, the Dean, and the faculty member running the independent study.

Internships. Internships are three credit on-site experiences in collaboration with a campus or community partner. If you do a three credit internship that requires 8 contact hours per week for 15 weeks, that's the course of the semester. And we have agreements with existing partners who you could always reach out to and find out if an internship is available. Sometimes they reach out to us and ask for.

Available interns or you can find your own opportunity and then we can create the agreement between Stockton and that organization or institution. We had a student last, say two years ago who might actually pre pandemic, who did an internship at the Museum of the American Revolution that she acquired for herself and then brought it to us. We created the agreement with the museum and then the student was able to work and learn there over that semester.

Um, yes. We also have study tours, which can also offer three credits in toward completion of the degree when they're available.

Pre pandemic, we would frequently do these almost every other year at least. We've had faculty LED trips to Ghana. We did a civil rights tour of the South that was actually interrupted by the pandemic in which students were going to take a Greyhound bus through the American S and visit some of the important sites of American Civil rights history. We've done study tours to pool Poland and Germany, Scotland, Costa Rica, and I understand there's one in the works right now.

To Panama coming up in the next year. So if you go on the trip and design with the faculty member a kind of curriculum or a what we would call student work product that results from the trip that is also available for as the equivalent of a course.

Um, American studies seminars that are are traditional classes are typically offered from 6:00 to 9:00 PM Mondays through Thursdays.

We do have some electives that are also shared space electives. Those are hybrid advanced undergraduate courses combined with American studies students. So you might be familiar with cross listed courses in which.

A classroom is a mixed population taking the course for different kinds of credit.

A shared space course is similar to that, except the students in the classroom are actually enrolled in two different courses altogether. There's graduate students who are enrolled at the 5000 level and undergraduates who are enrolled at the 3000 or 4000 level, and our professors have find unique ways to get graduate students working with undergraduates in those areas.

I also wanted to mention that graduate students can take up to 9 credits in out of program graduate courses with the approval of the chair. So we have some students who are interested in entrepreneurship who might take a course with our masters of Business Administration program. We have students who we work really closely with the Holocaust and genocide studies graduate program as well. So many of our students will take courses in what we call MOG.

The Master of Arts and Holocaust and Genocide in many of their students will take courses in American studies, but we also have other programs also. Let's such as our Master of Arts and Instructional Technology with what they offer a grant writing course that some students will take. Bottom line, and the point of me talking here is that you are permitted to take up to three courses that are not coded as a MST courses.

We do offer graduate assistantships. We have a limited number of them each semester. But graduate assistantships are really a form of financial aid which waives up to three credits and tuition in exchange for 4.5 hours of work per week assisting in a MST faculty member with their usually their research projects. Those applications are available on the graduate admissions web page, and they have due dates.

They are the same every semester, the end of October and March and those notices go out in the winter.

This is just a slide on some of our resources. We try to support our students as much as we can. We have a graduate with tutoring specialists in the tutoring center. We have a designated American studies librarian who's also our university archivist, where some of our students will do independent studies and internships.

The graduate admissions program. We're here with Jen today, and we're housed in the School of Arts and Humanities, although the Dean of graduate studies is from general studies.

Many of our students get involved in the Graduate Student Council, which offers opportunities to.

Operate as the voice of the graduate students in policy and procedure.

Questions related to Graduate School.

This year, we've unveiled 6 new 4 + 1 dual degree concentrations for undergraduates. This offers advanced undergraduates a way to begin taking graduate courses in their senior year at the undergraduate level, and we allow students to take up to 9 credits per semester.

In as advanced undergraduates, so in the fall they can take the professional seminar, in the spring they take the research methods, and then they can add one more course to their schedule. All of those credits would apply both to the undergraduate degree and to the graduate degree.

In our admissions process, this is also on the graduate studies webpage. You can do the general application, which is for most people. We also have a direct entry option that's for students who graduated from Stockton University within the past year. And what we kind of do is make that transition from undergraduate to graduate studies at our institution a little bit easier for students who have already.

I've been taking classes here. The requirements are just a little bit different than the traditional application process. I believe it waives the need for letters of recommendation and there might be some other slight differences making the direct entry application a little easier than the traditional application.

These are some of the prerequisite requirements for admission into the program. Of course, you have to have a BA degree with a minimum undergraduate GPA of 3.0. You can see some other details on this slide that I won't read out, but if you glance down, you can see information about the fee, an essay to accompany your application, 3 letters of recommendation, and testing requirements which are actually waived.

If your GPA was higher than 3.0 at the undergraduate level.

Resumes are asked for and official transcripts from your undergraduate institution.

Well, I'm all alone here and that is sounds like a barrage of information to me, but I am here all the time and that's my e-mail address, so you can contact me directly anytime, really. Or Jen through the Graduate School. And that is it. That's the Master of Arts and American Studies program.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Alright, you can still hear me right?

I can.

Alright, good deal. Alright. So I know we have a couple of people who are joining us live. We wanna take this time to just see if you have any additional questions. I'm gonna actually John, if it's OK, I'm going to bump this slide over to for a second. For anybody who's joining us virtually and not watching it live though, you can send any questions you have to either of us and then you can send them to these e-mail addresses here. But again if you're watching this with us currently please feel free to put any questions you have in the chat we'll we'll take.

Just a couple more minutes and let you type those in.

I think that one of the things I love about doing these sessions and we've done them for a couple of our programs is hearing the opportunity to hear from our chairs and hear the passion about their programs and their excitement for what they do. And I think that here at Stockton the thing that is the best about our programs is our faculty. And you know John had mentioned the the rock stars, the superheroes of of American Studies in and truly there's an amazing group of faculty who work within this.

Program, and if nothing else, that should be one of the main reasons you look at this program. In particular because the attention to detail, the one-on-one contact you would have with faculty to really advance your education is is unlike any other. And that should definitely be something you consider as you're looking at programs at Stockton and specifically with this program.

So I see we've taken a few minutes to let you put anything in the chat. I don't see any questions in the chat from our audience. That means, John, you did a wonderful job. You covered all the details. I think that that was really helpful, everything from the admissions application to where your students are now to just the highlights of the program. So thank you for touching upon all those things. We really appreciate it. We appreciate all of you who are watching this. And again, if you have any additional questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to chat with you further.

I hope everyone has a wonderful day. Take care. Bye bye.

Thank you.