American Studies

Professor Kim Marra leading a lecture course.

Cultural Experience

Helping students acquire a broad familiarity with the dynamics of cultural experience and explore aspects of life in the United States, such as sport, popular and fine arts, institutions, values, gender and ethnic relations, artifacts, and the everyday life of a diverse citizenry.

Students participating in a group exercise during a lecture by Professor Naomi Greyser.

American Studies is committed to the study of American culture. In our scholarship and teaching, we model interdisciplinary inquiry and stress the central role of power and struggle. We prepare students for a wide range of careers in the arts, education, and public service.

American Studies

Professional athlete kneeling during the national anthem.

Sport Studies

Course work provides students with the critical skills necessary to understand the cultural significance of sport as it relates to the media, the economy, the political system, and the educational system. A focus on the race, class, and gender differences in the sport experience is central to the major.

Sport Studies

Native and Indigenous Studies

Students examine the diversity within indigenous literatures, material culture, belief systems, languages, political and social organization, and economies. Students critically examine popular stereotypes of Native peoples, and develop a clearer understanding of the complex connections between past and present that shape the achievements, needs, and resources of Native American communities.

Native and Indigenous Studies

News and Announcements

Houlihan wins ASA award

Friday, November 11, 2022

American Studies PhD student Glenn Houlihan won the American Studies Association's 2022 Sports Studies Caucus Graduate Student Essay Prize for "From Placemaking to Profit: Cricket’s Cultural and Commercial Logic in the United States.”

Houlihan book review published in the journal Urban Studies

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

American studies PhD student Glenn Houlihan reviewed Bulls Markets: Chicago’s Basketball Business and the New Inequality, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018) by Sean Dinces in the September 12, 2022 online edition of the journal Urban Studies. In the book, author Sean Dinces focuses on similarities between the 2020 construction of the SoFi Statium in Inglewood, California -- the most expensive sporting arena ever built -- and 1990s Chicago, where the construction of the United Center served to enrich wealthy sports franchise owners at the expense of low-income city residents.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980221121684

Vogan interviewed for NYT piece on the NFL

Thursday, September 8, 2022

Professor Travis Vogan (AMST and JMC) was interviewed for a piece in the September 8, 2022 edition of the New York Times. "How the N.F.L. Stays So Popular, Despite Its Many Scandals" examines why the league stays attractive to fans despite numerous scandals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/sports/football/nfl-football-scandals.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-sharevo

The Department of American Studies acknowledges the university’s origins in land grants from the Ioway, Sioux and Pottowottami, Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki and Sauk peoples; we acknowledge that, like almost all property in the United States, university land has been obtained or extracted from indigenous people. While recognizing that these origins cannot change the past, the Department works to create a future where the past is thoroughly understood in support of human flourishing, democratic values, ethical action and social justice.

The University of Iowa Acknowledgement of Land and Sovereignty represents an official and public recognition that the institutions where we work and learn today are built on Native lands.

Cultural Experience