Honours in American Studies

The fourth year Honours program consists of an American Studies seminar, one other seminar chosen from the American-focused fourth year units taught in English, Film Studies, Government and International Relations, and History, and an 18-20,000 word thesis.

Honours Coordinator:

To Apply for Honours

1. To apply for Honours, you must pre-enroll with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences through Courses Online by 30 November 2011.
2. Students must also apply directly to the American Studies Program. Each student’s program of seminars and thesis topic must be approved by the Honours Coordinator. The completed Registration Form should be emailed to the coordinator by 14 November 2011.

• Registration Form

Seminars

You are required to do the American Studies Honours Seminar, Approaches to American Studies, and one additional seminar chosen from those focused on the United States offered by the English, Film Studies, Government and History departments.

In 2012, there are two options for the second seminar:

• Americas (History – Dr. Michael McDonnell) | Mondays, 2-4pm
  Who created ‘America’? Traditional histories of the United States usually focus on the European settler societies planted along the eastern seaboard in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explain the origin and rise of the new nation. More recently, historians have drawn on the insights of the new ‘Atlantic history’ to put these developments into a richer trans-national context, while others have utilised innovative methodologies to access the histories of non-Europeans during this period. This seminar will explore these new approaches and give students the opportunity to examine the multi-faceted ways in which indigenous and “subaltern” peoples around the Atlantic basin confronted, challenged, and ultimately shaped the contours of empires in the early modern period, and the rise of the United States itself.
• American Gothic (English – Dr. Melissa Hardie)
  This course looks at the persistence of the gothic in American literary and cinematic practice. The “unreality” of gothic conventions and their origins in Europe will be briefly signalled before the domestic and paranoid colonial fantasies of Wieland serve to introduce a number of concerns:
  i. repression and its return – repressing and re-animating populations, indigenes, cultures.
  ii. social unrealism – discursive constructions of gothic “identity” in popular culture and the exploration of cultural vs. individual pathology.
  iii. live burial and other forms of incarceration: regional imprisonment, lockup as writer’s block, family romance as destiny, paranoia and familiarity.
  iv. mutations of audience, genre, marketplace: gothic as popular reading, gothic as vestigial high culture.
  v. "signs taken for wonders": psychoanalytic and epidemiological readings of gothic in US political-social-neo-colonial cultures.

Thesis

You are required to complete an 18-20,000-word thesis on a topic of your choice, supervised by a member of the American Studies Program.

Staff can only supervise a limited number of Honours students each year, so you should make contact with potential supervisors as soon as possible