Studies in United States Culture will publish provocative books that explore United States culture in its many forms and spheres of influence. We seek interdisciplinary work characterized by big ideas, brisk prose, bold storytelling, and methodological sophistication.
In this endeavor, we build on the intellectual origins and historical development of American Studies as a field. In the last quarter century, scholars engaged in interdisciplinary research on United States culture have developed a rich and expansive intellectual practice now flourishing everywhere from academic presses to social media. The best work on literature, music and sound, visual culture, history, documentary arts, and other forms of cultural production regularly cuts across disciplinary bounds to assess the significance and influence of “American culture,” both within the United States and around the globe. Our goal is to publish books that serve as an intellectual meeting ground where scholars from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives can build common lines of inquiry around matters such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, power, and empire in an American context.
We seek authors who work across methodologies, specializations, and disciplines and combine sophisticated textual and archival analysis with equally sophisticated historical analysis. We are especially interested in books that use theory to dig deeply into cultural materials, examining their circulation, reception, interpretation, and reuse.
The series invites submissions from junior and senior scholars whose arguments and archives surprise and provoke their audiences. We will publish books that engage readers, speak to the issues of the present, and contest the contemporary narrowing of intellectual endeavor. The series particularly encourages submissions that experiment with new forms for scholarly and general interest work, including short, strong books that tackle big questions.
Series Editor
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Commonwealth Chair of American Studies and History, University of Virginia
Editorial Board
Sara Blair, University of Michigan
Janet Davis, University of Texas at Austin
Matthew Guterl, Brown University
Franny Nudelman, Carleton University
A. Naomi Paik, University of Illinois-Chicago
Bryant Simon, Temple University
This series is no longer accepting submissions.
Cold War Country
How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism
Studies in United States Culture
Published: April 2024
Transpacific Convergences
Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II
By Denise Khor
Studies in United States Culture
Published: July 2022
Diners, Dudes, and Diets
How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture
Studies in United States Culture
Published: November 2020
White Balance
How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights
By Justin Gomer
Studies in United States Culture
Published: June 2020
Black Market
The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865
By Aaron Carico
Studies in United States Culture
Published: June 2020
A Wall of Our Own
An American History of the Berlin Wall
Studies in United States Culture
Published: March 2020
The Portrait's Subject
Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Studies in United States Culture
Published: December 2019
History Comes Alive
Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s
Studies in United States Culture
Published: November 2017
The Dying City
Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear
Studies in United States Culture
Published: June 2017
Consuming Japan
Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America
Studies in United States Culture
Published: October 2017