Description
The first stand-alone interdisciplinary Ph.D. in cultural studies in the United States, the program at George Mason draws on the expertise of faculty in ten disciplines, centers, and programs. Special strengths of the program include gender/sexuality, film and media, and cultural and political economy. Available concentrations run the gamut of cultural topics: African-American studies, early modern literatures, Latin American modernities, contemporary museum studies, and popular culture. Click here for more information on cultural studies.
News
George Mason was named the nation's number one university to watch on U.S. News and World Report's 2008 list of "Up-and-Coming Schools." Celebrating its 37th anniversary in 2009, Mason combines strong academic and research programs with a reputation for forward-thinking academic offerings. The Cultural Studies PhD program is the first of its kind in the US.
Cultural Studies Director Roger Lancaster wrote the preface for and contributed an essay to New Landscapes of Inequality, a volume that grew out of a School for Advanced Research seminar. Contributors to this volume map the connections among neoliberalism, social inequality, and punitive governance.
Student Robert Gehl's new article, "YouTube as archive: who will curate this digital Wunderkammer?" is available in the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Tim Kaposy joins the Cultural Studies faculty as an Assistant Professor in Fall, 2008. Kaposy received his PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is coeditor (with Imre Szeman) of Cultural Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, forthcoming), and is presently Visiting Professor in the Department of North American Studies at the Universität Bonn in Germany.
Alison Landsberg will also be joining the program this fall as its first three-year faculty fellow. (The new faculty fellowships commit recipients to teaching half of their courses in Cultural Studies for a three-year period.) Landsberg is Associate Professor of History at George Mason; she received her PhD in literature and film from the University of Chicago. Her first book is titled Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Two Cultural Studies students, Elaine Cardenas and Ellen Gorman, have published a new book, The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture.
Cultural Studies professor Paul Smith's new book, Primitive America, is now available. This book examines the dialectic between cultural atavism and the seemingly inexorable and untouchable expansion of capitalism in American culture.
Student Pia Moller has published a chapter in The Politics, Economics and Culture of Mexican-U.S. Migration: Both Sides of the Border. Her chapter, "From the Margin to the Middle?: The Origin, Transformation, and Direction of the Minutemen" examines the American "nativist" mobilization, primarily the Minutemen and their influence in established conservative circles.
Student David Arditi's new book, Criminalizing Independent Music- The Recording Industry Association of America's Advancement of Dominant Ideology, is now available
Student Randa Kayyali has published the award-winning book, The Arab Americans.
Student Cecelia Uy-Tioco has published an article, 'Overseas Filipino Workers and Text Messaging: Reinventing Transnational Mothering' in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (21.2, pp. 253-265). This essay is now available as a chapter in Mobile Phone Cultures, Routledge, 2008.
Cultural Studies graduate Bob Shepherd's latest book, When Culture Goes to Market, is now available.
Cultural Studies graduate Wendy Burns-Ardolino's new book, Jiggle: (Re)Shaping American Women, is now available.
Cultural studies student Adila Laidi-Haneih's book Palestine, Rien ne nous manque ici will appear soon in France and Belgium. It gathers commissioned texts and images (essays, memoirs, diaries, interviews, poems, photographs, installations, etc.) from both confirmed as well as emerging artists, critics, philosophers, poets and visual artists from Palestine and elsewhere.
