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.
Professor Hugh Gusterson coedited The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It. Contributors to this volume map the impact of the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more.
Professors Hugh Gusterson and Andy Bickford contributed chapters to the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual. Written by the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual explores the ethical and intellectual conflicts of the Pentagon's Human Terrain System; argues that there are flaws in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual; identifies the next frontiers for the Pentagon's culture warriors; and suggests strategies for resisting the deformation and exploitation of anthropological knowledge by the military.
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.
