Introduction to American Studies II

AMER 196 picks up where the fall introduction left off, shifting from broad surveys of American culture to the actual toolkit scholars use to study it: textual analysis, ethnography, object reading, and archival work applied to themes like race, class, gender, education, and politics. You'll spend the semester working through primary documents, theorists like Foucault and Gramsci, and Bilkent's own archives, with output coming in five quizzes and four essays plus a final project proposal. It's the methods half of the AMER 195/196 sequence that grounds the rest of the major, so the analytical habits you build here carry directly into upper-level seminars on literature, history, and cultural theory.