Американские исследования: история, культура и междисциплинарный подход.

Interdisciplinary academic field
the journal

American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, history, society, and culture. It traditionally incorporates literary criticism, historiography and critical theory. Scholarship in American studies focuses on the United States. In the past decades, however, it has also broadened to include Atlantic history and interactions with countries across the globe. Subjects studied within the field are varied, but often examine the literary themes, histories of American communities, ideologies, or cultural productions. Examples might include topics in American social movements, literature, media, tourism, folklore, and intellectual history. Fields studying specific American ethnic or racial groups are considered to be both independent of and included within the broader American studies discipline. This includes European American studies, African American studies, Latino studies, Asian American studies, American Indian studies, and others.

Vernon Louis Parrington is often cited as the founder of American studies for his three volume Main Currents in American Thought, which combines the methodologies of literary criticism and historical research; it won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize. In the introduction to Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington described his field:
I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American—how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions. In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic. The "broad path" that Parrington describes formed a scholastic course of study for Henry Nash Smith, who received a PhD from Harvard's interdisciplinary program in history and American civilization in 1940, setting an academic precedent for present day American studies programs. The first signature methodology of American studies was the "myth and symbol" approach, developed in such foundational texts as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land in 1950, John William Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age in 1955 and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in 1964. Myth and symbol scholars claimed to find certain recurring themes throughout American texts that served to illuminate a unique American culture. Later scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Alan Trachtenberg re imagined the myth and symbol approach in light of multicultural studies. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, these earlier approaches were criticized for continuing to promote the idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the US has had a special mission and virtue that makes it unique among nations. Several generations of American studies scholars moved away from purely ethnocentric views, emphasizing transnational issues surrounding race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, among other topics. But recent studies critique the exceptionalist nature of the transnational turn. "The transnational turn has positioned American Studies in a nationalist rut", observes Jeffrey Herlihy Mera, in After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism:
In these transnational turns  the unhyphenated American phenomenon tends to have colonial characteristics: English language texts and their authors are promoted as representative; a piece of cultural material may be understood as unhyphenated—and thus archetypal—only when authors meet certain demographic criteria; any deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are subordinated to hyphenated status. Institutionally, in the last decade the American Studies Association has reflected the interdisciplinary nature of the field, creating strong connections to ethnic studies, gender studies, cultural studies and post or de colonial studies. Environmental perspectives, in ascendance in related fields, such as literature and history, have not penetrated the mainstream of American studies scholarship. A major theme of the field in recent years has been internationalization—the recognition that much vital scholarship about the US and its relations to the wider global community has been and is being produced outside the United States.

Until the mid 2000s, the use of American for this multidisciplinary field was widely defended. In 1998, Janice Radway argued, "Does the perpetuation of the particular name, American, in the title of the field support the notion that such a whole exists even in the face of powerful work that tends to question its presumed coherence? Does the field need to be reconfigured conceptually?" She concluded, "the name American studies will have to be retained." In 2001, Wai Chee Dimmock argued that the field "is largely founded on this fateful adjective. [American] governs the domain of inquiry we construct, the range of questions we entertain, the kind of evidence we take as significant. The very professionalism of the field rests on the integrity and the legitimacy of this founding concept." In 2002, Heinz Ickstadt argued that American studies "should accept its name as its limitation and its boundary." In 2006, Dimmock affirmed that the field "does stand to be classified apart, as a nameable and adducible unit." More recently, scholars have questioned American as a categorizing term. "In consideration of the limitations of conventional terms," Jeffrey Herlihy Mera argued in 2018, instead of American, terms like "spaces claimed by the political body" and "residents of spaces claimed by the political body" would offer a "more sensitive and attuned description of the regions, critical artifacts, communities, and individuals in question, one that is less charged with the ambiguities and colonial ties that weigh down the traditional disciplinary nomenclatures." In "the interests of justice and along the lines most suitable to our emergent age," argued Markha Valenta in 2017, scholars should consider "abandoning America as the field identifier."

Founded at Bellagio, Italy, in 2000, the International American Studies Association has held World Congresses at Leyden (2003), Ottawa (2005), Lisbon (2007), Beijing (2009), Rio de Janeiro (2011), The Sixth World Congress of IASA at Szczecin, Poland, August 3–6, 2013, and Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (2019). The IASA is the only worldwide, independent, non governmental association for Americanists. Furthering the international exchange of ideas and information among scholars from all nations and various disciplines who study and teach America regionally, hemispherically, nationally, and transnationally, IASA is registered in the Netherlands as a non profit, international, educational organization with members in more than forty countries around the world.

The American Studies Association was founded in 1950. It publishes American Quarterly, which has been the primary outlet of American studies scholarship since 1949. The second largest American studies journal, American Studies, is sponsored by the Mid America American Studies Association and University of Kansas. Today there are 55 American studies journals in 25 countries.