Bachelor of Arts in American Studies - Material Culture and the Built Environment

DePaul University

Students in this concentration study the complex interrelationships among the arts, craft, design, ideas, places, and social and cultural life in America. This concentration allows for the encyclopedic study of things in their historical context, drawing on methodologies and approaches from art and design history, economic history, history of technology, philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, and geography. The curriculum combines two broad approaches: giving objects prime importance and placing objects in wider social and intellectual contexts. Some courses raise issues related to media, techniques, aesthetics, production and consumption, historiography, and theory, while others focus on the role objects and places play in people’s lives: the planning of cities, parks, and gardens the design of buildings, interiors, and furnishings clothing jewelry and body adornment the material culture of food, decoration, and ornament illustration and the graphic arts. Students will explore the ways in which Americans have been shaped by and have shaped their physical environments, from ''nature'' to the urban environment.