Welcome!

The University of Hawai'i is home to one of the oldest and largest American Studies departments in the United States. The year 2001 marked its fortieth anniversary, during which time the Department had awarded close to a thousand BA, MA, and PhD degrees.

Hundreds of American Studies programs and departments exist throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia, each of them having unique characteristics and strengths. But only the American Studies Department at the University of Hawai'i provides students at all levels with a broad-based foundation in traditional American Studies fields (such as history, literature, film, politics, gender, ethnicity, and the arts) along with an opportunity to pursue in depth cross-cultural specializations involving the United States, Asia, and the Pacific.

Most undergraduate students in the UH American Studies Department hail from Hawai'i—the most genuinely multicultural state in the country. And while many of our graduate students also are from Hawai'i, a large proportion of them come to the Department from throughout the United States and abroad. In recent years foreign graduate students studying in the Department have arrived from Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Sweden Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The Department's diverse twelve member core faculty teach and publish in a wide variety of fields, including popular culture, media studies, film, cultural/social/intellectual history, African American studies, literature, art, architecture, cultural theory, Asian American Studies, international politics, indigenous studies, historic preservation, Japanese American studies, women's/gender studies, Filipino American studies and museum studies/material culture.

Beyond the Department's core faculty, approximately two dozen additional faculty from throughout the University work closely with American Studies students. These faculty are drawn from such departments as English, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, art, music, Asian studies, ethnic studies, and women's studies.

The American Studies Department is located on the University of Hawai'i's 320-acre Manoa campus. The campus—which takes its name from lush Manoa Valley, in which it is situated, a short drive to either downtown Honolulu or Waikiki—is the University's research center and the largest of the ten campuses in the 48,000 student UH system.

The Department's commitment to multiculturalism is especially appropriate in this setting, since in the University's student body (as in the State of Hawai'i at large) no one ethnic group comes close to constituting a majority of the population. All UH students, like all the people of Hawai'i, are therefore members of one or another "minority group," and fully a third of the population is of mixed ethnic ancestry. Appropriately, the motto of the University is "Above All Nations is Humanity."

The University is surrounded by the City and county of Honolulu, which has a population of nearly 900,000—making it one of the dozen or so largest municipalities in the United States. It also is one of the most diverse, containing within its 620 square miles a densely populated, high-rise urban center and numerous outlying suburban communities, as well as miles of pristine beaches, mountain ranges, and wilderness open space. Honolulu is on the island of O'ahu, one of the five major islands (including Kaua'i, Maui, Moloka'i, and the "Big Island" of Hawai'i) in the Hawaiian archipelago.

As befits the islands' world-renowned climate and environment, much of life in Honolulu is lived outdoors. There are, however, countless museums, art galleries, theaters, concert halls, libraries, and bookstores throughout the city. Shopping opportunities range from enormous malls with the likes of Tiffany's, Nieman Marcus, and Saks to open air markets and tiny shops in the narrow streets of Chinatown. And, of course, Honolulu's nightlife is famously vibrant—with hundreds of clubs and restaurants serving an astonishing variety of cuisines from throughout the world.

Everyone knows that Honolulu, like the rest of the Hawaiian Islands, is a wonderful place to visit and to live. What is less well known is that the University of Hawai'i provides an unmatched locale for the study of American culture and society. Situated at the crossroads of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres—with a faculty drawn from the finest universities in the country and a student body as cosmopolitan as any in the world—it is almost impossible for those who work and study at UH to view the United States in other than a richly complex, internationalist, and multicultural perspective.

It is now estimated that in fifty years the entire United States will have no single ethnic group that constitutes a majority of the population—as has been the case in Hawai'i for more than a century. Why wait? In Hawai'i you can study the American future—now.