About ANES | American & New England Studies | University of Southern Maine

Woodsman driving pulpwood on the Kennebago River

The American and New England Studies program is committed to studying regionalism in the context of contemporary thought and scholarship. It is both a regional and an American studies program. The program's focus is on New England, but the region is examined in the broad context of American social and cultural experience as a whole. Exploring as well as destabilizing "official" New England, the program offers students a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies-including folklore, literary studies, visual culture, landscape and cultural geography, architectural history, archaeology, cultural criticism, environmental studies and ethnography-but stresses the historicity of such practices, and of the culture and society they set out to explore.

The graduate program in American and New England Studies was established in 1987. Rather than create separate master's degrees in history, literature, art history, anthropology, and other areas, the University chose to establish an innovative interdisciplinary program that would appeal to students with diverse academic backgrounds and interests. A year was devoted to planning and developing the program, and the first students began their studies in the fall of 1988. Program development has been supported by four grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, the program has received grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Davis Family Foundation.