This organization’s Studies in American Culture is an interdisciplinary peer-
reviewed journal that represents our view of American Culture Studies. Our title
emphasizes two capacious signifiers: “American” is not restricted to one particular
national identity; and, “Culture” includes more than canonical U.S. texts and
artefacts and practices. Articles published in Studies in American Culture present
serious examinations of works produced—art, music, poetry, prose, drama, film,
fashion, photography, history, languages, and critical theory—from different
traditions, different contexts, different locales, different politics, and different
rhetorics of power.

American culture is dynamic, and its potentiality is well characterized by Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s assertion in “Self-Reliance” that “power ceases in the instant of
repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the
shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” For every issue of Studies in
American Culture, the editors seek to respond to such transition. Two notable
examples include the 2020 Special Issue on “New Approaches to Latinx and the
Caribbean” and the 2024 Special Issue on “Afrofuturism.” The editors invite
submissions from well-established and new academics, from graduate students
and, potentially, from intellectually passionate undergraduates. The editors
encourage anyone interested in the capaciousness of American culture to attend the
annual conference of the Popular Culture Association in the South/American
Culture Association in the South.