About the Center – University of Copenhagen

Center for Transnational American Studies
Resize Print Bookmark and Share

CTAS > About the Center

About the Center

The Center for Transnational American Studies was launched at the beginning of the spring 2010 semester. It is based at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies (Engerom). The Center was established to provide an institutional focus at Engerom, and at the University of Copenhagen more generally, for teaching and research related to the United States. The Center is built around a core of tenured and tenure-track staff with training and research expertise in American studies, American history and society, and American literature and culture. This core staff teaches and researches various aspects of U.S. history, literature, politics, and culture in regional, national, and global frameworks.

As its name indicates, the Center places a special emphasis on transnational American studies: teaching about and research into the United States within wider hemispheric, transatlantic, transpacific, and global contexts. There are various intellectual and institutional reasons for this transnational emphasis:

  • in the last ten to fifteen years, American studies has been transformed by what Robert Gross and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, among others, have termed a "transnational turn." Many American studies scholars have moved away from treating the United States only on its own terms or as an "exceptional" nation to explore the various ways in which the U.S. interacts-historically, socially, politically, economically, and culturally-with the wider world;

  • Engerom's current research strategy (outlined in Danish) puts a particular emphasis on transnational studies. The implementation of this strategy was also demonstrated with the establishment in 2008 of the PhD research program in Transnational and Migration Studies (TRAMS);

  • the Center is working with colleagues at the Center for Latin American Studies to develop postgraduate teaching that focuses on the United States in comparative and hemispheric contexts. The first collaborative MA course will run in autumn 2010;

  • the Center is located in a large, multidisciplinary department at a Danish university that also houses British studies, Anglophone postcolonial studies, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. As the departmental research strategy states, this "disciplinary breadth provides excellent opportunities for interdisciplinary cooperation and the comparative study of cultures. In that connection, the links between Denmark and, for example, Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States in both the past and the present are an obviously relevant field of study." ("Instituttets faglige bredde giver store muligheder for tværdisciplinært samarbejde og for sammenlignende kulturstudier. I den forbindelse er samspillet mellem Danmark og eksempelvis Tyskland, Frankrig, Storbritannien og USA i fortid og nutid et oplagt studiefelt.") Thus the Center can draw on the expertise of departmental colleagues in other disciplines, as well as colleagues working on the United States in other departments at the University of Copenhagen. Some of these colleagues are affiliated staff at the Center for Transnational American Studies, supplementing the core staff of American studies specialists.

Please use the links on the left-hand side to access more information about research conducted by Center staff; teaching in American studies; the profiles of individual staff members; events taking place at the Center (i.e., guest lectures, research seminars, conferences); and contact information.