The Institute has moved!
Visit our new location at 222 Science Building (also known as Old Art Museum) on East Campus
Duke’s Institute for Critical US Studies is committed to examining the myriad ways in which the material history and the very concept of the United States have been constituted and conceived in response to global economic, social, political, and intellectual developments. We are especially interested in the way worldwide economic and political structures have produced flows of people, commodities, and information around the globe, thereby generating the urgent need for innovative inquiry about the history and status of nationalisms, identities and community formation. Questions about borders and borderlands, about empire and neo-colonialism, about hybrid histories and subjectivities have moved to center stage in the rapidly changing field of American Studies. We seek an expanded understanding of what constitutes an "American," as we acknowledge that America cannot be adequately conceptualized from within the national borders of the U.S. but rather must be studied in relation to those "others" who have both contended with the power of the United States and helped constitute its historical and affective reality.