Effron Center for the Study of America

The Effron Center for the Study of America works to fulfill Princeton’s institutional vision — in the nation’s service and the service of humanity — by offering curricula, supporting research and hosting discussion on the evolving experiences and identities of the peoples of the territories known as America.

By exploring and relating issues raised separately by the humanities, arts, and social and natural sciences, and by engaging with a wide range of scholarly methods and theories, we aim to create a generative space for new understandings of — and approaches to — issues that profoundly affect contemporary lives and will profoundly affect future generations.

Inquiries and Intersections

These issues include questions of migration, diaspora and borders; indigeneity; colonization; globalization; empire and war; capital and culture; language, race and ethnicity; religion; slavery and racialization; gender and sexuality; ecology and technology; and the transnational and local particulars of how these questions are lived. Through conversations and collaborations on how these questions inform and are informed by language, law, popular culture, public policy and the arts, we aim to further — and to draw inspiration from — inquiries and intersections from disparate disciplinary perspectives.

Our core faculty draw on disciplinary expertise in anthropology, art history, literature, performance studies, sociology, theater and music theater and more, with research interests including in transnational religion; ecology and environmental narrative; Native American and Indigenous studies; and economic and cultural history.

Certificate Programs

We host undergraduate certificate programs in American studies, Asian American studies, and Latino studies. Our programs’ curricula — in dialogue with one another and with our students’ concentrations — demonstrate the multiplicity of research directions and perspectives made possible by an interdisciplinary approach.

Across the University, we partner with scholars and students of African American studies, anthropology, architecture, art and archaeology, economics, history, music, literature, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, religion and sociology, and with the Center for Digital Humanities, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Lewis Center for the Arts and the School of Public and International Affairs.

Welcome

We endeavor to provide spaces for critical analysis guided by principles of civil rights, freedom, social justice and activism; spaces for intellectual discussions that produce transformative agendas based on ethical research.

We invite you to join us in studying America in the world and how the world lives in (the) America(s).