To write a thesis is to become part of a community of scholars. As an original work of scholarship, advised by staff, the thesis is the culmination of the student’s work at university.
In American Studies, students choose their own subjects, bringing together the knowledge and skills honed in their courses with their own particular interests. Thesis advisees learn to gain fluency in a scholarly field: to navigate a scholarly debate but also to articulate why that debate is important, to think about the power of narrative and the salience of scholarly categories.
From their courses students have learned how to read and interpret both closely and adventurously. How do we draw new insights from a canonical text? How do we find the weirdness in something that seemed settled or plain? How do we glean a mentality from a written document, and put ourselves in the mind of the past? How do we develop questions that only primary sources can answer?
Research in an age of information overload. Students also learn how to navigate internet resources, to master library tools in the UvA and beyond, and to pursue archival research. In a digital age, it seems like we can find whatever we want to find—quick—or we’re immediately frustrated when we can’t. Work that would have demanded hours browsing through microfilms now takes a few minutes of keyword-searching in digitized historical newspapers. We have access to more information than ever, but we might not know how to parse it, how to distinguish fresh inquiries from stale ones, how to focus on the genuine discovery.
Recent theses. Recent theses in American Studies have explored the unlikely pathways of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and blackface minstrelsy in the 19th-century Dutch empire; American jazz in the Netherlands between the World Wars; the influence of the CIA in Eisenhower’s policy toward the 1954 coup in Guatemala; and modern secessionist movements in Texas. All of these subjects require a knowledge of the American culture and politics on their own terms, but are enriched by international and comparative perspectives.
The Theodore Roosevelt American History Award
Each year the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies awards the Theodore Roosevelt American History Award to the best MA thesis in American Studies in the Netherlands. Recent honorees from the UvA’s American Studies program include:
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- Winner: Queeny van der Spek, “Hitler’s Gift to America: American motivations to rescue displaced scientists from Europe in the 1930s.”
- Honorable mention: Lennart Bolwijn, “Dogma, Romance, and Double-Consciousness: The Dilemmas of the New Negro Generation Through the Travels of Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay.”
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- Winner: Renee de Groot, “The Rewritten War: Alternate Histories of the American Civil War.”
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- Winner: Martina van Cimmenaede, “The Sexually Charged Office: An Analysis of Sexual Harassment and Gender Relations in the Workplace, 1940-1975.”
- Honorable mention: Roos Maier, “Remembering a Counterculture: Visuality, Orality, and Imagination in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby.”