Over fifty years in the making, the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan has emerged as one of the preeminent American Studies programs in the United States and the world.  With its strengths in Asian/Pacific Islander American, Latina/o, Native American, and Arab American Studies, the Program has established itself as one of the critical sites for the dialogue between American and Ethnic studies that has characterized the national American Studies movement during the last decades.

Created in 1952, the Program arose from a desire among Michigan students and faculty in the English Department for a grasp of American experience broader than could be provided in the study of any one discipline. Its center of interest was defined as the study of values in America, and the Program sought to build bridges between the humanities and the social sciences, while linking the past with contemporary issues and questions.  In the early 1970s, the Program became interested in augmenting this original orientation by responding to a growing awareness of the diversity and complexity of cultural experience in America.  Increasingly, the Program turned to the study of the many social and cultural groups-defined by national origin, race, religion, gender, sexuality and social status, among others-existing alongside the dominant European-based culture in the United States.

In 1984, the Program in American Culture set up a new curricular program in Latino Studies to help satisfy the growing national and local interest in the history and culture of Latino peoples in the United States.  By the 1990s, Latino Studies was well established at Michigan, and the Program was building strengths in Asian American studies, and contemplating a similar program initiative in Native American Studies.   The Program truly entered a new era at the turn of the twenty-first century, with changes in program status, and a hiring initiative in the three Ethnic Studies fields.  American Culture began holding its own tenure lines, which gradually transformed the Program, taking it away from an organizational model dependent upon the donated labor of a pool of generous faculty associates to a more stable core budgeted faculty model.

At the same time, the Program was able to hire a cluster of talented faculty who anchored strong and growing programs in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies, Native American Studies, and Latina/o Studies.  In a very few years, for example, Native American Studies went from a single core faculty member to seven budgeted faculty and three faculty associates.  Asian American Studies expanded to include five faculty members specializing in Pacific history, literature, music, and culture-the largest faculty cluster outside the Pacific and the West coast.  The Program also added new faculty in nineteenth century literature and culture, public and community scholarship, material and visual culture, and Arab American Studies.  Today, American Culture's thirty-eight core budgeted faculty members hold joint appointments with a range of disciplinary departments, including History, English, Psychology, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Screen Arts & Cultures, as well as with interdisciplinary units such as Women's Studies and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.  The Program is widely considered an important leader in American Studies and a range of Ethnic Studies fields, with faculty members holding important positions in a variety of national organizations and graduates going on to successful careers in academia and public scholarship.