American Studies

Christine Palmer

Associate Director - American Studies

Christine Palmer holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She also completed a Master’s in Anthropology at UC Berkeley and an AB in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Palmer’s research and teaching focus on the interplay between race, visual culture, literature, and cultural memory in twentieth-century popular and mass culture.

Recent course offerings include: James Baldwin’s America, 1953-74; The Future Then: Imagining American Tomorrows; “I’ll Be There for You”: Friendship in America (co-taught with Sarah Gold McBride); Love, American Style; Explosive Ideologies: American Culture in the Atomic Age; At Home in America (co-taught with Kathleen Moran); Harlem Renaissance (co-taught with Bryan Wagner); Frontiers in American History and Culture (co-taught with Mark Brilliant); Standing in a Crooked Room Speaking God’s Language: Memory, Creation, and Fiction; Everyday America; The Teen Age; America, Song by Song (co-taught with Greil Marcus and Kathleen Moran); America at Play; and Rebels and Revolutionaries.

Spring 2023 course offerings: Going Nuclear! (co-taught with Mark Brilliant) and American Media Culture since World War II

Summer 2023 course offering: Harlem Renaissance (co-taught with Bryan Wagner, online)

Future course offerings will include: The Good Life (co-taught with Chiyuma Elliott) and Culture and Society in Classical Hollywood Cinema (co-taught with Bryan Wagner).