Master of Art in Liberal Studies

Areas of Concentration: American Studies

These are some examples of programs of study that other MALS students have pursued in the past. They are meant to give you a sense of the kind of program that you might create with us. Each program of study includes courses taken as one-on-one independent studies with Skidmore faculty, traditional graduate-level courses taken in classrooms at universities across the country, as well as the required introductory seminar. Our students also earn credit through transfer of prior graduate credit, supervised internships, and assessment of prior experiential learning.

• Program focus: Women at Work in New England

  Coursework:
  Master’s seminar
  Theory and Practice of Biography
  Cultural History of America, 1890-1940
  Foundations of Occupational Therapy
  History of 19th and 20th Century Design
  American Women and Textiles
  Labor in American History
  Women in the Economy
  Education for Morality

  Final Project:
  “Dr. Herbert J. Hall and his Psychological Principles for Occupational Therapy”

• Program focus: Social History of New England

  Coursework
  Master’s Seminar
  American Literature 1815-1865
  Modern American Social History
  Winslow Homer: Changes in Perception
  The New England Town
  Industrial New England
  Creating a Usable Past: Place, Space, and Self in American Poetry
  American Literature 1915-1945
  Religion and American Socialists

  Final Project:
  “One Grand Park: Remaking New Hampshire Farms into Summer Homes, 1870-1930”

• Program focus: Music in American Popular Culture

  Coursework
  Master’s Seminar
  Observing The Fifties
  Music Theory
  Jazz, From its Beginnings Through the Late 1950s
  The Beatles
  Studies in Popular Culture
  American Material Culture
  Rural America: The South
  Civil Rights: Changing Meanings of Freedom

  Final Project:
  “American Popular Culture and the Struggle for Art: Rock ‘n’ Roll as Metaphor”