About this site

Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Third Edition is a hybrid print-digital publication that includes over 114 essays, each on a complex and contested term such as “disability,” “intersectionality,” “freedom,” and “prison.” The print volume includes 66 essays, 42 of which are new or revised for this second edition. Another 48 essays appear on this site.

The site also includes “Keywords: An Introduction,” the list of works cited by all the essays, information about the contributors, a note on classroom use, and sample syllabi and assignments, a page that now includes a suggested assignment for an asynchronous online class. Any page in the site can be printed or saved as a pdf, and a single click provides a citation to that page that can be pasted into a bibliography.

Essays

Readers may browse the full list of essays by clicking at the upper left. The search function allows you to shuttle between the print and web essays: search results show both the web essays in full and snippets from the print essays, with a page reference. This function enables readers to discover connections among the complete set of essays.

In addition to the essays published as part of this edition, we invite post-publication essays by students and scholars who want to respond to the essays by creating new work.

Finally the site enables readers to discover connections and contrasts across all the different Keywords volumes using the extraordinarily robust search function. For example, if you select “all books” and search for “gender,” you’ll see how that term is used not only in American studies and cultural studies (gender), but also in related fields such as African American Studies, (gender) Asian American studies, (gender) children’s literature (gender), comics studies (gender) disability studies (gender), Latina/o studies, and media studies. If you search a term that is not the title of an essay in a volume, you’ll also see how that term is used throughout the volumes – including in the essays that appear only in print.

Courses

Thousands of students have read the first two editions of Keywords for American Cultural Studies in courses across a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. This third print-digital edition is designed to increase this activity by collecting and learning from responses to the previous volumes. Instructors may wish to consult the “Note on Classroom Use” or examine sample syllabi, suggested assignments, and other resources. Readers can learn more about the print book, and purchase a copy of it from NYU Press, by clicking on the shopping cart logo at the top of each page.

Communication

You can share links using Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail from any page on this site. Blog posts will update you on events related to the volumes in NYU Press’s Keywords series. Feel free to contact us at keywords@fordham.edu to ask questions about the projector to inquire about authoring a post-publication keyword essay.

Acknowledgments

This site is supported by NYU Libraries’ Digital Library Technology Services (DLTS), in collaboration with NYU Press. The project team was led Monica McCormick, with support from NYU Press by Adam Bohannan, Dorothea Halliday, Charles Hames, Alicia Nadkarni, Jodi Narde, Miguel Sandoval, and Eric Zinner; and from DLTS by Zach Coble, Laura Henze, Carol Kassel, David Millman, and Jennifer Vinopal. Crucial assistance was provided by intern Meghan White.

The site was designed by Command C.