In 2025, George Shulman, Jay Garcia, and Robert Reid-Pharr convened an American Studies Symposium at NYU Berlin June 26 – 27. This symposium promises to be among the first post-pandemic trans-national American Studies events of its kind, allowing for intellectual exchanges addressing a moment of significant reconfiguration in US political culture, and in the field of American Studies. Encompassing humanistic inquiry, the study of political formation, and different kinds of sociocultural analysis, American Studies has been an interdisciplinary field from its beginnings. Yet in recent years it has been remade in remarkable ways by the advent of new work in Black, Indigenous, and
Sexuality Studies, in digital and new media studies, and in the trans-national, among other areas of theorization. How are scholars in the US and Germany now making sense of changes in American sociocultural and political life, and in the configuration of American Studies itself? These twinned questions guide the three component parts of the symposium, thematic discussion sessions to enable sharing of ideas, methodologies, and emergent terms for understanding and researching our current conjuncture.