Dear Friends,
The American Studies Crossroads site has been closed and archived.
In 1993, when the Crossroads Project began to engage with curriculum innovation and the integration of new technologies in American Studies, the Internet was so new that many weren't even sure it was a suitable environment for scholarly projects. While Crossroads spearheaded the scholarship of teaching through workshops and research projects, it also provided a virtual home for the American Studies Association at a time when very few other professional organizations had their own website.
For almost two decades, the Crossroads website was a comprehensive and integrated platform for pedagogical, scholarly, and institutional information, a space for collaboration and innovation for the international American Studies Community. But the Web is nothing if not a swiftly moving stream and what was once the core idea of Crossroads (a single knowledge-building, field-forming virtual community) no longer has a role in the distributed and ubiquitous environment of the Web.
So we have archived the site and moved on. For those interested in continuing to track Crossroads' innovative work on new media and the scholarship of teaching and learning, you can connect with the Visible Knowledge Project: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/vkp/
For those interested in the digital humanities and digital scholarship, there are networks like HASTAC and the newly formed Digital Humanities Caucus of the ASA and myriad other resources, projects like NINES and the Digital Humanities summer camps or the THATcamps from CHNM at George Mason University, journals like VECTORS and the exciting work at USC, and many other directions. For those looking for basic resources on syllabi and pedagogy you should consult the American Studies Association.
I want to thank all the folks who helped make Crossroads a useful and meaningful project for so many years, including Paul Lauter, Michael Cowan, Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Tim Powell. I also want to thank all of the faculty—far too numerous to call out—who participated in all of the many faculty and classroom inquiry workshops and projects, who experimented with new approaches in their classrooms and took the time and effort to document their experiments for others; many of these folks taught at institutions with crushing teaching loads but still found the energy and commitment to push the edge forward. You are all amazing.
And I want to thank all of the wonderful staff and collaborators at Crossroads at Georgetown who did so much great work, especially Michael Coventry, Eric Hofmann, Sharon Leon, Dave Lester, Matthias Oppermann, and Mark Sample. And I especially want to remember Jeff Finlay, who is no longer with us but was there at the beginning and whose vision and tireless appetite for the virtual was the sine qua non of Crossroads in the earliest years.
Peace,
Randy Bass