The department has a wide-ranging curriculum in the arts of the United States, in painting, photography, architecture and visual culture, from the colonial period to the present. The principal coverage is provided by Bruce Robertson, whose published scholarship covers a period from 1710 to the 1960s, primarily in painting, but also in works on paper, photography and the history of museums. He has published extensively on early Modernism, especially the artist Marsden Hartley, and is interested in nativist strains in the development of modern art in the United States. Artists and collectors of very different, even opposing ideologies, in the 1920s and 1930s attempted to define a tradition of primitivism that stretched back to colonial times. Complicating the story was the issue of race; indeed, the issue of how artists in the United States approached race and racism is a defining characteristic of US art, culture and politics. Another research area includes the history of museums, the development of collections and their relationship to different publics.

The scholarly expertise and teaching interests of other faculty in the department also incorporate the arts of the United States. Laurie Monahan teaches art and visual culture in the United States from World War II to the contemporary period, with particular emphasis on art movements in the 1960s. Ulrich Keller works on photography and visual culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Abigail Solomon-Godeau offers courses in contemporary art and photography of the United States and Sylvester Ogbechie teaches the arts of the African Diaspora.  Swati Chattopadhyay and Volker M. Welter both teach aspects of American architecture, urbanism and historic preservation.

Swati Chattopadhyay and Volker M. Welter both teach aspects of American architecture, urbanism and historic preservation. comprehensive American Studies program. Only informally incorporated at this point, nonetheless there are significant numbers of prominent faculty who concentrate on aspects of American culture, film, literature and history in many other departments. It is possible to devise graduate seminars and dissertations  which draw on these resources. Current dissertation topics include depictions of race, the economics of Albert Bierstadt’s art, museum audiences in Santa Fe, and spatial configurations in Japanese internment camps.

Additional research opportunities in the art of the United States exist both locally and in Los Angeles: at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Huntington Library and Art Collections (where the West Coast Branch of the Archives of American Art are housed), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Autry Museum. The Getty Museum and Research Center has superb collections in American photography, as does  the University of California, Riverside. For those interested in architecture, UCSB's Architectural Drawings Collection at the University Art Museum is one of the best in the country and the Ethnic and Multicultural archives at UCSB boasts extensive holdings, including the major Chicano poster collection.