The English Translation courses which now comprise the United States Studies Division of the FAST Area Studies Program were the core of the original Tampere American Studies Program, founded in 1984 as the first academic program in a Finnish university to cover the language, literature, history, and political and socioeconomic phenomena of the U.S.A.

The history of the Tampere American Studies Program is itself intriguing. The decision to create the Program was taken in consequence of three developments of the early 1980s. First among these was the integration into Tampere University of the Department of Translation Studies (formerly administered under the City of Tampere as the Tampere Language Institute), with its wide range of English-language background courses in American and British Studies. The addition of these courses to the overall Tampere University curriculum, along with the Translation Department's extensive international activity, provided the resources which had been lacking to form an interdisciplinary program.

Second was the beginning of reciprocal international academic exchange at Tampere University, which became a national leader in the new 'internationalization' boom of the early and mid-1980s. In 1982, Tampere was the first Nordic university to join both the Washington-based NAFSA: Association of International Educators and the International Student Exchange (ISEP) Program. Tampere soon began hosting up to a dozen ISEP undergraduates annually, and reciprocally sending its own undergraduate and graduate students to American universities. For both incoming and outgoing students, the need for a systematic academic structure to examine and compare American and Finnish culture was apparent.

Student exchange was supplemented by growing faculty exchanges via the Fulbright Program, in which Tampere University was influential throughout the 1980s, with John Hopkins a member of the Finnish Commission's Board of Directors. Hopkins' overlapping roles enabled Tampere University to advance rapidly with both its international mobility development and the American Studies Program. From 1982-1986, in addition to his Fulbright Commission involvement, he was Chair of the English Division of the Translation Department, taught many of the Section's U.S.-oriented courses, and on release time worked under Rector Jarmo Visakorpi to develop and organize the university's international program linkages and International Student Services. Hopkins also worked closely with the ISEP Central Office in Washington (later elected Chair of the ISEP Board), and subsequently with the NAFSA organization, serving on its Communications and Information Policy Steering Committee, as Chair of its MicroSIG Committee, and on its Board of Directors. Capitalizing on this synergy, and with both the academic need and a basic curricular structure in place, the decision to officially found the American Studies Program soon followed.

This decision was crystallized by the third development, two major conferences organized during the Spring and Fall of 1993. The first, the June First Nordic Conference on Teaching American Studies at the Secondary and University Levels, was held at the Hanasaari Cultural Center near Helsinki. The second was in Tampere, the October 30th Anniversary Conference (which was in fact the 31st anniversary, as for technical reasons the conference was a year late) of USEF, the United States Educational Foundation in Finland (later renamed to FUSEEC, the Finland-United States Educational Exchange Commission). The success of these conferences, each drawing over 200 participants from all levels of academia in Finland, as well as from Europe and the U.S., proved that there was a national as well as local interest in — and need for — an organized study and research program on the United States.

The Tampere American Studies Program was approved by the various university bodies and officially launched in 1984, with Professor Olli Vehviläinen of the Department of History as Director, John Hopkins of the Department of Translation Studies as Coordinator, and Professors Pekka Ahtiala, Viljo Kohonen, Ralf Norrman and Tatu Vanhanen as the remaining Board members. Nominally a joint interdisciplinary effort of nine departments (Translation Studies, History, English Philology, Literature and Art Studies, Education and Teacher Training, Sociology, Political Science, Economics and Business Administration, Journalism and Mass Communications) from four of the university's five faculties, in practice over 70% of the regular courses provided by university staff from 1984 through the early 1990s were those of the Translation Department. This curriculum is now the foundation of the United States Studies division of the FAST Program.

The remaining regular courses of the American Studies Program included various topics in American Literature (in addition to the basic course in American Literature in its Historical Context taught in the Translation Department) by Matti Savolainen of the Department of Literature and Art Studies and Ralf Norrman and Douglas Robinson of English Philology (before Robinson moved to the Translation Department), and both American History and Finnish-American Relations, taught on an adjunct basis through the History Department by Michael Berry of the Turku School of Economics and Business Administration. Lectures in American Government and Politics were offered in alternate years by Tatu Vanhanen of the Department of Political Science. Other courses appeared on a "one-off" basis, such as epics on American Popular Music by Jari-Pekka Vuorela of the Sociology Department and American Banking by Pekka Ahtiala of the Economics Department.

This basic program was supplemented by courses of Fulbright and other visiting professors, which rapidly increased in number and variety as the American Studies Program became known, and by the initiation of an international American Studies Conference, linked with the university's international educational exchange development. With a biennial schedule following from the 1983 USEF/FUSEEC anniversary conference, Translation Department staff organized the 1985 Tampere American Studies Conference, the 1987 Second Tampere American Studies Conference (combined with pre-conference events commemorating the 35th Anniversary of the Fulbright Program in Finland — this time on schedule — and 40th Anniversary of the creation of the Fulbright Program), and 1989 Third Tampere American Studies Conference, which was also the Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies. In short order the program had developed an international prominence which both fertilized local American Studies courses and discussions, and resulted in a greater ease of attracting visiting scholars to complement the basic curriculum.

The Program was fortunate to have a series of outstanding Fulbright lecturers spend a year or more in Tampere between 1983-1989. Ellsworth 'Skip' Fuhrman in Sociology, Daryl Gibb in English Translation, Keith Olson in American History, Karen Armstrong in Cultural Anthropology and George Hummasti in American History were all instrumental in expanding their respective portions of the American Studies program. Funding also materialized to fund the annual Bicentennial Professors of American Studies in Finland, based in Helsinki, to give lecture series of a month or more in Tampere. Particularly notable were the Tampere courses of Bicentennial Professors Bob Bannister, Bill Chafe, Al Crosby, John Lewis Gaddis, Lloyd Gardner, Judith Yaross Lee, Donald Mathews, Barbara and Christer Mossberg, Joseph Slade, Thomas Wendel and Allan Winkler.

A rich assortment of Fulbright lecturers at other Finnish universities also increasingly provided visiting courses, as the reputation of the program and its organization increased. The high point for such courses was 1986-87, when in addition to Keith Olson's Fulbright year in the History Department, Daryl Gibb's second-year Fulbright extension in the Translation Department, and visiting courses by the Bicentennial Professor team of Judith Yaross Lee (Humor in American Literature) and Joseph Slade (America as a Post-Industrial Economy), courses were also given by Rodes Trautman (Information Technology), Leonard Barchak (Mass Communications), Patricia Lander and Claudette Charbonneau (Sociology and Women's Studies).

To support and develop the Program, a Center for American Studies, an Office for U.S. Exchange Programs and an American Studies Resource Center were established, with the Center begun in 1985 as part of the University Library and moved in 1987 to larger premises in the History Department, from which time it was known as the American Studies Reference Collection. Expansion of the Reference Collection was aided considerably by the acquisition of an American Studies Microfilm Collection, covering the entire post-WWII period, with an emphasis on the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and the contribution by American and European publishers of 1102 new books from all disciplines of American Studies in conjunction with the 1987 Conference.

In less than four years, the Tampere American Studies Program had accomplished more than could have been expected. But new administrators and schemes emerged within the university. The original American Studies Program no longer exists; remaining in the History Department is a re-named "North American" Studies entity.

The English Translation courses that had sustained the American Studies Program are now the United States Studies division of the FAST Area Studies Program. Taught by tenured Tampere-based staff and financed wholly by the regular Department budget, the FAST curriculum combines the Department's U.S.-related area studies courses with their British, Finnish and Irish counterparts in a stable, comprehensive, student-based program which focuses on the dynamics of the English language within the national cultures of these principal English-speaking countries, the growing global mediation of English language and culture via new information technologies, and the basic role of language in cultural identity. The FAST Program ensures that the traditional concept of American Studies remains alive and well at the University of Tampere.