In recent years, digital storytelling has emerged as an alternative medium of knowledge production for students in American studies. A growing number of faculty are creating assignments which combine methodological markers of American studies and reinvented notions of critical pedagogy in a multimedia learning environment. Based on an analysis of student learning and interviews with student producers of digital stories, this essay investigates the potential of digital storytelling for the development of voice and intellectual depth at the intersection of affective and cognitive dimensions of learning. Evidence from student-produced digital stories suggests that affective developmental processes can enable epistemological expertise instead of opposing it. In the same way, the multimedia authoring process does not obscure traditional forms of expert research and scholarship, but makes expert strategies visible and explicit.