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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Cosco, Joseph P. "Eyeing Italians: Race, Romance, and Reality in American Perception, 1880-1910," American Studies, College of William and Mary, November 1999.
This dissertation explores how American representation of Italians and Italian Americans engages, reflected and helped shape the United States’ developing concepts of immigration, ethnicity, race and national identity from 1880-1910, when masses of Italian and other “new immigrants” rigorously tested the country’s attitudes and powers of assimilation. In a larger sense, the research examines how the process of constructing the modern Italian/Italian American was part of the process of America constructing for itself a modern national identity for a new century. The dissertation looks at a variety of “texts,” including journalism, travel literature, autobiography, fiction, and photographs and illustrations of the period, but concentrates on a handful of American writers (journalists Jacob A. Riis and Edward A. Steiner, and writers Henry James, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells) and their works. Research shows that these writers alternately supported and subverted America’s often conflicting and confused attitudes and ideas about Italy and Italians, a tangle of discourses related to the romance of artistic, heroic, picturesque Italy and the reality of the Italian “Other” arriving in the form of masses of immigrants to American shores.
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