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Distinguished Speaker’s Bureau
Submit a speaker request | Community Partnership Grant Program
The American Studies Association is pleased to announce the scholars participating in its Distinguished Speaker's Bureau for the 2007-2008 academic year. Speaking on a wide range of topics, the ASA Distinguished Speakers' Bureau brings leading scholars to your institution. The Distinguished Speaker's Bureau includes current and past presidents and councilors of the association selected for their major contributions to American Studies, American Ethnic Studies American Women's Studies, and related fields.
Speakers listed below are willing to give at least one lecture in the 2007-2008 academic year on behalf of the ASA. Speakers donate their time to the ASA in order to participate. Host institutions pay a $1,000 speaker's fee directly to the ASA, in addition to the speaker's travel and lodging expenses.
All speakers' fees are deposited into the ASA's Community Partnership Fund. The Community Partnership Fund supports a competitive grants program open to members of the American Studies Association. The Fund encourages projects developed in collaboration with community-based organizations, school districts, public libraries, local historical societies, community museums, and other non-profit entities.
If you or an institution you know would like to arrange a lecture or need further information, please contact the Distinguished Speakers' Bureau Coordinator at ; Tel: 202-467-4783; fax 202-467-4786; ASA, 1120 19th Street, NW, Suite #301, Washington, DC 20036-3614. In some cases the scholars may be willing to speak on topics other than those listed here. The earlier arrangements are made the better chance you have of obtaining the speaker of your choice. Please do not contact lecturers directly.
The following individuals are available to lecture (note "key" for any conflicts for certain speakers).
KEY:
#1) Not available to lecture during the fall 2007 Semester
#2) Not available to lecture during the spring 2008 Semester
#3) Not available to lecture during the 2007-2008 academic year
- Randy Bass, Georgetown University
- Joanne Braxton, College of William and Mary
- Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland, College Park
- Paul Buhle, Brown University
- George Chauncey, Yale University
- Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- Gina Dent, University of California, Santa Cruz
- Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
- Julie Ellison, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- Ann Fabian, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, University of Southern California
- Michael Frisch, State University of New York, Buffalo
- Inderpal Grewal, University of California, Irvine
- Karen Halttunen, University of Southern California
- Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania
- John Kasson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Mary Kelley, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University
- Paul Lauter, Trinity College
- Eric Lott, University of Virginia
- Susan Manning, Northwestern University
- Elaine Tyler May, University of Minnesota
- Gary Y. Okihiro, Columbia University
- Donald Pease, Dartmouth College
- Rafael Pérez-Torres, University of California, Los Angeles
- Carla L. Peterson, University of Maryland, College Park
- Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota
- Janice Radway, Duke University
- David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine
- George J. Sánchez, University of Southern California
- Stephen H. Sumida, University of Washington
- Patricia A. Turner, University of California at Davis
To date, the following association leaders have volunteered their services to the ASA's Distinguished Speakers' Bureau.
Randy Bass, Georgetown University
- *Learning and Technology in the American Culture and History Classroom*
- *New Technologies, Narrative, and Representations of Cultural Knowledge*
- *Changing Faculty Roles in New Learning Environments and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning*
Active in lecturing, faculty development, and the design of a variety of electronic projects, Bass is the Director of the American Studies Association's Crossroads Project, and at Georgetown, the Executive Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. An Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Bass has been a Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and in 1999 received the EDUCAUSE Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Technology and Undergraduate Education. Most recently he co-edited Intentional Media: The Crossroads Conversations on Learning and Technology in the American Culture and History Classroom; he is currently working on a book of "hybrid essays," entitled Hyper Activity and Under Construction: Learning Culture in a Wired World.
Joanne M. Braxton, Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of English and the Humanities, College of William and Mary
- *Letters and Liberation: Reclaiming the Lost Ground of Black Women's Autobiography*
- *Teaching the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar*
- *Langston Hughes' Poetic Vision and Its Challenge to the New American Scholar in the 21st Century*
- *Other topics on request
Joanne M. Braxton is Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of English and the Humanities at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg , Virginia. In addition to teaching for the William and Mary English Department, she also teaches for American Studies, Women's Studies and Black Studies. Widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies, Professor Braxton's writings also include the monograph Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition, Sometimes I Think of Maryland, a collection of poetry, and the play, Crossing A Deep River: A Ritual Drama in Three Movements, which has been shown at the National Black Theatre Festival and elsewhere. Braxton edited the The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the most complete volume of Dunbar's poetry ever published, as well as The Maya Angelou "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" Reader." She edits the Women Writers of Color Biography Series for the Praeger Publishing Group. Professor Braxton has traveled in Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal, and lectured in the United States, Cuba, Brazil, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. She has served as a senior Fulbright Professor, teaching American Studies, African American literature and non-fiction life writing at the University of Muenster, in Germany. She recently completed a digital video conference on Black women's writing to four European nations for the U.S. State Department.
Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland, College Park
- *The Work of Friendship: Nurturing Manhood in the Great Migration*
- *What's Class Got To Do With It? Inserting Labor into a History of Black Women's Social and Political Activism*
Paul Buhle, Brown University
- *Comic Art and American Studies for the Twenty-First Century*
- *The 1960s as History for Today*
- * Jewish Identity and American Popular Culture*
- *Oral History for American Studies*
Founded in 1967 Radical America, the journal for Students for Democratic Society, created the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University, has taught Oral History, Social Movements and Jewish Identity in the Hollywood Film at Brown since 1995, lectured widely on popular culture subjects, most recently comic art.
Has written or edited 28 volumes, including the Choice award-winning C.L R. James's Caribbean (Duke) and The New Left Revisited (Temple); five books on film; the trilogy Jews and American Popular Culture (Praeger/Greenwood); visual and oral histories of Rhode Islanders; and several comic-art works including Wobblies: a Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World; and three works prepared for 2007 publication, SDS: AHistory, an adaptation of Howard Zinn's People's History and an art-comic biography of Emma Goldman. (Further art-comic works on the Beat Generation and Studs Terkel's works in the making.) He has written on popular culture and other subjects in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and the UK Guardian. He is a Contributing Editor to TIKKUN and a columnist for the ecological journal, CNS.
George Chauncey, Professor of History, Yale University
- *From Sodomy Laws to Marriage Amendments: A Century of Sexual Identity/Politics*
- *From Drag Balls to Vogue Balls: Changing Rituals of Queer Belonging in Twentieth-Century African American Society*
- *A Different West Side Story: Latino Gay Culture and Antigay Politics in Postwar New York City*
- *Why 'Come Out of the Closet'? Secrecy, Authenticity, and the Shifting Boundaries of the Public and Private Self in the 1950s and 60s*
George Chauncey teaches History, American Studies, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Best known for his award-winning book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994), he is also the author of Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (2004) and co-editor of Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989) and two special journal issues on gender, sexuality, and transnationalism. He testified as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination at the 1993 trial of Colorado's Amendment 2, which resulted in the Supreme Court's Romer v. Evans decision that gay people could not be excluded from the political process, and was the organizer and lead author of the Historians' Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas, which weighed heavily in the Supreme Court's landmark decision overturning the nation's sodomy laws. He is nearing completion of another book, The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Male Culture and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era..
Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- *J.B. Jackson at Mount Rushmore: Reading the Landscapes of the Interstate, the New Deal, the Wilderness, and the Nation*
- *Drain the Lake! Tear Down the Butte! Build Paradise!: The Environmental Dimensions of Political Economy in Boulder, Benzie and Beyond.*
- *Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: The Story of My Grandparents*
Philip J. Deloria (Ph.D. Yale 1994) is a professor in the Department of History and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. He came to Michigan in 2001, after six and one half years teaching at the University of Colorado. His 1998 book Playing Indian (Yale University Press) was the winner of a Gustavus Myers outstanding book award from the Gustavus Myers Program for the study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. His latest work is Indians in Unexpected Places (Kansas, 2004), which examines the ideologies surrounding Indian people at the turn of the twentieth century—and the ways Native Americans challenged those ideologies through world travel, film and theater, sports, automobility, and musical performance. He is the author of numerous articles and essays, was a co-author of The Native Americans (Turner, 1993), and is presently at work on three other book-length projects.
Gina Dent, University of California, Santa Cruz
- *Who's Laughing Now?: Bamboozled and Black Culture*
- *Forget Race: Becoming Cultural Studies*
- *Transnationalizing Gender Justice: Feminism, Prison Abolition, and Human Rights*
- *Prison as a Border*
- *Complicating Frameworks for Diversity*
Gina Dent (Ph.D., Columbia University, English & Comparative Literature) is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies and Director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture ([1993] New York: The New Press, 1998) and author of articles on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art. Her forthcoming book Anchored to the Real: Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology (Duke University Press) is a study of the consequences—both disabling and productive—of social science's role in translating black writers into American literature. Her two current book projects grow out of her work as an advocate for human rights and prison abolition—Prison as a Border, on prisons and popular culture, and Movement in Black and Red: The Life of Charlene Mitchell, an oral history and memoir. Her work is also focused on cultural transformation within the university, with special attention to the impact and interpretation of the language of diversity. In this capacity, she served as principal investigator for UC Santa Cruz's recent climate study. She lectures widely in the US and abroad on the topics of prisons and popular culture, African American and African Diaspora studies, and the politics of disciplinary histories and transformations.
Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
- *Race and Religious Fundamentalism in American Culture*
- *Race and Money in Mark Twain and Herman Melville*
- *Cultural Memory and the Contemporary American Novel*
- *Why Read American Literature?*
- *American Innocence/American Experience in the 21st Century*
- *Why Do We Still Study New England Puritanism*
Emory Elliott is the 2006 President of the American Studies Association, and he has been teaching American literature and American Studies at UC Riverside since 1989 where he is Director of the Center for Ideas and Society. As a faculty member at Princeton from 1972-89, he chaired the American Studies Program for six years, was Master of Butler College and chaired the English Department. He is the General Editor of the American Book Award winning Columbia Literary History of the United States, the Columbia History of the American Novel, and American Literature: A Prentice Hall Anthology. His books include Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature, and New Directions in American Literary Scholarship: 1980-2002 (co-authored with Craig Svonkin). With Louis Freitas Caton and Jeffrey Rhyne, he also edited Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (2002). Emory has long been committed to helping internationalize the field of American Studies and has lectured in twenty-six countries. He also enjoys working with K-12 teachers, and served in a two-week institute for high school teachers at the National Humanities Center in July 2005.
Julie Ellison, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- *Humanities and the Public Soul*
- *Imagining Your State: New Alliances between Higher Education, Humanities Councils, and Arts Agencies*
- *World Poetry Day and Why It Matters*
- *What Is Public Scholarship?*
Julie Ellison is the founding director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. Imagining America is a national consortium that fosters the civic role of the arts and humanities, especially through campus-community alliances and public scholarship. Professor Ellison works closely with state arts and humanities councils through, for example, "Imagining Your State," a toolkit for coalitions between higher education and the public arts and humanities at the state level. She has served on the Board of the Michigan Humanities Council and the Michigan Arts and Humanities Steering Committee. She is also committed to structural change in higher education aimed at bringing engaged artists and scholars together across institutional boundaries. At the University of Michigan, Ellison served four years as Associate Vice President for Research. In this position, she led the University-wide Year of Humanities and Arts (YoHA). Ellison is Faculty Associate in America Culture and Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Ellison's scholarly work ranges across the literature and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. and Britain, with particular emphasis on gender and emotion. She has received an NEH fellowship, along with other research grants and awards. Chicago University Press published Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion in 1999. Her previous books include Emerson's Romantic Style (Princeton, 1984) and Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Cornell, 1990). Her current research project is a study of World Poetry Day and other organized efforts to link poetry and democratic values.
Ann Fabian, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
- * Flatheads and Head Hunters: Craniologists, Phrenologists, Missionaries, Native Americans, and the Making of American Race Science*
- *The Liar's Autobiography*
- *Races of the Dead*
Ann Fabian is Dean of Humanities and Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is former chair of the American Studies Department. Her books include Card Sharps, Dream Books and Bucket Shops, a study of American gambling, and The Unvarnished Truth: Person Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. She has published several essays on the history of the book and the history of the American West. She is a member of the Council of the American Antiquarian Society and served a term on the council of the American Studies Association. Her work has received support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the School of American Research, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for the Study of History at Princeton, and the American Antiquarian Society.
Michael Frisch, State University of New York, Buffalo
- *Putting the 'Oral' Back in Oral History: Beyond Transcripts and Documentary, or, The Surprising Promise of Audio-Video Indexing*
- *Workers' Life Stories in a Changing American Economy: Deindustrialization from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out*
- *Leveraging the Past and Imagining the Future: Heritage Projects and the Contested Uses of History in Urban America*
The president of the American Studies Association in 2000-2001, Michael Frisch teaches American Studies and History at SUNY Buffalo. His books include A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, and Portraits in Steel, 1995 winner of Oral History Association book prize. His career has combined academic scholarship work with museums, documentary films, and community-based history projects. His current work focuses on the application and refinement of new indexing software offering direct access to audio and video documentation, an approach with surprisingly open-ended implications for research, collection management, community access, and multi-media production.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, University of Southern California
- *The United States's Addiction to Prisons: Racism, Surplus, and Globalization*
- *Racism in the 21st Century: Profiling Alienated Labor*
- *Abandonment: The Politics of Infrastructure*
- *A Manifesto in Defense of Dependency: or, Not All Power is Bad*
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Chair of the American Studies and Ethnicity Department (ASE) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is Associate Professor of ASE and Geography. In addition to her new book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press), recent publications include: "In the Shadow of the Shadow State" (in Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, eds. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, March 2007, South End Press), and "Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning" (in Charles R. Hale, ed., Engaging Contradictions, forthcoming, University of California Press). She is a founding member of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, and past-president of the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Honors include a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship, The James Blaut Award for Critical Geography, the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Economic and Environmental Justice, and a USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students.
Inderpal Grewal, University of California, Irvine
- *Gender, Feminism and Security*
- *Race, Biopolitics and the "West": Contemporary Politics of State and Nation*
- *Transnational Feminist Studies: Problems and Possibilities*
Inderpal Grewal (Berkeley, 1987) is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Irvine and Director of the PhD Program in Culture and Theory. She has published widely on topics such as Transnational and postcolonial feminist theory, feminism and human rights, NGO's and theories of civil society and citizenship, Law and subjectivity, travel and mobility and diaspora studies. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Duke UP, 1996), and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke UP, 2005). She is co-editor and author of Gender in a Transnational World: An Introduction to Women's Studies (McGraw-Hill, 2001, 2005) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minnesota, 1995).
Karen Halttunen, Professor of History, University of Southern California
- * Murder and the Gothic Imagination in American Culture*
- *"Local Communities, American Communities: K16 Collaboration in Teaching American Studies*
- *Indian Bones and Dinosaur Tracks: Exploring Antiquity in 19th-century New England*
- * Indian Rock: Geology and Racial 'Extinction' in the Nineteenth Century*
Karen Halttunen is the President of the American Studies Association (2005-2006) and Professor of History, University of Southern California. Books include: Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination and Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Edited works include: A Companion to American Cultural History (under contract, Blackwell Publishers); OAH Magazine of History, issue on teaching American history through criminal cases (in preparation, scheduled for publication in June 2006); co-editor with Lewis Perry, Moral Problems in American Life: New Essays on Cultural History. Professional service to K-12 education: academic co-director, "Local Communities, American Communities," a Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education (for the Sacramento City Unified School District), 2003-2006; academic director, "E Pluribus Unum," a Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education (for the Grant Unified School District, Sacramento), 2002-2005; academic director, "The History Workshop: Enriching the U.S. History Classroom" (offering monthly workshops for 8th- and 11th-grade teachers in the Sacramento area), 2002-; U.S. History Faculty Adviser, History and Cultures Project, U.C. Davis (a state- and foundation-funded K-16 collaboration for teaching history), 2001-; director or co-director, summer institutes for K-12 teachers held in 2003, 1999, 1998. Her current work concerns geology, landscape, and memory in 19th-century New England.
Amy Kaplan, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
- *Violence and Belonging: ASA Presidential Address*
- *Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space in the Wake of 9/11*
- *W.E.B. DuBois and the Cartography of Empire*
- *Between Empires: Francine Calderón de la Barca'a Life in Mexico, 1843*
- *Malinche and Pocahontas: Race, Gender, and Nation Across the Americas*
Past-president of the ASA (2003-2004), Amy Kaplan is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Fall 2002, Harvard) and coeditor of Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. In addition to her work on imperialism and culture, she teaches courses on mourning and memory in American Literature, and comparative perspectives on Latin American and US culture. She has been the recipient of an NEH Fellowship and winner of the Forster prize for the best essay in American Literature.
John Kasson, Professor of History and American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- *Houdini's Body: Masculinity, Modernity, and Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century America*
- *Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America*
John Kasson is the author of Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (1976), Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978), Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (1990), and the newly published Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (2001). An award-winning teacher, he has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Mary Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Chair in History, American Culture, and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
- *Transformations in, of and by American Studies: Past and Present*
- *Revolutions in Education: The Making of Learned Women in Nineteenth- Century America*
- *Reading Women/Reading Women: Making Meanings with Books*
The president of the American Studies Association in 1999-2000, Mary Kelley is the author, co-author, and editor of six books. She has held the Times-Mirror Chair in American Studies at the Huntington Library and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation. Kelley has served on the Editorial Boards of the American Quarterly, the Journal of American History, and the New England Quarterly. In addition to teaching awards at Dartmouth College, she was named New Hampshire Teacher of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1995.
Alice Kessler Harris, Columbia University
- *Economic Citizenship and the New Democracy*
- *Lillian Hellman: Public Intellectual Before Her Time*
- *Global Perspectives on Women's Work*
Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History, and past president of the American Studies Association, specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender. Her published works include Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (1981), Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982), and A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990). She is co-editor of Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, Australia, and the United States, 1880-1920 (1995), and U.S. History as Women's History (1995), and is largely responsible for re-introducing the immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska to new audiences. Her newest book, In Pursuit of Equity: How Gender Shaped American Economic Citizenship, won several prizes, including the Joan Kelly, Phillip Taft and Bancroft Prizes. It explores how gendered ideas became embedded in such twentieth-century U.S. social policies as old age and unemployment insurance, and equal employment opportunity legislation. She is currently working on a biography of playwright Lillian Hellman.
Paul Lauter, Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
- *Civil Rights and American Literature: From Mississippi Summer to The Heath Anthology*
- *Stephen Spielberg and American Political Culture*
- *Is American Studies Anti-American?*
- * Should We Be Teaching Lydia Sigourney?*
Past-president (1994-95) of the American Studies Association and General Editor of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature, Lauter was one of the founders of The Feminist Press and its treasurer and an editor for fourteen years. He also held offices in the faculty and staff union at the State University of New York, the American Friends Service Committee, and the U.S. Servicemen's Fund. He worked in freedom schools in Mississippi during the mid-1960s. His recent books include From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park (Duke) and a collection with Ann Fitzgerald on Class, Culture, and Literature (Longmans). Other projects include a Blackwell companion to American literature, a volume entitled What is American, and the development of an anthology of American literature for students in Asia.
Eric Lott, University of Virginia
- *Hollywood in the Age of Globalization: The Case of National Treasure*
- *Gangs of New York: Popular Culture in Antebellum America*
- *Blackface Now and Then: The Minstrel Show and Its Afterlives*
- *Boomer Liberalism: Intellectuals in the Age of Clinton/Bush*
- *Blonde on Blonde: Whiteness, Whiteness Studies, and the Construction of Race*
Eric Lott received his PhD from Columbia University and has taught American Studies at the University of Virginia since 1990. His book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford UP, 1993) won the Modern Language Association First Book Prize and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians; it also afforded the title of Bob Dylan's album "Love and Theft" (2001). He is also the author of a study of liberal intellectuals in the 1990s titled The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006). His work-in-progress includes a study of white cultural constructions of blackness (White Like Me). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Princeton University, among others, and his work has appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Representations.
Susan Manning, Northwestern University
- *American Studies and Dance Studies: The Case of Martha Graham*
- *Dissident Sexuality in American Dance from Ted Shawn to Bill T. Jones*
- *Spirituals in American Performance from W.E.B. DuBois to Alvin Ailey*
- *Stormy Weather: From Black Minstrelsy and Ragtime to the Lindy Hop and Bebop*
- *Watching Across the Color Line: Multiracial Spectatorship of American Dance, 1900-1960*
Elaine Tyler May, University of Minnesota
- *"Gimme Shelter:" The Legacy of the Cold War at Home*
- *"Family Values" and American Politics: The Power of Myth and the Making of Public Policy*
- *Sex, Women and the Bomb: American Families in the Cold War Era*
- *Childless Americans and the Culture of Reproduction*
President of the American Studies Association from 1995-1996, Elaine Tyler May is Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. She recently served as Fulbright Distinguished Professor of American History at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of several books and articles on American domestic and political culture, including Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980), Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), and Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness. She is also co-editor of Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (2000). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled, "Gimme Shelter: The Legacy of the Cold War at Home."
Gary Y. Okihiro, Columbia University
- *Asian and African Americans in the Making of the U.S.*
- *Hawai'i and the U.S.*
- *American and Ethnic Studies*
Gary Okihiro, the ASA's delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies, served on the ASA's council and executive committee, 2003-2005. He is a professor of international and public affairs and director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He is author of eight books, including his latest, Common Ground: Reimagining American History (2001), which won a Choice outstanding academic book award, and The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (2001), which won a special award for a reference work from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is now writing a book on Hawai'i and its relations with the U.S. He is the recipient of the ASA's lifetime achievement award, and is a past president of the Association for Asian American Studies.
Donald Pease, Dartmouth College
- *American Studies after US Exceptionalism*
- *The Recent Planetary Turn in American Studies *The Mythological Foundations of Bush's Biopolitical Settlement*
- * The Mexican-American War and Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Foundational Borderline Fantasy*
- *Trauma and Translation *Tennessee Williams and the Primal Scene of the 1950's*
- *"Experience," the Anti-Slave and the Crisis of Emersonianism*
- *Spectres of the New Americanists*
- *Transnational American Studies: A Critical Comparativist Analysis*
Donald Pease is the Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities and the Chair of the Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth College.His 1987 book Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Context won the Mark Ingraham Prize for the best new book in the Humanities in 1987. Pease is the editor or co-editor of eight volumes including: The American Renaissance Reconsidered, Cultures of US Imperialism (with Amy Kaplan), Revisionist Interventions into the American Canon, Postnational Narratives and (with Robyn Wiegman) Futures of American Studies. Pease has directed two NEH Seminars for College Teachers and is presently the General Editor for the New Americanists book series at Duke University Press as well as the Founding Director of Futures of American Studies, a Summer Institute in American Studies held each summer at Dartmouth. The author of more than eighty essays, Pease is presently at work on American Studies after the New Americanists.
Rafael Pérez-Torres, University of California, Los Angeles
- *The Tropics of Mestizaje: Uses of Race in Chicana Critical Discourse*
- *Critical Mestizaje and Chicana/o Culture*
- *Globalization and Chicano/a Cultural Response*
- *Spatial Hybridity and Transnational Identities in Chicano Culture*
- *Ethnics, Ethics and Chicano Aesthetics*
Rafael Pérez-Torres studies the intersection of contemporary U.S. culture with social configurations of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. He is particularly interested in the intersection between contemporary multicultural production and theories of postcoloniality and postmodernity. He is the author of Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and co-author of To Alcatraz, Death Row and Back: Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw (University of Texas Press, 2005). He also co-edited The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán 1970-2000 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2001). Other publications include "Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, the Mestizo Voice" (American Literature 70.1), "Refiguring Aztlán" (Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 22.2), "Between Presence and Absence: Beloved, Postmodernism, and Blackness" (A Casebook on Beloved edited by William Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay.. Oxford University Press, 1999), and "Nomads and Migrants - Negotiating a Multicultural Postmodernism" (Cultural Critique 26). He has served on the editorial boards of such journals as America Literary History, American Literature, Aztlán, and Contemporary Literature and regularly teaches courses on Chicano/a literature and culture, postmodernism and multiculturalism, and the novel and its theories.
Carla L. Peterson, University of Maryland, College Park
- *"African-American Women Orators in the Antebellum North*
- *"Antebellum Slave Narrators: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs*
- *"African Americans and the New York Draft Riots of 1863: Contested Spaces of Black Community and City Neighborhoods*
- *"Family, Memory, History: Reconstituting Black Elite Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York*
- *"Black Cosmopolitanism and the Reshaping of African American Local and National Identities (1830-1910)*
Carla L. Peterson is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and affiliate faculty of the American Studies, African-American Studies, and Women's Studies Departments. In the American Studies Association, she was co-chair of the ASA 2003 Annual Meeting Program Committee, member of the John Hope Franklin Prize Committee in 1993-94, and served on the American Quarterly Board of Managing Editors and the Board of Advisory Editors. She is the author of "Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) and of numerous essays on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Black Gotham: African American Family and Community in Nineteenth-Century New York, about nineteenth-century black New Yorkers as seen through the lens of family history. Peterson has been the recipient of fellowships from the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, and the NEH. Beyond the academy, she is a current member of the Maryland Humanities Council Speakers Bureau and past member of the board of the Washington D.C. Humanities Council. She has participated in the TV documentaries, "Ticket to Freedom" and "Remembering Slavery." She has conducted numerous curriculum development workshops for public school teachers in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Internationally, she has served as a USIA academic specialist in American Studies at Quisqueya University, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and taught summer seminars in Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City.
Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota
- *The Demotic Ulysses: Pulp Fiction in Postwar America*
- *Black & White & Noir: Race and America's Pulp Modernism*
- *Domesticating Art: Museums in the Age of the Trademark*
- *Tuning, Collaborating, Interacting: Women's Installation Art*
- *Feminism as a National Identity; Or Why There are Three Georgia O'Keeffe Prints in the Rome USIS Office*
- *Swimming Into the Canvas: Two Dreams, a Book and Some Paintings; on The Awakening*
- *Labor in Fiction during the 1930s*
(B.A. magna cum laude American Studies, Brandeis University 1974; PhD. American Culture, University of Michigan, 1986 [awarded the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize]) is Professor and Chair of English and Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the programs of American Studies, Critical Studies in Discourse and Society, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as the Department of English. Her research, teaching and training are in the areas of American materialist feminist cultural studies. Her work considers the interlocking roles of cinema, photography, painting in and through literature and space in twentieth-century American social history. A feminist cultural historian, she has published widely on contemporary and modernist American women's art and literature. Her books explore hidden histories within working-class, pulp and popular cultures; they include Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (UNC, 1991), They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (Verso, 1994) and Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism (Columbia, 2002). She co-edited Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940 (Feminist Press, 1987) and has contributed articles and chapters on literary radicalism and film theory to many journals, anthologies and encyclopedia, such as, the recent Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, Encyclopedia of Documentary Film (Routledge), Modernism, Inc. (NYU). Her recent essays on art and culture have appeared in NY Arts, PAJ, Social Text, Legacy, Cineaste, Film International, Women's Studies Quarterly, T/Here among others, and have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Chinese. Between 2003 and 2006, she was Project Director of VG/Voices from the Gaps, an award-winning international website on the Art and Writing of North American Women of Color comprised of student and professional writing. She has also co-curated gallery exhibits on women and pulp fiction and on women's sound installation art. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Mellon Fellowship, a Rockefeller Residency at Bellagio, Italy, a Senior Fellowship at the Oregon State Humanities Center and a Fulbright Professorship in Rome. She serves on the National Council of the American Studies Association and is currently a member of the Delegate Assembly, the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee and the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, for which she previously was co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Professions.
Janice Radway, Frances Hill Fox Professor in Humanities and Professor of Literature, Duke University
- *Girls, Reading, and Narrative Gleaning: Crafting Repertoires for Self-Fashioning within Everyday Life*
- *Reading, Subjectivity, and Community Formation: Book Clubs, Libraries, and the Promotion of Reading in the Interwar Years*
- *Girls, Zines, and the Performance of Identity*
President of the American Studies Association in 1998-99, Janice Radway is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (1984) and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire (1997). She also served as Editor of American Quarterly jointly with Richard Beeman from 1983 to 1984 and then alone from 1984 to 1987. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies (declined) and has lectured widely throughout the U. S. and internationally. She is currently serving as co-editor with Carl Kaestle of volume 4 of the multi-volume work, History of the Book in America. She is beginning an ethnographic project on girls' self-generated cultural production that will deal with girls' zines, web pages, collages, decorated backpacks and other cultural products.
David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- *White Worlds: The Critical Study of Whiteness within and beyond the U.S.*
- *White Nation: The Reproduction of Race in the U.S.*
David Roediger is the Babcock Professor of History and of African American Studies at University of Illinois. He was born in southern Illinois in 1952 and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. Currently the Babcock Chair of History at University of Illinois—Urbana/Champaign, he has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on the history of radicalism and on the racial identities of white workers. His books include Our Own Time, The Wages of Whiteness, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso, Colored White (California), History against Misery (Kerr)and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic). His edited books include an edition of Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South (Kerr), and another of W.E.B. Du Bois's John Brown (Random House) as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken).
Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine
- *"Nuestra America: Latino History as U.S. History"*
- *"La Nueva Chicana": Women in the Chicano Movement*
- *Comadres, Cowgirls, and Curanderas: Spanish/Mexican Women in the Southwest 1540-1900*
- *Big Dream, Rural Schools: Mexican Americans and Public Education, 1870-1950*
President-elect of the American Studies Association, Ruiz is the author or editor of eleven books, including the influential monograph From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. She is Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine. Recipients of NEH and Ford Foundation Grants, she and Virginia Sanchez Korrol have recently co-edited the three-volume reference work, Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. She is immediate past president of the Organization of American Historians and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.
George J. Sánchez, University of Southern California
- *Natives and Aliens: Drawing Boundaries of Race and Nation in Urban America*
- *The Multiracial Body: Interrogating U.S. Fascination with Mestizaje*
- *Adventures in Post-Nationalist American Studies: The Difference Race Makes*
President of the American Studies Association in 2001-2002, Sanchez is best known for his award-winning 1993 book, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and dentity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. He currently serves as Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, an innovative program which combines the fields of American Studies and Ethnic Studies. He works on both historical and contemporary topics of race, gender, ethnicity, labor, and immigration, and is one of the co-editors of the book series, American Crossroads: New Works in Ethnic Studies, from the University of California Press.
Stephen H. Sumida, University of Washington
- *The Global Construction of American Culture: America as an Asian Nation*
- *A Narrative of Kuki'iahu and Its Erasures: Multiculturalism Bumps Indigenous Culture in Hawai'i *
- *Paradigm Shifts in Asian/Pacific American Literature*
President of the ASA in 2002-2003; past president of the Association for Asian American Studies, 1999-2000; Professor and Chair of American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington. Teaches and researches in Asian/Pacific American literature and interdisciplinary American Studies. Books: Asian American Literature of Hawaii: An Annotated Bibliography; And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai'i; A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature (with Sau-ling Cynthia Wong). With Marie Hara and Arnold T. Hiura, a co-founder of Talk Story, Inc.: The Hawaii Ethnic Resources Center, the organization that produced the Talk Story writers' conferences that launched the Local literary movement in Hawai'i beginning in 1976. Taught (English, American Studies, ethnic studies) at the University of Hawaii (1970s), Washington State University (1981-90), and the University of Michigan (1990-98), prior to working at the University of Washington.
Patricia A. Turner, University of California at Davis
- *Please Forward This: Cultural Markers in E-Mail Legends*
- *This Little Light of Mine: A Study of African-American Quilters*
- *Inebriated Post-Docs and Lascivious Lecturers: Images of Academics in Popular Film*
- *Race, Rumor, and Huricane Katrina*
Currently the vice-provost of undergraduate studies, Turner is a specialist in folklore and popular culture. She is the author of many articles and two books, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture and Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture. Turner has served as a consulting scholar on many media projects including the Emmy Award winning documentary Ethnic Notions and the Peabody award-winning Color Adjustment.
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