The following is a registry of completed doctoral dissertations in American Studies and American Ethnic Studies as reported by Ph.D. degree-granting programs in the United States.  This list is based on requests to American Studies and American Ethnic Studies programs for lists of doctoral dissertations completed between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015.  The request was sent to fifty-seven different universities, some with multiple Ph.D. degree-granting departments in the relevant fields.

The report contains entries whose titles suggest the broad range of topics and diverse methodologies that American Studies scholars are exploring.  

BOWLING GREEN UNIVERSITY (7)

Wonda Baugh, “An Autoethnographic Exploration Into Bipolar Depression and Social Support As A Factor Of Resilence.” Johnanna Ganz, “Contested Titles: Gendered Violence Victim Advocacy and Negotiating Occupational Stigma in Social Interactions.” Lance Gibbs, “It’s not just about giving them money”: Cultural Representations of Father Involvement Among Black West Indian Immigrants in the United States of America.” Keisha Hicks, “Sumptuous Soul: The Music of Donny Hathaway Everything is Everything Donny Hathaway, 1970.” Christine Lezotte, “Have You Heard the One About the Woman Driver? Chicks, Muscle, Pickups, and the Reimagining of the Woman Behind the Wheel.” Deborah Ribera, “(Re)Presentation: An Affective Exploration of Ethnographic Documentary Film Production.” Elisabeth Woronzoff-Dashkoff, “Playing for Their Share: A History of Creative Tradeswomen in Eighteenth Century Virginia.”

BROWN UNIVERSITY (6)

Clarissa J. Ceglio, “A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy: The War Work of U.S. Museums, 1930s-1950.” Brent Akio Fujioka, “Four-Color Creatures: Race and Monstrosity in American Comic Books and Japanese Manga.” Elena L. Gonzales, “Resonance And Wonder: Museums Working For Social Justice.” Sara Matthiesen, “Reconceived: Women’s Reproduction after Roe v. Wade.” Colleen Marie Tripp, “Pacific Sensations: The Making of an American West and Pacific Orientalism in U.S. Print Culture, 1840-1920” Miel Mason Wilson, “At the Roots: Genealogy, Genetics, and Race in American Popular Culture.”

CUNY GRADUATE CENTER (6)

Nicole Berkin, “Economies of Touring in American Theatre Culture, 1835-1861.” Anne C. Donlon, “Archives of Translational Modernism: Lost Networks of Art and Activism.” Donatella Galella “Performing (Non) Profit, Race, and American Identity in the Nation’s Capital: Arena Stage, 1950-2010.” Stefania Heim “Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, and the Scholar’s Art.” Jonathan Keller “Right Without Might: Prophecy and Enervation in the American Political Tradition.” William McNally “Ragtime Then and Now: Composers and Audiences from the Ragtime Era to the Ragtime Revival.”

HARVARD UNIVERSITY (6)

Christina Adkins, “Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory.” Holger Droessler, “Islands of Labor: Community, Conflict, and Resistance in Colonial Samoa, 1889-1919.” Aaron Hatley, “Tin Lizzie Dreams: Henry Ford and Antimodern American Culture, 1919-1942.” Peter L’Official, “Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin.” Anna Lvovsky, “Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge about Homosexuality, 1920-1970.” Katherine Stevens, “Unsettling the South: War, Expansion, and Slavery in the Southern United States, 1780-1840.”

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, MANOA (2)

Milo Andrus, “The Peninsula: From the Bouldered Shores of Kalawao to the Black Sands of Kalaupapa.” Daniel Simon, “The Creation of the King/Drew Medical Complex and the Politics of Public Memory.”

INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON (12)

Milton Clark Barwick, “Obscurity, Blackness, and the Making of the Harlem Renaissance, 1919-Present.” Elizabeth Burbach,  ““Baseball City”: Cultivating Ball Players in the Boca Chica Dominican Republic.” Kate Netzler Burch, “Creation Care: Evangelicals, Politics, and the Environment.” Callie Clare, “Off the Road: American Identity and Modification of Off-Road Trucks.” Susan Eckelmann, “Freedom’s Little Lights: The World of Children and Teenagers in the U.S. and Abroad during the Civil Rights Era.” Mark Hain, “Revamped: Theda Bara, Cultural Memory, and the Repurposing of Star Imabe” Jennifer Heusel, “Why Do These Silly Things Exist?: Postracial, Free Market Logics in Local Discourse.” Jonathan Kay, “Material Life Review: Folk Art and Aging in Indiana.” Teresa Klassen, “Quilt Making and Social Order in the Tennessee Delta in the Middle Twentieth Century.” Teresa Nichols, “Making and Managing Mongolian Heritage.” Ruth Reichard, “Sick in the City: Isolation and Policy in Times of Crises.” Holly Schreiber, “Representations of Poverty in American Literary Journalism.”

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (5)

Jennifer Ambrose, “Geographies of Responsibility: The Cultural Logic of 21st Century Weather Emergencies.” Wayne Anderson, “Honest to Goodness Farmers: Rural Iowa in American Culture during the Great Depression.” Jonathan Hansen, “Take a Chill Pill: A Cultural History of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.” Matt Thomas, “Life Hacking: A Critical History, 2004-2014.” Nathan Titman, “The Drift of Desire: Masculinity and a Gay American Work Ethic, 1910-1945.”

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS (3)

Stephanie Krehbiel, “Let Us be Broken Together: LGBTQ Mennonites and Discourses of Community.” Angela Gaile Liljequist, “‘Softy, Glossy Tresses”: Shampoo Advertisements, White Women’s Hair, and the Late-Post World War II Domestic Ideal.” John Patrick Shreve, “Transformation and Resilience at Shuri-Jo: Defining a Genome of Place”

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND (4)

Mark Barron, “Tax Rebels: The Rise of the White Property Owner in Cobb County, Georgia.”

Shayna Maskell, “Politics as (Un)Usual: Washington, DC Hardcore Punk (1979-1983) and the Politics of Sound.” Andrew Nelson, “With Sight and Sound: Black Photographic and Musical Expression in Rural Alabama, 1900-1930.” Maria Velazquez, “Reclaiming Black Beledi: Race, Wellness, and Online Community.”

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (8)

Matthew Blanton, “Beyond the Playing Field: The Rise of College Football and the Educated Elite in the Progressive Era United States.” Joseph Cialdella, “Landscape of Ruin and Repair: Cultural and Environmental Change in Detroit, 1880 - 2010.” Sarah Gothie, “(Her)itage: Interpretation, Literary Tourism, and the Popular Legacies of Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, and Beatrix Potter.” David Green, ““Out of This Confusion I Bring My Heart”: Love, Liberation, and the Rise of Black Lesbian and Gay Cultural Politics in Late 20th Century America.” Frank Kelderman, “Authorized Agents:  The Projects of Native American Writing in the Removal Era.” Natalie Lira, “Of Low Grade Mexican Parentage: Race, Gender, and Eugenic Sterilization in California, 1928-1950.” Wendy Michael, “Labor on Display: Ford Factory Tours and the Romance of Globalized.“Mejdulene Shomali, “Moving Femininities: Queer Critique and Transnational Arab Culture.”

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA (4)

Myrl E. Beam, “Compassion, Community, Capital, and Crisis: Neoliberalism and the Non-Profitization of Queer Social Movements.” Katherine Elizabeth Beane, “Woyakapi Kin Ahdipi “Bringing the Story Home”: A History Within the Wakpa Ipaksan Dakota Oyate.” Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, “The Heartland of Empire: Queer Cultural Imaginaries of Filipinas/os in the Midwest.” Elias Walker Vitulli, “Canceral Normatives: Sex, Security, and the Penal Mangement of Gender Nonconformity.”

PENN STATE, HARRISBURG (7)

Lynne Calamia, “A New Deal for Historic Preservation: The Impact of Relief Funding on the Cultural Landscape of Pennsylvania, 1932-1941.” Brant Ellsworth, “American Prodigals: The Rejection and Redemption of Mormons in the American West, 1890-1930.” Spero Lappas, “A Rabid Dog, the Third Shooter, and Fifty Head of Cattle: Mythos and Logos in the Culture of American Criminal Justice.” James McMahon, “Built of Stone: The Family of Milton S. Hershey Constructs a Pennsylvania German Cultural Landscape.” Susan Ortmann, “‘Telling you who we are’ Identity Formation on America’s First Western Frontier.” David Puglia, “Hon Culture Wars: Revering and Reviling the Vernacular in Baltimore and Beyond.”  David Russell, “A History of Maico Motorcycles and American Sport Motorcycle Culture, 1955- 1983.”

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (6)

Crystal Baik, “Mechanisms of Visibility: Korean Militarized Subjects, Critical Sensing, and The Decolonial Archive.” Adam Bush, “Passing Notes in Class: Listening to Pedagogical Improvisations in Jazz History.” Jennifer DeClue, “Specters of Miscegenation: Blood, Belonging, and the Reproduction of Blackness.” Treva Ellison, “Towards a Politics of Perfect Disorder: Carceral Geographies, Queer Criminality, and Other Ways to Be.” Kai Green, “Into the Darkness: A Quare (Re)Membering of Los Angeles in a Time of Crises” Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, “Heretical Scripts: Sylvia Wynter’s Early Intellectual Life in the Decolonial Atlantic, 1947-1995.”

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN (5)

Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa, “Disciplining Conservation: Paul N. Banks and the Moorings of Library and Archives Conservation Education.” Anne Gessler “Civilization’s Supreme Test’: Cooperative Organizing in New Orleans, 1890s- 2014.” Jennifer Kelly, “Your Work is Not Here: Solidarity Tourism in Occupied Palestine.” Courtney Williams Barron, “The Political Economy of Literacy in the ‘Post-Racial’ Era: The Common Core State Standards and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality in the United States.” Jeannette Vaught, “Science, Animals, and Profit-Making in the American Rodeo Arena”

WILLIAM AND MARY (9)

Kathleen Bennett, “The Economics of Loyalty: Robert Bonner, the New York Ledger, and Sentimental Capitalism.“Mikal Gaines, “The Black Gothic Imaginary: Horror, Spectatorship, and Black Subjectivity in American Cinema from 1960 to the New Millennium.” Sarah Glosson, “Performing Jane: A Cultural History of Jane Austen’s Fans in America.” Zachary Hilpert, “Ruins Reframed: The Commodification of American Urban Disaster, 1861-1906” Julia Kaziewicz, “Artful Manipulation: The Rockefeller Family and Cold War America.” Kimberly Mann, “‘Genuine Made-in-Americans”: Living Machines and the Technological Body in the Postwar Science Fiction Imaginary, 1944-1968.” Elizabeth Neidenbach, “The Life and Legacy of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, and the Making of a Free People of Color Community in New Orleans.” Roxane Pickens, “Dark Play: Ethnicity and Festivity in Jazz Age Literature and Popular Culture.” Kevin Valliant, “Fears in Concrete Forms: Modernity and Horror in the United States; 1880-1939.”

YALE UNIVERSITY (5)

Megan Asaka, “The Unsettled City: Migration, Race, and the Making of Seattle’s Urban Landscape.” Claudia Calhoun, ““The Story You Are About to Hear Is True”: Dragnet, Transmedia Storytelling, and the Postwar Police Procedural.” Tao Goffe, “Chiney Royal: Afro-Asian Intimacies in the Americas.” Tisha Hooks, “Duct Tape and the U.S. Social Imagination.” Carolee Klimchock, “Heiress Weds Coachman: Elopement Scandals and the Performance of Coach Driving in the Gilded Age.”