The following is a registry of completed doctoral dissertations in American Studies and American Ethnic Studies as reported by PhD 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, 2012 and June 30, 2013.  The request was sent to forty-one 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.  A complete alphabetical listing of American Studies Dissertation Abstracts from 1986-2011 and past surveys are available from the online ASA Archive at http://www.theasa.net (click on resources).

BOWLING GREEN UNIVERSITY (6)

Kristy Ganoe, “Mindful Movement as a Cure for Colonialism.“Bryan McGeart, “Houses, Hot Dogs, and ‘Hoods: Place Branding and the Reconstruction of Identity in Rick Sebak’s Pittsburgh Documentaries.” Aprilfaye Manalang, “How Does Religion Shape Filipino Immigrants’ Connection to the Public Sphere? Imagining a Different Self-Understanding of Modernity.” Edward Uszynski, “Implicit Religion and the Highly Identified Sports Fan: An Ethnography of Cleveland Sports Fandom.” Kelly MacDonald Weeks, “Parrotheads, Cheeseburgers, and Paradise: Adult Music Fandom and Fan Practices.” Eric Weeks, “Memory and Meaning: Constructed Commemoration in a Nation’s Capital City.”

SUNY BUFFALO (THE UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO) (6)

Amber Meadow Adams, “Teyotsi Tsiasonhatye: Meaning and Medicine in the Haudensaunee (Iroquois) Story of Life’s Renewal.” Robert Antone, “Yukwalihowanahtu Yukwanosaunee Tsinyukwaliho: As People of the Longhouse, We Honor Our Way of Life.” Peter Bjelskou, “When People Become Corporations: Product Placement and Gender Construction on Bravo TV’s The Real Housewives of New York City.” Erika Haygood Gault, “No Matter What They Think of Me: The Religious Beleifs of Gospel Rappers in Bufallo.” Jeffrey J. Lovannone, “Human Minageries: Freak Show Legacies in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture.” Brandon Martin, “Haudenosaunee Warfare and Politics: Persistence and Adaptation Through Time.”

CUNY GRADUATE CENTER (11)

Jill Belli, “Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being.” Johannes Hendrikus Burgers, “Conspiratorial Modernism: Modernism and Conspiracy Theory in Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Musil.” Garrett B. Eisler, “This Theatre is a Battlefield: Political Performance and Jewish-American Identity, 1933-1948.” Audrey Claire Raden, “As Long as She Cracks She Holds: Thoreau’s Anticipation of Dying.” Mark A. Schieve, “The Specter of Art in the American Business Novel, 1885-1917.” Jesse W. Schwartz, “Genetic Revolutionaries: American Socialism, The Russian Revolution, And the Invention of the Radical Immigrant. 1886-1920.” Katherine Wilson, “The Social Lives of Playscripts: Nick of the Woods from Inkwell to Internet.” Peter B. Zazzali, “The commodification of US Acting as Seen Through the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs, 1965-1987.” Robert R. Machado, “Metachromatics: Applied Color Across Media in the Age of Composite Pictures (1839-1935).” Douglas Singsen, “An Alternate by any Other Name: Alternative Comics Between the ‘Mainstream’ and the Avant-Garde, 1976 to the Present.” Karen A. Weiser, “Self-Begot, Self Rais’d’: Elective Orphanhood in American Novels, 1790-1852.”

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (1)


Laurie Lahey, “The Grassy Battleground”: Race, Religion, and Activism in Camden’s “Wide” Civil Rights Movement.

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, MĀNOA (7)


Johanna F. Almiron, “Now’s the Time: Signifying the Social and Cultural Politics in the Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.” Angela Krattiger, “In Service of Empire: Hawai’I, Satehood and the Cold War.” Aidan Smith, “All in the Family: Presidential Candidates and Representations of General Power within the Nuclear Family.” Paul Stader, “Rice v. Cayetano: America’s Evolving Legal Debate with Race, and the Consequences of Applying ‘Color-Blind’ Constitutionalism to Law Affecting Indigenous Peoples.” Sean Trundle, “Cowboys on the Endless Frontier: State Scientists and the Popular Imagination from the Post-War Era to the Present.” Michael Llora, “Transnational Bataan Memories: Text, Film, Monument, and Commemoration.” Joan Harper, “Exploring Landscapes as Sites of Intercultural Relations Between Indigenous Peoples and Immigrant Settlers.”

INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON (9)


Mark Benedetti, “Beneath New York: The Formation and Effects of Canons in American Underground Film Movements.” Katherine Burnett, “The most thrilling event of the night was the arrival at the stage station’: The Nostrum Springs Stage Station, Thermopolis, Wyoming, in Archaeological and Social Context.” Edward Chamberlain, “Speaking Out to Survive: Literary Activism and Queer Domesticity in Life Writing.” Chad Christensen, “Conflicting Motivations and a Complex Professional Environment: The Lived Professional Experiences of Adjunct faculty at a Community College.” William Gillis, “Say No to the Liberal Media: Conservatives and Criticism of the News Media in the 1970’s.” Cara Kinnally, “Writing America: Transnational Discourses of Empire, Race, and Community Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands.” Anthony Krus, “A Chronology for Warfare in the Mississippian Period (AD 1000-1500).” Amy Rubens, “Making Medicine in America: A Literary Account, 1870-1950.” Puja Sahney, “Religion and Houses in a Transnational Setting: A Study of Interior Decoration of Hindu Immigrants from India in the United States.”

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (5)

 Derrais Carter, “Beyond the Veil of the Secret City: New Negro Representation in the Nation’s Capital, 1919-1935.” Cinda Nofziger, “Vacation Views: Tourist Photography in the American West, 1945-1980.” Sara Shreve, “Futures So Bright: Solar Homes in Mid-Twentieth Century America.” Gyorgy “George” Toth, “Red Nations: The Transatlantic Relations of the Radical American Indian Sovereignty Movement of the Late Cold War.” Steven Williams, “Smudging the Book: The Role of Cultural Authority in Tribal Historical Narratives and Revitalization at Rocky Boy.”

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND (4).

Asim Ali, “Subjacent Culture, Orthoganal Community: An Ethnographic Analysis of an Online Buffy the Vampire Fan Community.” Gary Ford, “Justice is a Black Woman: The Life and Work of Constance Baker Motley.” Tiffany King, “In the Clearing: Black Female Bodies, Space, and Settler Colonial Landscapes.” Elise White, “‘Pushed Out’ and Pulled In: Girls of Color, the Criminal Justice System, and Neoliberalism’s Double-Bind.”

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS (4)

James G. Carroll, “Composing the African Atlantic: Sun Ra, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, and the Poetics of African Diasporic Composition.” Allia A. Matta, “Uncovering the Covered Word and Image: Framing a Blackwoman’s Diasporan Stage-Space.” McKinley E. Melton, “Pen Stroking the Soul of a People”: Spiritual Foundations of Black Diasporian Literature.” Jamal E. Waston, “Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press: Black Journalism and Its Advocacy Role from 1954-1991.”

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (8).

Christina Abreau, “Authentic Assertions, Commercial Concessions:  Race, Nation, and Popular Culture in Cuban New York City and Miami 1940-1960.” Paul Farber, “Boundaries of Freedom:  An American History of the Berlin Wall.” Chris Finley, “Decolonizing Sexualized Cultural Images:  Bringing “Sexy Back” to Native Studies.” Alex Olson, “The People’s Classroom:  American Modernism and the Struggle for Democratic Education, 1860-1940.” Veronica Pasfield, “The Head, the Heart, and the Hands:  Hampton, Carlisle, and Hilo in/as Circuits of Transpacific Empire, 1819-1887?” Aimee VonBokel, “The Inevitable and the Invisible:  Stories of Race and Class in Two New York Museums.” Stephen Wisniewski, “You Can’t Make Palm Beach Out of the Bowery: Neoliberalism and the Cultural Politics of Rust Belt Urban Revitalization.”

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (6)

Amy Sue Goodin, “Sovereign Conflicts and Divided Loyalties: Native American Survivance in the Era of Nuclear Modernity - A Story of the Western Shoshone and their Response to the Yucca Mountain High-level Radioactive Waste Repository.” Kara McCormack, “Imagining ‘the Town too Tough to Die’: Tourism, Preservation, and History in Tombstone, Arizona.” Carson Metzger, “Microbes, Individuals, and Medical Charity: The Remaking of Tuberculosis and Liberal Individualism.” María Munguía Wellman, “The Borderpsychosocial Development Project: Is There a Specific Psychosocial Consciousness that Frames Development for Border Women?” Whitney Purvis Rakich, “Savage Fakes: Misdirection, Fraudulence, and Autobiography in the 1920s.” Jennifer Richter, “New Mexico’s Nuclear Enchantment: Science, Environment, Politics, and Radioactive Waste.”

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (3)

Leticia Alvarado, “Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production.” Elizabeth Mesok, “Warring Subjects: Gender, Liberalism, and the Global War on Terror.” Ronak Kapadia, “Queer Cartographies of the Long War: Beyond the Cultural Logic of Counterinsurgency.”

PURDUE UNIVERSITY (3)

W. Neal Gill, “When We Got Beat”: The WWII Era Labor Camp Origin of the Beat Movement.” Kenra R. Unruh, “Jubilant Spirits of Freedom”: Representations of the Lindy Hop in Literature & Film from the Swing Era to the Swing Revival.” Christopher A. Warren, “The Price of Post-Racialism: Educational Genocide vs. Culture-Affirming Methodology.”

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY (2)

A. Bayard Clark, “Forgotten Eyewitnesses:  English Women Travel Writers and the Economic Development of America’s Antebellum West.” Jaclyn H. Kirouac-Fram, ““Yellow Rolling Cell Blocks”:  The Urban Bus and Race in the United States.”

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN (4)

Becky D’Orsogna, “Yoga in America: History, Community Formation, and Consumerism.” Tonny Fassi, “Manufacturing Ruin.” Katie Feo Kelly, “Organizing the American Domestic Interior: 1978-2010.” Rebecca Onion, “Science and the Culture of American Childhood, 1900-1980.”

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (5)

Genevieve Carpio, “Organizing the Inland Empire: Regional & Racial Formation in Southern California, 1880-1980.” Christina Heatherton, “The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution and Convergences of Radical Internationalism, 1910-1946.” Anjali Nath, “Rendered Visualities: Representation and Detention in the War on Terror.” Luis Carlos Rodriguez, “Heretical Scripts: Sylvia Wynter’s Early Intellectual Life in the Decolonial Atlantic.” Gretel Vera Rosas, “The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life: Illegality, Maternity & Displacement in the Americas.”

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY (7)

Kirsten Dyck, “Race and Nation in White-Power Music.” Michael Johnson, Jr., ““Discourses of Distinction” as Conspicuous Consumption:  An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race and Queer Desire on HBO’s The Wire the True Blood.” Frank Collington King, Jr., “Campaign for Edutainment:  Afrocentric Philosophy and Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Method for True Liberation.” Mary Jo Klinker, “Interrogating Moral Mothers, Mama Grizzlies, and Women Warriors:  Towards a Queer Transnational Feminist Antimilitarism.” Marc Robinson, “The Black Power Movement and the Black Student Union (BSU) in Washington State, 1967-1970.” David Warner, “Indigepedia:  Digital Decolonization—Living Histories of Native American People Indigenizing K-12 Curriculum in Washington State.”

WILLIAM AND MARY (7)

Merit Anglin, “Gone to the Dogs: Inter-Species Bonds and the Building of Bio-Cultural Capital in America, 1835 - Present.” Lashonda Barnett, “‘Learning How to Listen’: Analyzing Style & Meaning in the Music of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone & Cassandra Wilson.” Frank Cha, “Southern Orientation: Navigating Asian Pacific American Identity and Place in Contemporary Southern Literature and Film.” Evan Cordulack, “Imagining Saigon: American Interpretatons of Saigon in the Twentieth Century.” Jeffreen Hayes, “Real Talk: Blackness and Whiteness in the Works of Jefferson Pinder, Dave Chappelle, and Aaron McGruder.” David Kidd, “History Written With Lightning”: Religion, White Supremacy, and the Rise and Fall of Thomas Dixon, Jr.” Hollis Pruitt, “No Longer Lost at Sea: Black Community Building In the Virginia Tidewater, 1865 to the post-1954 Era.”