The following is a registry of completed doctoral dissertations in American studies, American ethnic studies, and women’s studies programs as reported by United States PhD degree-granting institutions. This list is based on requests to American studies, American ethnic studies, and women’s studies programs for lists of doctoral dissertations completed between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011. The survey was sent to sixty universities, some with multiple departments. Forty were American studies programs and twenty-one were American ethnic studies programs.
The following programs either did not respond, or had no completed dissertations to report: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; Baylor University; University at Buffalo; Bowling Green State University; College of William and Mary; California State University, Sacramento; California State University, Los Angeles; University of California, Davis; University of California, Berkeley; DePaul University; Florida State University; Georgetown University; Kennesaw State University; Kent State; Montana State University; University of Massachusetts, Boston; Michigan State; University of Michigan, Flint; University of Minnesota; Northeastern State University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of New Mexico; Ohio State University; Oklahoma State University; Pepperdine University; University of Southern California; University of Southern Maine; Trinity College; Temple University; Utah State University; University of Utah; University of Virginia; University of Wyoming; Washington University in St. Louis.
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 1986-2010 and past surveys are available from the online ASA Archive at http://www.theasa.net (click on resources).
BOSTON UNIVERSITY (7)
Beth Bennett. “A Picture of Moral Agency: Vanquishing the Victim in Richard Wright’s Prose, Film, and Photography.”
Molly Geidel. “The Point of the Lance: Gender, Development, and the 1960s Peace Corps.”
Diane Hotton-Somers. “Re-Invisioning Identities: Ethnicity and Cultural Nationalism in Irish and American Drama, 1899-1939.”
Christine Hult-Lewis. “The Mining Photographs of Carleton E. Watkins, 1858—1891 and the Origins of Corporate Photography.”
Carney Maley. “Flying the ‘Unfriendly Skies’: Flight Attendant Activism, 1964-1982.”
John Metz. “Room for Improvement, but No Room for Progress: The Material Basis of the Economic Transition in the Georgia Piedmont, 1880 -1910.”
Miriam Michelle Robinson. “Places for Dead Bodies: Race, Labor and Detection in American Literature.”
BROWN UNIVERSITY (6)
Oscar Vinluan Campomanes. “Figures of the Unassimilable: American Empire, Filipino American Postcoloniality, and the U.S.-Philippine War of 1898-1910s.”
Joseph Edward John Clark. “Canned History: American Newsreels and the Commodification of History.”
Eric David Larson. “Anxieties of Empire: Race, Class, Nation, and Neoliberalism in the U.S. and Mexico, 1986-2004.”
Mireya Loza. “Braceros on the Boundaries: Activism, Race, Masculinity, and the Legacies of the Bracero Program.”
Ani Mukherji. “The Anticolonial Imagination: The Exilic Productions of American Anticolonialism in Interwar Moscow, 1919-1939.”
Kelli Kristine Shapiro. “When the Modern Becomes Historic: The Historic Preservation of the Recent Past in America.”
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK (3)
Todd Michael Barosky. “Counterfeiting in American Literature.”
Galina Savukova. “Reading Films: Words on the Silent Screens of American Cinema.”
Valeri Whitmer. “The Sounds of War: Radio, the Aural Experience and National Consensus in World War II.”
EMORY UNIVERSITY (2)
Ju-Hwan Kim. “Relocating the Alliance: The U.S.-South Korea Military Alliance in Cultural Representations.”
Haipeug Zhou. “Our Expression of the Life that is Within Us: Epistolary Practice of American Women in Republican China.”
THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (7)
Charity Fox. “Manifest Mercenaries: Mercenary Narratives In American Popular Culture, 1850-1990.”
Sandra Heard. “The ‘Bad’ Black Consumer: A Study of African-American Consumer Culture in Washington, D.C., 1910s-1930s.”
Jeremy Hill. “Out of the Barn and into a Home: Country Music’s Cultural Journey from Rustic to Suburban, 1943-1974.”
Clara Lewis. “Tough on Hate? Addressing Hate Crime in a Post- Difference Society.”
Lars Lierow. “Gaps, Flows, and Networks: Social Space and the Cultural Work of Communication Theory in Social Science, Sci- Fi, and Political Movements, 1937-1980.”
Joan Fragaszy Troyano. “Visualizing a Nation: Photographs, European Immigration, and American Identity, 1880-1980.”
Amber Wiley. “Concrete Solutions: Architecture of Public High Schools during the ‘Urban Crisis’”
HARVARD UNIVERSITY (2)
Meghan Healy. “A World of Their Own”: African Women’s Schooling and the Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa, 1869 to Recent Times.”
Amber Moulton. “Marriage Extraordinary: Interracial Marriage and the Politics of Family in Antebellum Massachusetts.”
INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON (6)
Laila Amine. “Algerian Paris: Place, Identity, and the War.”
James Berkey. “Imperial Correspondence: Soldiers, Writing, and the Imperial Quotidian during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.”
Tanisha Ford. “Soul Generation: Radical Fashion, Beauty, and the Transnational Black Liberation Movement, 1954-1980.”
Anne Loechle. “Ye Intruders Beware: Fantastical Pirates in the Golden Age of Illustration.”
Don Maxwell. “Unguarded Border: The Movement of People and Ideas between the United States and Canada during the Vietnam War Era.”
Nancy Palm. “Thomas Cole’s Indian Landscapes, Racial Politics, and the National Landscape.”
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (7)
Miabi Chatteri. “The Hierarchies of Help: South Asian Service Workers in New York City”
Sybil Cooksey. “being black: a meditation on the meaning of invisibility, the right to obscurity, and the fugitive quality of art in post-negrophilic America.”
Andrew Ryan Cornell. “For a World without Oppressors’: U.S. Anarchism from the Palmer Raids to the Sixties.”
Miles Parks Grier. “Reading Black Characters: Staging Literacy, 1604-1855.”
Kerwin Kaye. “Drug Courts and the Treatment of Addiction: Therapeutic Jurisprudence as Neoliberal Governance.”
Chinua Thelwell. “‘Nothing Now Goes Down but Burnt Cork’: Blackface Minstrelsy and Ethnic Impersonation in South Africa, 1862-1968.”
Manu Vimalassery. “Skew Tracks: Racial Capitalism and the First Transcontinental Railroad.”
PENN STATE HARRISBURG (1)
Trevor Blank. “Posthum(or)ous: The Folk Response to Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age.”
PURDUE UNIVERSITY (3)
Jay Hopler. “Designated Hitters: The Contract Killer in Twentieth-Century American Fiction”
Karen N. Salt. “The Haitian Question.”
Courtney L. Thompson. “Capturing Democracy: Black Women Activists & the Struggle for Equal Rights, 1920s-1970s.”
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO (4)
Long Thanh Bui. “Suspended Futures: The Vietnamization of South Vietnamese History and Memory.”
Maria Teresa Ceseña. “Encased Encounters: Remapping Boundaries of U.S. and Mexican Indigeneity.”
Rebecca J. Kinney. “The Mechanics of Race: The Discursive Production of Detroit’s Landscape of Difference.”
Tomoko Tsuchiya. “Cold War Love: Producing American Liberalism in Interracial Marriages between American Soldiers and Japanese Women.”
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I AT MANOA (2)
Bernadette Cheryl Beredo. “Import of the Archive: A History of Colonial Bureaucracy in the Philippines, 1898-1921.”
Bich Ngoc Do. “Re-imagining Vietnam for America: Vietnam Veterans and the Reconstruction of U.S.-Vietnam’s Postwar Relations, 1988-2008.”
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (5)
Betsy Loyd Harvey. “Same Place Next Summer: Permanent Chautauquas and the Performance of Middle-Class Identity.”
Sharon Lake. “The Accidental Feminist: Iowa’s Breastfeeding Firefighter and the National Struggle for Workplace Equity.”
Danielle Rich. “Global Fandom: The Circulation of Japanese Popular Culture in the U.S.”
Karen Smith. “Framing Quilts/Framing Culture: Women’s Work and the Politics of Display.”
Mark Warburton. “‘For the Purposes of Example and Justice:’ Native American Incarceration in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1803-1849.”
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS (11)
Ruben Afagla. “Reading Cook-Lynn: Anti-Colonialism, Cultural Resistance, and Native Empowerment.”
Rebecca Barrett-Fox. “‘Pray Not for this People for Their Good’: Westboro Baptist Church, the Religious right, and American Nationalism.”
Lindsey Feitz. “Enlisting Feminism: Avon’s Global and the Transnational Marketing of Femininity.”
Jaime Gassmann. “Patrolling the Homefront: The Emotional Labor of Army Wives Volunteering in Family Readiness Groups.”
Jeonguk Kim. “Boxing the Boundaries: Prize Fighting, Masculinities, and Shifting Social and Cultural Boundaries, 1882-1913.”
Daniel Kerr. “Sheepdogs and Barbed Wire: an Environmental History of Grazing on the High Plains.”
Elizabeth Miller. “Moving to the Head of the River: the Early Years of the US Battered Women’s Movement.”
Michael Sweeney. “Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots: an Inquiry into American Genealogy Discourse.”
Thomas Thirlkel. “Forgotten Children: African American Children and the Child Welfare Reform in St Louis 1890-1930.”
Doretha Williams. “Kansas Grows the Best Wheat and the Best Race Women: Black Women’s Club Movement in Kansas 1900-1930.”
Elizabeth Yeager. “Understanding ‘It:‘Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene.”
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK (9)
Ruth Orstein Bergman. “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Goes Upscale: Redevelopment as Neighborhood Cleansing.”
Robert Keith Chester. “World War II and U.S. Cinema: Race, Nation, and Remembrance in Postwar Film, 1945-1978.”
Robert Lyle Hernandez. “Archive/Body/Archival Space: Queer Remains of the Chicano Art Movement, Los Angeles, 1969- 2009.”
Henrike Lehnguth. “Into the Dark Chamber of Terror: “The War on Terror” in Visual Culture”
Justin Thomas Maher. “The Capital of Diversity: Difference, Development, and Placemaking in Washington, D.C.”
Christine Marie Muller. “The World is Old and New Again: Cultural Trauma and September 11, 2001.”
Manon Sian Parry. “Broadcasting Birth Control: Family Planning and Mass Media, 1914-1984.”
Manouchka Poinson. “Creating Spaces of Home: Haitian Women’s Journey of Migration, ‘Lakay!’”
Amelia Selene Wong. “Museums, Social Media, and the Fog of Community.”
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST (3)
Catherine Adams. “Africanizing the Territory: the History, Memory, and Contemporary Imagination of Black Frontier Settlements in the Oklahoma Territory.”
Jonathan Fenderson. “‘Journey Toward a Black Aesthetic’: Hoyt Fuller, the Black Arts Movement and the Black Intellectual Community.”
Jacqueline M. Jones. “Where I Want to Be: African American Women’s Novels and the Journey toward Selfhood during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.”
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (12)
Laura Bymson. “The Company that Taught the World to Sing: Coca-Cola, Globalization, and the Cultural Politics of Branding in the Twentieth Century.”
Jason Chang. “Liberal Imperialism: The Rise and Fall of Liberal Internationalism in US China Relations and the Origins of the Cold War, 1898-1945.”
Brian Chung. “Exceptional Visions: Chineseness, Citizenship and the Architectures of Community in Silicon Valley.”
Tyler Cornelius. “A River Imaginary: Nature and Narrative in the Columbia River Gorge”
Stephanie Mariko Finn, “Aspirational Eating: Class Anxiety and the Rise of Food in Popular Culture.”
Charles Gentry. “The Othello Effect: The Performance of Black Masculinity in Mid-Century Cinema.”
Peter Gluck. “The Narratives of Interfaith Parents Raising Their Children With Jewish Identities: An Emerging Discourse.”
Sarah Gould. “Toys Make a Nation: A History of Ethnic Toys in America.”
Kelly Sisson Lessens. “Master of Millions: King Com in American Culture.”
Afia Ofori-Mensa. “Beauty, Bodies, and Boundaries: Pageants, Race, and U.S. National Identity.”
Wilson Valentin. “Bodega Surrealism: The Emergence ofLatin@ Artivists in New York City 1976-Present.”
Luis Vazquez. “Go and Make Disciples: Evangelization, Conversion Narratives and Salvation in Puerto Rican Protestant Evangelical Salsa Music.”
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (8)
Laura Sachiko Fugikawa. “Domestic Containment: Japanese Americans, Native Americans and the Cultural Politics of Relocation.”
Perla Minerva Guerrero. “Impacting Arkansas: Vietnamese and Cuban Refugees and Latina/o Immigrants, 1975-2005.”
Todd Sano Urbano Honma. “Cartographies of Skin: Asian American Adornment and the Aesthetics of Race.”
Jeb A. Middlebrook. “Challenging the White Supremacist System: Antiracist Organizing and Multiracial Alliance in the United States.”
Christina Grant Nieva. “This is My Country: The Use of Blackness in Discourses of Racial Nativism Towards Latino Immigrants.”
Tanachai Mark Padoongpatt. “Thais That Bind: U.S. Empire, Food, and Community in Los Angeles, 1945-2008.”
Abigail Rosas. “On the Move and in the Moment: Community Formation, Identity, and Opportunity in South Central Los Angeles, 1945-2008.”
Terrion L. Williamson. “Marks of the Fetish: Twenty-First Century (Mis)Performances of the Black Female Body.”
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN (6)
David Bates. “Scogan’s Choice: Vachel Lindsay’s Short Fiction, Poetry, and Prose”
Benjamin Lisle. “You’ve got to Have Tangibles to Sell Intangibles’: Ideologies of the Modern American Stadium, 1948- 1982.”
Robin O’Sullivan. “Compost and Consumption: Organic Farming, Food, and Fashion in American Culture.”
Audrey Russek. “Culinary Citizenship in American Restaurants, 1919-1964.”
Anna Thompson Hajdik. “Constructing and Consuming Rural Life in Modern America.”
Tracy Wuster. “‘The Most Popular Humorist who ever Lived’: Mark Twain and the Transformation of American Culture.”
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY (4)
Michelle Jack. “inca sənqsilxʷ (I Am All My Relations).”
Ung-Kyoung Kwak. “Philip Ahn, the Little Big Man: Seeing in Yellow.”
Regina McMenomy. “Game on Girl: Identity and Representation in Digital RPG’s.”
Xuan Nguyen. “Vietnamese American Identites: How Race, Gender, and Class are Reflected in the Cultural, Language and Technological Barriers.”
YALE UNIVERSITY (3)
Marie Martine Alix Jean. “Guardians of Order: Police and Society in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1907-1930.”
Leah Victoria Khaghani. “One World or None”: Transnational Struggles against Imperialism in the American Century.”
Julia Erin Wood. “Freedom is Indivisible: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Cold War Politics, and International Liberation Movements.”