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, 2009 and June 30, 2010. 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, The State University of New York; Bowling Green State University; Brown University; California State University, Sacramento; California State University, Los Angeles; California State University, Fullerton; University of California, Davis; University of California, Berkeley; City University of New York; Columbia University; DePaul University; Emory University; Florida State University; Georgetown University; George Washington University; Harvard University; Indiana University; Kennesaw State University; Kent State; University of Kansas; Lehigh University; Montana State University; University of Massachusetts, Boston; Michigan State; University of Michigan, Flint; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Minnesota; Northeastern State University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of New Mexico; Ohio State University; Oklahoma State University; Pepperdine University; Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg; Purdue University; University of South Florida; University of Southern Maine; Trinity College; Temple University; University of Texas at Austin; Utah State University; University of Utah; University of Virginia; University of Wyoming; Washington University in St. Louis; Washington State University; Yale University.
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 1986-2009 and past surveys are available from the online ASA Archive at http://www.theasa.net (click on resources).
BOSTON UNIVERSITY (4)
Hope Cushing. “The Life and Work of Arthur Ashel Shurcliff, Landscape Architect 1870-1957.”
Carney Maley. “Flying the ‘Un-Friendly Skies’ : American Flight Attendants in the 1970s-90s.”
Veronica Savory McComb. “The Bonds of Faith: Religion and Community among Nigerian Immigrants to the U.S., 1965-present.”
Timothy Orwig. “‘Material Things Worth While’ : Joseph Everett Chandler, The Colonial Revival, and the Preservation Movement.”
CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY (3)
Kristine Gunnell. “Without Regard for Race or Creed: The Daughters of Charity and the Development of Social Welfare in Los Angeles, 1856-1927.”
Lisa Kohlmeier. “Intellectual Homes: Alice Jones, Edith Wharton, Alice Paul, and Olgivanna Lazovich Wright and the Search for Space.”
Barry Thornberg. “A New Left at California State College, Fullerton: A Case Study of the Radical New Left in a Conservative, State College Community During the 1960’s and Early 1970’s.”
COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY (4)
Ella Diaz. “Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: The Ongoing Politics of Space and Ethnic Identity.”
Sarah Grunder. “The Spectacle of Citizenship: Halftones, Print Media, and Constructing Americanness, 1880-1940.”
Hilary Marcus. “Between Fact and Fiction: Writing by American Women in a Transnational Context.”
John Miller. “Buck-Horned Snakes and Possum Women Non-White Cultural Folklore, Antebellum Southern Literature, and Interracial Cultural Exchange.”
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (6)
Andre Carrington. “Speculative Fiction and Media Fandom Through a Lens, Darkly.”
Laura Harris. “Experiments in Exile: C.L.R. James and Helio Oiticica in the United States.”
Andrea McArdle. “Jersey Justice and Discourses of Power: Consumer Rights, Good-Mother Citizenship, and the Cold War.”
Patrick McCreery. “Miami Vice: Anita Bryant, Gay Rights, and Child Protectionism.”
Michael Palm. “Phoning It In: Self-Service, Telecommunications and New Consumer Labor.”
Victor Viesca. “Eastside State of Mind: Race, Space and Chicana/o Youth Culture in post-Industrial Los Angeles.”
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO (3)
Michael Lujan Bevacqua. “Chamorros, Ghosts & Non-voting Delegates: GUAM! Where The Production of America’s Sovereignty Begins.”
Martha D. Escobar. “Neoliberal Captivity: Criminalization of Latina Migrants and the Construction of Irrecuperability.”
Traci Brynne Voyles. “Decolonizing Cartographies: Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Maps of Meaning in the Uranium Landscape.”
THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (2)
Kyle Riismandel. “Under Siege: The Discursive Production of Embattled Suburbs and Empowered Suburbanites in America, 1975-1992.â€
Kevin Strait. “‘A Tone Parallel’ : Jazz Music, Leftist Politics, and the Counter-Minstrel Narrative, 1930-1970.â€
INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON (8) [updated, 8/2012]
Brian Amsden. “Liberal Rhetorical Praxis and the Youth Rights Debates.”
Elizabeth Cafer du Plessis. “Meatless Days and Sleepless Nights: Food, Agricultural, and Environment in World War I America.”
Danille Christensen. “Constructing Value: Women, Scrapbooking, and the Framing of Daily Experience.”
Rhonda Dass-Wilen. “Native American Symbols in Tattooing.”
Seth Friedman. “The Truth is Out There: Cultural Paranoia, New Media Technologies, and the Contemporary Hollywood Misdirection Film.”
David Higgins. “The Inward Urge: Science Fiction After Colonialism.”
Robert Rubin. “Establish No Religion: Faith, Law, and Public Education in Mobile, Alabama, 1981-1987.”
Jasmine Trice. “Transnational Cinema, Transcultural Capital: Cinema Distribution and Exhibition in Metro-Manila, Philippines, 2006-2009.”
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (3)
Barb Shubinski. “DOCUMERICA’s America: Environmentalism, Documentary Photography and Landscape in the Environmental Protection Agency, 1971-1977.â€
Sharon Romeo. “Freedwomen in Pursuit of Liberty: St. Louis and Missouri in the Age of Emancipation.â€
Brian Hallstoos. “Windy City, Holy Land: Willa Saunders Jones and Black Sacred Music and Drama.â€
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (6)
Maria Cardenas. “Third Word Subjects: The Politics and Production of Central American-American Culture.”
Samuel Erman. “US Citizenship and Puerto Rico: Struggles around Status in the Imperial United States, 1898-1917.”
Sarah Howell. “Inventing the American Mosque: Early Muslims and their Institutions in Detroit, 1910-1980.”
Ryan Snyder. “Spectra of Singularity: Episodes of Improvisational Lyricism from Hip-Hop to Pragmatism.”
Shanesha Brooks Tatum. “Poetics with a Promise: Performance of Faith and Gender in Christian Hip-Hop.”
Matthew Whittmann. “Empire of Culture: U.S. Entertainers and the Making of the Pacific Circuit, 1850-1890.”
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII (2)
Paulette Feeney. “Aloha and Allegiance: Imagining America’s Paradise.”
Jeff Tripp. “Contentious Divide: The Cultural Politics of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 1997-2007.”
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND (13)
Lisa Gill. “From Homeboy to Icon: The Image of Malcolm X, 1965-1999.”
Patrick Ryan Grzanka. “White Guilt: Race, Gener, Sexuality, and Emergent Racism.”
Rebecca A. Krefting. “Working the Crowd: The Economy of Charged Humor.”
Erica K. Martin Seibert. “Hidden in Plain View: African-American Archaeology at Manassas National Battlefield Park.”
Johonna Rachelle McCants. “Re-visioning violence: How Black Youth Advance Critical Understandings of violence in Climates of Criminalization.”
Teresa Moyer. “Gracious but Careless: Race and Status in the History of Mount Clare.”
Claudia Rector. “Whose Story Is it Anyway?: Constructing the Stories and Pathology of Madness/Mental Illness in the Contemporary U.S.”
Dawn Marie Reynolds. “Beyond Scraps: Narrating Traumatic Health Experiences Through Scrapbooking.”
Tammy Sanders. “The Long Tradition: Black Women & Mothers in Popular Discourses.”
Jennifer Anne Stabler. “Historic Conservation Landscapes on Fort Hood, Texas: The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Cultural Landscape Change.”
Tyron Stewart. “What is a Black Man Without His Paranoia?”
Savneet Talwar. “Mary Coble: Performance Art and the Politics of an Archive.”
Kristen Arlene Williams. “Waterfronts for Work and Play: Mythscapes of Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Rhode Island.”
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST (2)
David Lucander. “‘It is a new kind of militancy’: March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946.”
Christopher Tinson. “The Fight for Freedom Must be Fought on All Fronts: Liberator Magazine and Black Radicalism, 1960-1971.”
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN (4)
Bates, David. “Scogan’s Choice: Vachel Lindsay’s Short Fiction, Poetry and Prose”
Hill, Victoria “Defining “Normal” in their own Image: Psychological Professionals, Middle-class Normativity, and the Postwar Popularization of Psychology”
Lisle, Ben. “You’ve got to Have Tangibles to Sell Intangibles’: Ideologies of the Moddern American Stadium, 1948-1982”
O’Sullivan, Robin. “Compost and Consumption: Organic Farming, Food, and Fashion in American Culture”
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (15)
Jungmiwha S. Bullock. “Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: Identity Formation in a Contemporary America.”
Wendy Cheng. “Episodes in the Life of a Place: Regional Racial Formation in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley.”
Michelle Denise Commander. “Flights of the Imagination: Black American Travelers Journey toward ‘Africa’ in Brazil and Ghana.”
Carolyn Marie Dunn. “Carrying the Fire Home: Space, Place and Citizenship in the Diaspora Narratives of Joy Harjo, Arigon Starr, and Gayle Ross.”
Araceli Esparza. “Activist Imaginings and Imagined Solidarities: Chicana Literature, Central America, and Political Violence, 1981-2005.”
Nicole Hodges Persley. “Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance.”
Todd Sano Urbano Honma. “Cartographies of Skin: Asian American Adornment and the Aesthetics of Race.”
Imani Kai Johnson. “Dark Matter in B-Boying Cyphers: Race and Global Connection in Hip Hop.”
Lata Murti. “With and Without the White Coat: The Racialization of Southern California’s Indian Physicians.”
Sionne Rameah Neely. “Sensing the Sonic and Mnemonic: Digging Through Grooves, Afro-Feelings and Black Markets in Ghana, 1966-Present.”
Phuong T. Nguyen. “The People of the Fall: Refugee Nationalism in Little Saigon, 1975-2005.”
Margaret Nicole Salazar. “Representational Conquest: Tourism, Display, and Public Memory in ‘America’s Finest City.’”
Anton Lowell Smith. “Stepping Out on Faith: Representing Spirituality in African American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement.”
Cam Nhung Vu. “Regarding Vietnam: Affects in Postwar Vietnamese and Vietnamese Diasporic Literature and Film.”
Karen Yonemoto. “Sacred Changes: Multiracial Alliances and Community Transformation among Evangelical Churches in the U.S.”