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 Ph.D. 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, 2007 and June 30, 2008.  The survey was sent to forty universities and/or departments.  Twenty-five were American Studies programs, seven were American Ethnic Studies programs, and eight were Women’s Studies programs. 

The following programs either did not respond or had no completed dissertations to report: Bowling Green University; Claremont Graduate University; Michigan State University; New York University; St. Louis University; University of Utah; UC Berkeley (Ethnic Studies); UC Berkeley (Afro-American Studies); UC Davis (Native American Studies); UC San Diego (Ethnic); Harvard University (Afro-American Studies); University of Massachusetts (Afro-American Studies); Temple University (Afro-American Studies); Yale University (African-American Studies); Clark University (Women’s Studies); Emory University (Women’s Studies) UC Los Angeles (Women’s Studies); University of Maryland (Women’s Studies); University of Minnesota (Women’s Studies); Ohio State University (Women’s Studies).

A total of 75 dissertations were reported.  Of these, seventy-four were in American Studies, and only one was in Women’s Studies.

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 1986-2008 and past surveys are available from the online ASA Archive at http://www.theasa.net (click on resources). 

BOSTON UNIVERSITY (5)

Desiree Garcia, “‘There’s No Place Like Home’: Immigrants, Race Cinema, and the Hollywood Musical, 1920-1950.” Stephen Hodin, “‘Inscrutable Contrivances’ and ‘Labour-Saving Devices’: Mechanization, Literature and Culture in Antebellum America.” Rebekah Burgess, “Collecting Agency: Revising the Camera’s Gaze in Early Twentieth-Century Lowell, Massachusetts.” Emily Murphy, “‘To Keep Our Trading For Our Livelihood’: The Derby Family of Salem, Massachusetts, and Their Rise to Power in the British Atlantic World.” Hannah Carlson, “Pockets, Possessions, and the Ordering of Things.”

BROWN UNIVERSITY (9)

Marcia Chatelain, “‘The Most Interesting Girl of this Country is the Colored Girl’: Girls and Racial Uplift in Great Migration Chicago.” Matthew Francis Delmont, “American Bandstand and School Segregation in Postwar Philadelphia.”  Caroline Baer Frank, China as Object and Imaginary in the Making of an American Nation, 1680-1780.”  James Vernando Gatewood, “City Lights Books: The History of a Community.” Karen Midori Inouye, “Changing History : Competing Notions of Japanese American Experience, 1942-2006.”  Stephanie Frances Larrieux, “Racing the Future: Hollywood Science Fiction Film Narratives of Race.”  Sarah Ilene Petrides, “The Postregional Turn in Contemporary American Literature.” Matthew Quest, “C.L.R. James, Direct Democracy, and National Liberation.” Susanna J. Rankin-Bohme, DBCP in the United States and Central America: Body, Nation and Transnationalism in the History of a Toxic Product.” 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO (6)

Natchee Blu Bard. “Inhabiting Indianness: US Colonialism and Indigenous Geographies.” Ofelia Otiz Cuevas. “Mortifications of the Flesh: Racial Discipline in a Time of Crisis.” Thuy Vo Dang. “Anticommunism as Cultural Praxis: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in the Vietnamese American Community.” Denise Khor. “Asian Americans at the Movies: Race, Labor, and Migration in the Transpacific West, 1900-1945.” Jesse Mills. “Racing to Refuge: Ethnicity, Gendered Violence, and Somali Youth in San Diego.” Theofanis Costas Dino Verinakis. “Barbaric Sovereignty: States of Emergency and Their Colonial Legacies.”

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (1)

Jeff Smith, “Imagining Presidents: Fictions of American Leadership in Popular Literature, Film, Drama, and Electronic Media.”

EMORY UNIVERSITY (2)

Stacy Boyd, “Black Men Worshipping: Intersecting Anxieties of Race, Gender, and Christian Embodiment.”  Brent Campney, “And this is Free Kansas: Racist Violence, Black and White Resistance, Geographical Particularity and the ‘Free State’ Narrative in Kansas, 1865 to 1914.”

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (5)

Laurel A. Clark, “Taming the Territory: Women and Gender on the Florida Frontier.”  Bernard Domczuk, “Unionville: Race, Time, Place and Memory in Talbot County, Maryland, 1634-1892.” Laura Cook Kenna, “Dangerous Men, Dangerous Media: Constructing Ethnicity, Race, and Media’s Impact Through the Gangster Image, 1959-2007.”  Shelly Ann McKenzie, “Mass Movements: A Cultural History of Physical Fitness and Exercise, 1953-89.”  Stephanie Ricker Schulte, “State Technology to State of Being: The Making of the Internet in Global Popular Culture, 1989-2000.”

HARVARD UNIVERSITY (4)

Erin Mary Royston Battat, “‘Aint Got No Home’: Race and American Narratives in the Depression Era.”  Peter Becker, “The Perpetrator’s Past: Consciousness and Conscience in the Historical Novel.”  Talaya Adrienne Delaney, “Performing History: History and Politics in the Works of Suzan Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, Naomi Wallace, and Charles Mee.”  Scott M. Gelber, “Academic Populism: The People’s Revolt and Public Higher Education, 1880-1905.” 

INDIANA UNIVERSITY (4)

Jonathan Cavallero, “Motion Pictures: The Films of Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino.”  Ursula McTaggart, “Radicalism in America’s ‘Industrial Jungle’: Primitive and Industrial Metaphors in Activist’s Texts.”  Chad Hunter, “Transports of Progress: The Arabian American Oil Company and American Modernization in Saudi Arabia, 1945-1973.”  Kimberly Trager-Bohley, “Beyond Domestic Borders and Back: An American Transnational Bookseller in Southeast Asia.”

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (4)

Ulrich Adelt, “Black, White and Blue: Racial Politics of Blues Music in the 1960s.”  Elise LoBue, “Kazakhstan’s Soviet Past, Globalized Present, and “Emancipated Women”: Presenting a Case for a New Gender and Development Domain.”  Eleanor McConnell, .  Kirsten Bland Walters, .

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS (2)

Cheryl Ragar, “Plunging into the Very Depths of the Souls of our People: The Life and Art of Aaron Douglas.”  Andrea Weis, “DasZweite Gesicht der Niederlage: Transnational Private Memoires of German Prisoners of War in U.S. Captivity.”

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK (6)

Isabel Cserno, “Race and Mass Consumption in Consumer Culture: National Trademark Advertising Campaigns in the United States and Germany, 1890-1933.”  Heidi Nasstrom Evans, “Live in the Country with Faith: Jane and Ralph Whitehead, the Simple Life, and Arts and Crafts in the United States, England, and on the Continent, 1870-1930.”  Paula Nicole King, “Sombreros and Motorcycles: Place Studies on Tourism and Identity in Modern South Carolina.” Michael T. Lucas, “Keepers, Patrons, and Merchant Politicians: History, Archaeology, and the Material Culture of Colonial Chesapeake.”  Alice S. Sandosharaj, “Ghetto Proclivities.”  Jennifer Nolan Stinson, “Reading Beyond the Page: Contextualizing Reading within the Lives of Avid Readers.”

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (7)

Robert Hill, “‘As a man I exist; as a woman—I Live’: Heterosexual Transvestism and the Contours of Gender and Sexuality in Postwar America.” David Julyk, “The Trouble with Machines is People.  The Computer as Icon in Post-war America: 1946-1970.” Kathy Jurado, “Alienated citizens: ‘Hispanophobia’ and the Mexican Im/migrant Body.”  Justine Pas, “Finding Home in Babel: Transnationalism, Translation, and Languages of Identity.” Lorgia Garcia Pena, “Dominicanidad in Contra (Diction): Marginality, Migration and the Narration of a Dominican National Identity.” Anastasia Pratt, “Home: A Twentieth-Century American Construction.” Ellen Scott, “Race and the Struggle for Cinematic Meaning: Film Production, Censorship, and African American Reception, 1940-1960.” 

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA (3)

Matt Becker, “The Edge of Darkness: Youth Culture Since the 1960s.”  Jill Doerfler, “Fictions and Fractions: Reconciling Citizenship Regulations with Cultural Values among the White Earth Anishinaabeg.”  David Gray, “Visualizing a Classless America: Motivational Campaigns in the Industrial Workplace, 1920-1955.”

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (5)

Wesley Chenault, “An Unspoken Past: Lesbian and Gay History in Atlanta, 1940-1970.” Jennifer Dickinson, Pocho Humor: Contemporary Chicano Humor and the Critique of American Culture.”  Felecia Caton Garcia, “Mulattos, Mutants, and Futureheroes: Mixed Race Identity in Contemporary Narrative.”  Peggy Gerow, “To Do Much with Very Little: New Mexico’s Farm Women and the Cooperative Extension Service, 1914-1929.”  Lena McQuade, “Troubling Reproduction: Sexuality, Race and Colonialism in New Mexico, 1919-1945.”

PURDUE UNIVERSITY (1)

Stephany R. Spaulding, “The Crisis of White Imagination: Towards the Literary Abolition of Whiteness.”

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (2)

Daniel HoSang, “Racial Propositions: Genteel Apartheid in Postwar California.”  Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, “The Contours of the Sonic Color-Line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening.”

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS - AUSTIN (7)

Kimberly Ann Hamlin, “Beyond Adam’s Rib: How Darwinian Evolutionary Theory Redefined Gender and Influenced America Feminist Thought, 1870-1920.”  Angela Maxwell, “A Heritage of Inferiority: Public Criticism and the American South.” Soo-Young Lee, “God’s Chosen People: Protestant Narratives in Korean Americans and American National Identity.”  Allison Joyce Perlman, “Reforming the Wasteland: Television, Reform, and Social Movements, 1950-2004.” Amy Shoultz, “A Revolutionary Idea: Gilbert Stuart Paints Sarah Morton as the First Woman of Ideas in American Art.” Jessica Swigger, “History is Bunk” Historical Memories at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village.” Amy Nathan Wright, “Civil Rights ‘Unfinished Business’: Poverty, Race, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign.” 

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON (Women’s Studies) (3)

Brianna Blaser, “More than Just Lab Partners: Women Scientists and Engineers Married to and Partnered with Other Scientists and Engineers.” Kristy Leissle, “Cocoa and Cash, Culture and Chocolate: A Feminist Analysis of “Free” and “Fair” Trade in Ghana and Britain.”  Michelle McGowan, “Stem Cells, Genetic Selection, and Strong Embryos: A Feminist Analysis of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis.”

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY (1)

Lori Saffin, “Bodies that (Don’t) Matter: Systems of Gender Regulation and Institutions of Violence against Transgender Persons: A Queer/Critical Race Feminist Critique.”

COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY (1)

Caroline Carpenter Nichols, “Celebrity and the National Body: Encounters with the Exotic in Late Nineteenth-Century America.”

YALE UNIVERSITY (African American/American Studies) (6)

Lauren J. Bierbaum, “Taking the Plunge!: Negotiating Cultural Immersion, Social Mobility, and Inter-Class Collision in an Elite Summer School Program.”  Brenda Carter, “Dreams of Recognition, Fantasies of Revenge: Work and Workers in Late Twentieth Century American Mass Culture.”  Paul Grant-Costa, “The Last Indian War in New England: The Mohegan Tribe of Indians vs. the Governour Company of Connecticut, 1703-1774.” Mark Krasovic, “The Struggle for Newark: Plotting Urban Crisis in the Great Society.”  Shana Redmond, “Anthem: Music and Politics in Diaspora, 1920-1970s.”  Annemarie Strassel, “Redressing Women: Feminism in Fashion and the Creation of American Style, 1930-1960.”