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, 2006 and June 30, 2007. The survey was sent to forty-two universities and/or departments. Twenty-six were American Studies programs of which twenty-three replied. Eight were American Ethnic Studies programs of which two replied. Eight were Women’s Studies programs of which four replied.
The following programs had no completed dissertations to report: University of Utah; University of Washington (Women’s Studies).
The following programs did not respond: Michigan State University; New York University; St. Louis University; UC Berkeley (Ethnic Studies); UC Berkeley (Afro-American Studies); UC Davis (Native American Studies); Harvard University (Afro-American Studies); University of Massachusetts (Afro-American Studies); Temple University (Afro-American Studies); Clark University (Women’s Studies); UC Los Angeles (Women’s Studies); University of Minnesota (Women’s Studies); Ohio State University (Women’s Studies).
A total of 103 dissertations were reported. Of these, eighty-eight were in American Studies, seven were in Ethnic or African-American Studies, eight were in Women’s Studies, and one was independently reported.
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 1986-2006 and past surveys are available from the online ASA Archive at http://www.theasa.net (click on resources).
*Indicates independently submitted, non-American Studies department. Some independent, non-American Studies submissions are also included under American Studies or Ethnic Studies Program headings and are not counted toward the total of dissertations reported for that department.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY (5)
Kavita Ramdya, “Bollywood Weddings: Accruing Symbolic Ethnic Capital in Second-Generation Indian-American Hindu Matrimonials.” Ella Howard, “Skid Row: Homelessness on the Bowery in the Twentieth Century.” Aaron Lecklider, “Brainpower: Intelligence in American Culture from Einstein to the Egghead.” Abigail Carroll, “‘Colonial Custard’ and ‘Pilgrim Soup’: Culinary Nationalism and the Colonial Revival.” Katherine Stebbins-McCaffrey, “Reading Glasses: American Spectacles in the Age of Franklin.”
BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY (6)
Elliot C. Adams, “American Feminist Manifestos and the Rhetoric of Whiteness.” Jeanine A. Pfahlert, “The Sociological Hitch.” Jamie Stuart, “The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage.” Lisa Doris Alexander, “Race on First, Class on Second, Gender on Third, and Sexuality Up To Bat: Intersectionality and Power in Major League Baseball, 1995-2005.” Lori S. Liggett, “Mothers, Militants, Martyrs & ‘M’M! M’M! Good!’: Taming the New Woman: Campbell Soup Advertising in Good Housekeeping, 1905-1920.” Bradley S. Klypchak, “Performed Identities: Heavy Metal Musicians Between 1984 and 1991.”
BROWN UNIVERSITY (1)
Elizabeth Belanger, “Women Emergent: Gender, Geography and Activism in St. Louis and Chicago, 1840-1914.”
*UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (1)
Jeff Smith, “Imagining Presidents: Fictions of American Leadership in Popular Literature, Film, Drama, and Electronic Media.”
CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY (4)
Michele Ladd, “Sometimes a Cigar…Literature and the American Experience of Modernity.” Jesse Lerner, “The Maya in the Modernist Imagination, 1839-1999.” Glenn Mitoma, “Globalizing Rights: Defining, Declaring, and Denying Human Rights in the Age of American Hegemony, 1939-1955.” Lisa Porter, “Transnational Spaces: U.S. Expatriates Recreating Home in Costa Rica.”
EMORY UNIVERSITY (7)
Ellen Spears, “Toxic Knowledge: A Social History of Environmental Health in the New South’s Anniston, Alabama, 1872-Present.” Eddy Von Mueller, “The Acme Aesthetic: Violence, Visual Culture and the Impact of Animation on Contemporary Cinema.” Stuart Patterson, “A New Pattern of Life: The Public Past and Present of Two New Deal Communities.” Gordon Jones, “Gut History: Civil War Re-enacting and the Making of an American Past.” Pellom McDaniels III, “The Angle of Ascent: Race, Class, Sport and Representations of African-American Masculinity.” Margaret McGehee, “On Margaret Mitchell’s Grave: Women Writers Imagining Atlanta, 1941-2006.” Robert Patterson, “Many Are Invited, But Few Are Chosen: Civil Rights, Historical Memory, and the Figure of the ‘Chosen’ One in the African-American Literary Tradition, 1971-1989.”
EMORY UNIVERSITY (Women’s Studies) (2)
Sheila O’Connor-Ambrose, “‘That I Will Find My Best Life’: The Role of Marriage in the Quest for the Dedicated Life in the Works of Gail Godwin.” Dana Beth McGraw, “‘The Living of Dying’: An Epistolary Grief Memoir.”
GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (2)
Cameron Logan, “The Constituent Landscape: History, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C., 1950-1990.” Margaret Whitehead, “The Making of the Art Museum’s Photography Canon: Beaumont Newhall and the Rejection of 1930s Modernity in New York.”
HARVARD UNIVERSITY (6)
Kevin Matthew Burke, “The Nervous American.” Elizabeth Blair Clark, “The Inward Fire: A History of Cruelty in Marriage in the Northeastern United States, 1800-1860.” Suleiman Yusuf Osman, “The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Post-industrialization, and Race in South Brooklyn, 1950-1980.” Salamishah Margaret Tillet, “Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the American Cultural Imagination.” Diana Irene Williams, “‘They Call It Marriage’: The Inter-racial Louisiana Family and the Making of American Legitimacy.” Dagmawi Woubshet, “Figurations of Catastrophe: The Poetics and Politics of AIDS Loss.”
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I - MANOA (1)
Robert Vaughan, “The Workers’ Paradise: Edward Bellamy and the ‘Labor Question,‘1888-1898.”
INDIANA UNIVERSITY (4)
Rebecca Mercedes Gordon, “Between Thought and Feeling: Affect, Audience, and Critical Film History.” Lauren Keash Lessing, “Presiding Divinities: Ideal Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century American Domestic Interiors.” Sherra Lee Schick, “‘Oprah Winfrey, Media and Culture.” Bernard von Bothmer, “Blaming ‘The Sixties’: The Political Use of an Era, 1980-2004.”
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (1)
Kristin Solli, “North of Nashville: Country Music, National Identity, and Class in Norway.”
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (Women’s Studies) (3)
Jessica Share, “Getting Away From Gay: The Construction of Lesbian and Gay Anti-Community at the Dinah Shore and White Parties in Palm Springs, CA.” Jill Moffett, “Ribbons and Revolution: Breast Cancer Activists and Strategic Pragmatism.” Sreevidya Kalaramadam, “Transforming the State from Within: Women Changing Local Governance in India.”
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS (4)
Sheryl Adelman-Kimmel, “The Changing of the Guard: A Case Study of Maynard I. Wishner as an American Jewish Communal Leader.” Jennifer Heller, “The Search for Something More: Evangelical Women, Middle-Class Marriage, and the ‘Problem That Has No Name’ in Popular Advice Books of the 1970s.” Andrea Pacor, “Natural Life, Manufactured Feelings: National Identity, Bio-Political Power and the Japanese-American Internment.” Norton Wheeler, “Transnationalism in the Modernization of Post-Mao China: A Study in American Cultural Transfer.”
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK (6)
Laura Suzanne Gordon, “Field Notes from the Light: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Meaning and Significance of ‘Near-Death Experiences.’” Michael Hummel, “Three American Artists at Mid-life: Negotiating the Space Between Professional and Amateur Status.” Patricia Hunt, “A Story Not To Be Told: The Depiction of Slavery in American Novels, 1875-2000.” Kelly Anne Quinn, “Making Modern Homes: A History of Langston Terrace Dwellings, A New Deal Housing Program in Washington, D.C.” Jesse J. Scott, “Transgressing the Law: Reparations and African-American Cultural Narratives.” Barbara L. Shaw, “(Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic: Violence, Affect, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Migration Literature.”
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK (Women’s Studies) (3)
Luh Ayu Saraswati, “The Maze of Gaze: Contextualizing the Color of Beauty in Transnational Indonesia.” Sarah Tillery, “Performing Fatness and Culture Negotiations of Body Size.” Na Young Lee, “Negotiating Boundaries: The Korean Woman’s Movement Against Prostitution in U.S. Camptowns.”
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (3)
Tracie Rubeck, “Racial Harmony Through Clenched Teeth: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement in Newsweek and the CBS Evening News, 1990-1999.” Shawn Kimmel, “Freedom’s Panopticon: The Constitution of the Liberal Police State in the Early Republic’s Theater of Civil Society.” Anne Kustritz, “Productive (Cyber) Public Space: Slash Fan Fiction’s Multiple Imaginary.”
UNIVERISTY OF MINNESOTA (8)
Joshua E. Barkan, “A Genealogy of the Corporation: Articulating Sovereign Power and Capitalism.” Wendy D. Geniusz, “Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Knowledge: A Biskaabiiyang Approach.” Robin L. Hemenway, “The Efforts of Their True Friends: African-Americans and Child Welfare in New York, 1836-1930.” Deirdre J. Murphy, “The Look of a Citizen: Representations of Immigration in Gilded Age Painting and Popular Press Illustration.” Miglena S. Todorova, “Race Travels: Whiteness and Modernity Across National Borders.” Amy M. Tyson, “Living History: Producing Historical Narratives in the Service Economy.” Chia Y. Vang, ” Reconstructing Community in Diaspora: Narratives of Hmong American/Refugee Resistance and Human Agency.” John Kinder, “Encountering Injury: The Wounded Soldier in the American Imagination, 1917-1945.”
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (5)
Cristina Duran, “Carnicer�as, Panader�as y Peluquer�as: Re-Mexicanizing the Urban Landscapes of a Southwest City.” Todd Hanson, “Quantum Entanglements: Collaboration and Communication in a Scientific Community of Practice.” Katherine Lehman, “Whose Girl?: Representations of Single Women’s Work and Sexuality in U.S. Television and Film, 1960-1980.” Michele Potter, “Searching for an Angle of Repose: Environmental Narratives of Questa, NM and the Molycorp Mine.” Elizabeth Swift, “Class, Taste and Empire in Reagan’s America.”
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK - BUFFALO (2)
Kevin White, “Haudenosaunee Worldview Through Iroquoian Cosmologies: The Published Narratives in Historical Context.” Christine Zinni, “Interweaving: Memory Through Machines.”
PURDUE UNIVERSITY (6)
Laura L. Beadling, “The Aesthetics of Translating Cultural Trauma: Traumatized Communities in Twentieth-Century Fiction and Film.” Lee Bebout, “The Presence of the Past: The Mythohistorical in the Chicano/a Movement and Post-Movement Era.” Vanessa Hall, “Put Yourself in My Shoes: A Cultural Geography of Raymond Carver’s America.” Julie Lester, “The Agrarian Myth as Narrative in Agricultural Policymaking.” Paul Reich, “Race-ing West: Propaganda and Pedagogy in African-American Fiction, Poetry, and Autobiography.” Zhen Zou, “‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’: American Writers on the Opium Issue in China, 1840-1860.”
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO (Ethnic Studies) (2)
Cecilia M. Rivas, “Imaginaries of Transnationalism: Media and Cultures of Consumption in El Salvador.” Faye Christine Caronan, “Making History from U.S. Colonial Amnesia: Filipino-American and U.S. Puerto Rican Poetic Genealogies.”
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (2)
Daniel Wei HoSang, “Genteel Apartheid: Ballot Initiatives and Race-Making in the Postwar.” Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “The Contours of the Sonic Color-Line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening.”
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS - AUSTIN (6)
Philip Tiemeyer, “Manhood Up in the Air: Gender, Sexuality, Corporate Structure, and the Law in Twentieth Century America.” Gregory Carter, “America’s New Racial Heroes: Mixed Race Americans and Ideas of Novelty, Progress, and Utopia.” Matthew Hedstrom, “Seeking a Spiritual Center: Mass-Market Books and Liberal Religion in America, 1921-1948.” Joel Silverman, “Pursuing Celebrity, Ensuing Masculinity: Morris Ernst, Obscenity, and the Search for Recognition.” Mike O’Connor, “Democratic Capitalism in the United States.” Nancy Semin, “An Examination of Linda Lovelace and Her Influence on Feminist Thought and the Pornographic Industry in America.”
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY (4)
Sarah Hentges, “Radical Oppositional Cultures and Consciousness: Countering/Critiquing Hegemony, Forging/Fashinging Connections, and Inspiring/Sustaining Social Movement.” Charles Anthony Adams, “Machismo and Geographies of Hope.” Cheris Brewer, “Representation, Resettlement, and Gender.” Eric Carter, “Comparative Racial Formations: Chinese Exclusion, Assimilating Native Americans, and Racial Ideology in the United States.”
COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY (4)
Seth Bruggeman, “Birthing Washington: Objects, Memory, and the Creation of a National Monument.” Robert Nelson, “Society of Souls: Friendship in the Antebellum Reform.” Susan Bauer, “The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Scandal and the Rise of Public Confession.” Jennifer Blanchard, “More of Less than Kind: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.”
YALE UNIVERSITY (African American/American Studies) (5)
Radiclani Clytus, “Envisioning Slavery: American Abolitionism and the Primacy of the Visual.” Joshua Guild, “You Can’t Go Home Again: Migration, Citizenship, and Black Community in Postwar New York and London.” Brennan Maier, “‘Tell It Like It Is Baby’: The Intersection of Culture and Democracy in Ralph Ellison.” Sonya Demetria Winton, “All Things Being Equal: The Politics of Environmental (In)Justice.” Laurie Avant Woodard, “Performing Artists of the Harlem Renaissance: Resistance, Identity, and Meaning in the Life and Work of Fredi Washington from 1920 to 1950.”