The following is a registry of completed doctoral dissertations in American Studies, American Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies programs as reported by U.S. 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, 2003 and June 30, 2004. The survey was sent to 43 universities. 27 were American Studies programs of which 21 replied. 8 were American Ethnic Studies programs of which 3 replied. 8 were Women’s Studies programs of which 3 replied.
The following programs had no completed dissertations to report: University of Southern California; Purdue University; University of Iowa (Women’s Studies); Emory University (Women’s Studies); Ohio State University (Women’s Studies).
The following programs did not respond: Claremont Graduate University; Emory University; Indiana University; St. Louis University; University of Utah; Yale University; UC Davis (Native American Studies); UC San Diego (Ethnic Studies); Harvard University (Afro-American Studies); Temple University (Afro-American Studies); Yale University (Afro-American Studies); Clark University (Women’s Studies); UC Los Angeles (Women’s Studies); University of Maryland (Women’s Studies); University of Minnesota (Women’s Studies); University of Washington (Women’s Studies).
A total of 94 dissertations were reported, including 5 independently submitted dissertations. Of the 89 dissertations reported by the departments, 80 were in American Studies, 9 were in Ethnic Studies, and 0 were 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. For abstracts of these and other dissertations completed this year by ASA members, please see the December 2004 American Quarterly. A complete alphabetical listing of American Studies Dissertation Abstracts from 1986-2004 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.
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA (1)
*Jodi I. Kelber-Kaye, “Straighten Up And Breed White: The Representation of Race and Sexuality in Films About Reproductive Technologies.” (Program in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies)
BOSTON UNIVERSITY (4)
Brian Carso, “Whom Can We Trust Now?: The Meaning of Treason in the united States, From the Revolution Through the Civil War.” Elizabeth Jacobson, “Boston’s Three Decker Menace: The Buildings The Builders, and the Dwellers, 1870-1930.” Bradley Alex Queen, “Conservatism and the Logic of American Consumer Democracy, 1938-1976.” Janine Skerry, “Silver at Harvard College from Its Founding to the Revolution.”
BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY (7)
David Heckman, “It’s a Small World After All: Smart Homes, Narrative, and the Technology of the Perfect Day.” Elizabeth Johnson, “African American Women’s Hair as Text.” Timothy Lake, “A Certain Democracy: The Political Philosophies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cornel West.” Kelly McLain, “The Lyching of Nicole Brown: An Examination of White Supremacist Patriarchy, Black Patriarchy, and Interracism in America.” D. Kirk Richardson, “A Sociological Examination of the Contemporary Self-Help Book.” Jeff Schwartz, “New Black Music: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Jazz, 1953-1965.” Margaret Weinberger, “How American Invented Thanksgiving: A Cultural History of an American Holiday.”
BROWN UNIVERSITY (3)
Eric Estuar Reyes, “The Politics of Globalization in Filipino American Culture.” Judith Rosenbaum, “Whose Bodies? Whose Selves? Women’s Bodies and Women’s Activism in the Twentieth Century.” Alexander Russo, “Roots of Radio’s Rebirth: Audiences, Aesthetics, Economics, and Technologies of American Broadcasting, 1926-1951.”
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY (Afro-American Studies) (1)
Maude Ddikobe, “‘Doing She Own Thing’: Gender, Performance, and Subversion in Trinidad Calypso.”
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY (Ethnic Studies) (6)
Rakesh N. Bhandari, “The Racial State: Racism, the New Social Darwinism and the Demise of Social Democracy.” Jason M. Ferreira, “All Power to the People: A Comparative History of “Third World” radicalism in San Francisco, 1968 – 1974.” Rayne Galbraith, “Raped by U. S. Customs: Strip Searches and the War on Black Women.” Irene Lara, “Decolonizing Latina Spiritualities and Sexualities: Healing Practices in las Americas.” Birgit Rasmussen, “Re-Imagining Literary America: Writing and Colonial Encounters in American Literature.” Rowena Robles, “Asian Americans and the Shifting Politics of Race: The Dismantling of Affirmative Action at an Elite Public High School.”
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY (Rhetoric)
James Salazar, “Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America.”
GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (3)
Peter J. Brownlee, “‘The Economy of the Eyes’: Vision and the Cultural Production of Market Revolution, 1800-1860.” Dale Woolston Dowling, “For God, For Family, For Country: Colonial Revival Church Buildings in the Cold War Era.” Mary McComb, “The Great Depression and the Middle Class: Experts, Collegiate Youth, and Business Ideology, 1929-1941”
HARVARD UNIVERSITY (1)
Nancy Elam Squires, “Back to the Blanket: The Indian Fiction of Oliver La Farge, John Joseph Mathews, D’Arcy McNickle, Ruth Underhill, and Frank Waters, 1927-1944.”
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I – MANOA (4)
Patrick O’Brien, “Imagery and Symbol of the Airplane in American Film 1950-2004.” Manako Ogawa, “The Women’s Christian Temperance Unions in the United States and Japan, 1905-1945.” Janine Powers, “From Medicine to Art: Nils Paul Larsen (1890-1964).” Christine Su, “Tradition and Change: Khmer Identity and Democracy in the 20th Century and Beyond.”
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (3)
Mary Ann Beecher, “A Place for Everything: The Influence of Storage Innovations on Modern American Domesticity (1900-1955).” Chrys Poff, The Western Ghost Town in American Culture, 1869-1950.” Kevin Quirk, “That’s What Books Can Do: The Multicultural Middlebrow.”
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS (4)
Bradley Carter, “Reverence Helmeted and Armored”: 20th Century Military Chaplain Memoirs.” David Anthony Tyeeme Clark, “Representing Indians: Indigenous Fugitives and the Society of American Indians in the Making of Common Culture.” Todd Ormsbee, “Sexuality and Experience: Gay Male Publicity, Community, and Meaning in 1960’s San Francisco.” Amber Reagan-Kendrick, “Ninety Years of Struggle and Success: African American History and the University of Kansas, 1870-1960.”
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK (5)
Marguerite Glass, “Vermeer in Dialogue: From Appropriation to Response.” Cheryl La Roche, “On the Edge of Freedom: Archaeology, the Free Black Community, and the Underground Railroad.” Christine Arnold Lourie, “A Punishment for My Pride: The Hamiltons of Port Maryland.” Edwin Martini, “Invisible Enemy: The American War on Viet Nam, 1975-2000.” Paul Reber, “Retail Trade and the Consumer in Fairfax County, Virginia, 1759-1766.”
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS – AMHERST (4)
Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, “Community Acts: Locating Pilipino American Theater and Performance.” Stephanie Elaine Dunson, “The Minstrel in the Parlor: Nineteenth Century Sheet Music and the Domestication of Blackface Minstrelsy.” Nancy Frazier, “Vanitas: The Circle of Intentions.” Albert Uriah Turner, “Bad Niggers, Real Niggas and the Shaping of African American Counterpublic Discourses.”
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS – AMHERST (Afro-American Studies) (2)
Brandon L.A. Hutchinson, “Refusing to be Silent: Tracing the Black Women’s Role as Protector on the American Stage.” Jennifer Jensen-Wallach, “Remembering Jim Crow: The Literary Memoir as Historical Source Material.”
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (9)
Colin Johnson, “Columbia’s Orient: Gender, Geography Orient: Gender, Geography in Rural America.” Pablo Ramirez, “Borderlands Ethics: Visions of Incorporation in Chicana/o Fiction.” Rebecca Poyourow, “From Working Girl to Adolescent: The Detroit YMCA and the Transformation of Sociability Among Working Class Young Women, 1900-1930.” Charlotte Pagni, “Hollywood Does Kinsey: Cinema, Sexology, and Cultural Regulations, 1948-1968.” Alejandra Marchevsky, “Flexible Labor, Inflexible Citizenship: Latina Immigrants and the Politics of Welfare Reform.” Libby Garland, “Through Closed Gates: Jew and Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1933.” Jennifer Tilton, “Dangerous and Endangered Children: Representations of Youth and Political struggles to Shape the State and City.” Merida Rua, “Claims to ‘The City’: Puerto Rican Latinidad Amid Labors of Identity, Community, and Belonging in Chicago.” Nhi Lieu, “Private Desires on Public Display: Vietnamese American Identities in Multi-Mediated Leisure and Niche Entertainment.”
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (Anthropology) (1)
*Rachel Heiman, “Driving After Class: Youth and the Cultural Politics of Suburban Life in the Boom Economy.” (Anthropology)
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY (2)
April Michelle Herndon, “Carrying the Torch: Fatness and Nation in the Age of Weight Loss.” Rieko Tomisawa, “The Crisis of Democracy in a Pluralistic Society: A Genealogy of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Double Consciousness.”
UNIVERISTY OF MINNESOTA (6)
Karla Erickson, “Paid to Care: Selling Service, Smiles, and Community in American Restaurants.” Benjamin Flowers, “Constructing the Modern Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York from the Great Depression through the Cold War.” Kate Kane, “Reel Relations: Investing Racial and Sexual Identity Constructs in Popular Film and Looking Towards the New Vision of Coalition.” Brian Klopotek, “The Long Outwaiting: Federal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities.” Felicity Schaeffer-Grabriel, “Cyber-brides Between the U.S. and Mexico: Transnational Imaginaries, Migration, and the Intimate Economy of Marriage.” Mary Elizabeth Strunk, “The Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun: Women Outlaws, Public Memory and the Rise and Fall of Hoover’s FBI.”
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (8)
Anthony P. Avery, “Folklore and Alternative Masculinities in a Rave Scene.” David Leo Bennett, “Bloys Camp Meeting: Cultural Center of Camaraderie, Community and Faith in the American Southwest.” William A. Dodge, “The Meaning of Place at Bedrock: Change and Identity on the Zuni Indian Reservation.” Rebecca Hernandez , “Past is Perfect in the Present Tense: Exhibiting Native America in Museums and Culture Centers.” Jeremy Hockett, “Reckoning and Ritual and Counterculture in the Burning Man Community: Communication, Ethnography, and the Self in Reflexive Modernism.” Lloyd L. Lee, “Twenty-First Century Dine Cultural Identity: Defining and Practicing Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoon.” Brij Lunine, “Creativity and Constraint: The Role of Television and Popular Culture in the Lives of Adolescents.” T. Seamus O’Sullivan, “Wasted and Wounded: Men’s Stories of Homelessness in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1998-2002.”
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (4)
Michael Laskawy, “Uncommitted: Contemporary Work and the Search for Self: A Qualitative Study of 28-34 Year-Old College-Educated Americans.” Cree LeFavour, “Who Reads an American Book?: British Reprints and Popular Reading in America, 1848-1858.” Alondra Nelson, “Black Nationalism, biomedicine and the Politics of Knowledge.” Julie Sze, “Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice.”
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA (1)
*Christopher Klemek, “Urbanism as Reform: Modernist Planning and the Crisis of Urban Liberalism in Europe and North America, 1945-1975.” (History)
RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY (1)
*Brian Norman, “Addressing Division: The American Protest Mode in the Twentieth Century.” (English)
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK – BUFFALO (6)
Candace Scovell Broughton, “Remembering Emma and the Story of Murder Hill.” Brenda Washington Lacey, “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now: A Study of African American Females Performing on School-Based Drill Teams.” Minnie C. Wilson, “Embracing the Shadow: Black Women’s Narratives as Recovery and Restoration.” Jodie G. Roure, “International Human Rights Law as a Resource in Combatting Domestic Violence: Transcending Legal, Social and Cultural Obstacles in Brazil and the United States.”
Janine Santiago, “Weaving Fiction, History, Memory and Orality in Four Puerto Rican Women Writers.” Jennifer Christianna Rossi, “Souls Across Spaces: Ambiguity as Resistance and a New Generation of Black Women Writers.”
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS – AUSTIN (3)
Golub, Adam. Into the Blackboard Jungle: Educational Debate and Cultural Change in 1950s America. William Bush, “Representing the Juvenile Delinquent: Reform, Social Science, and Teenage Troubles in Postwar Texas.” Davis, Jonathan, “Unrealized America: transforming American Studies to transform America.” Laura Ehrisman, “Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Performance in San Antonio’s Public Culture.” William Fagelson, “Nervous out of the Service: 1940s American Cinema, World War II Veteran Readjustment, and Postwar Masculinity.” Heiskanen, Benita. “Fighting Identities: The Body in Space and Place.” McMillen, Ryan, “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization.”
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY (1)
Margaret Sherve, “There isn’t Even a Thing that One Can Hide Behind!”: Domestic Lives of Immigrant, Ethnic Women on the Upper Great Plains, 1880-1910.”
COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY (2)
Matthew Hyland, “Montpelier: The History of a House, 1723-1988.” Sharon Zuber, “Re-Shaping Documentary Expectations: New Journalism and Direct Cinema.”
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN – MILWAUKEE (1)
*Ronald Clohessy, “The Ship of State: American Identity and Maritime Nationalism in the Sea Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper.” (English)