Faculty Advising Interests for

Comprehensive Senior Essays in American Studies

 

 

Sharon Akimoto

Department of Psychology

 

I am able to help comps students with projects involving social psychological phenomenon, in particular, those that deal with social cognition, stereotyping and prejudice.

I am also able to supervise comps that focus on the psychological aspects of the Asian American experience.

 

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Deborah Appleman

Educational Studies

 

I am willing to advise American Studies students in four general topic areas:

1) The relationship of adolescent development and the structure of American Schools

           gender issues in schools, cliques and other peer relationships, identity development, youth culture

 

2) Issues in urban education

           Ethnography of urban classrooms, culturally relevant pedagogy, multicultural education

 

3) Intersections of literature and pedagogy

           How American literature gets taught in high schools, adolescents and the bildingsroman, multicultural literature and the dynamic demographics of high school

 

4) Using literary theory to “”read” popular culture

           Reading film, television, magazine though a variety of multiple perspectives, influence of popular media and adolescents (and vice versa)

 

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Robert Bonner

Department of History and Environmental Studies

 

I am prepared to advise American studies students in the following three areas:

 

History and culture of the American West.

 

Modern history of American Indians, i.e. post 1832 (the year of the Cherokee Removal across the Mississippi) and west of the Mississippi River.

 

American Environmental History, particularly the relations of environmen and culture in the West.

 

 

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Nancy Cho

Department of English

 

Research and teaching interests:

 

19th and 20th century American Literature

American drama

Asian American Literature

Asian American Studies

Race and ethnicity theory

 

 

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Cliff Clark

History & American Studies

 

I am willing to advise American studies students on a wide variety of topics within American social, cultural, and intellectual history.  My most recent interest has been in the fields of urban and community history, architecture, and material culture- including the ways in which Americans have shaped the built environment from landscapes, houses, and furniture to zoos, residential colleges, prisons, and other institutions.  I also have a background in historic preservation and planning and would be interested in working with students in that area.

 

A second area of particular interest is late nineteenth century history and popular culture including politics, immigration, industrialization, labor history, the rise of sports, the settlement of the west, imperialism, urban reform movements, and popular music.

Two other areas that particularly interest me are the history of American religion and American education.

 

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Carol Donelan

Media Studies Program

 

I am prepared to advise American Studies students in three broad topic areas:

 

1) American film history

 

Especially: silent film, Hollywood studio system, the classical Hollywood

style, the star system, Hollywood genres, American auteurs, film noir,

history of film technology (sound, color, widescreen), history of acting

styles, censorship, the New American Cinema, contemporary American film

 

2) Classical and contemporary film theory

 

Especially: the work of classical theorists such as Bazin, Eisenstein,

Balazs, Arnheim, Kracauer, etc, and the usefulness for film analysis of

contemporary methodologies such as semiotics, psychoanalysis, ideological

analysis, feminism, cultural studies, queer theory, etc.

 

3) American Television Genres (history and conventions)

 

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Annette Igra

Department of History

 

I am prepared to advise comps in the following areas:

 

U.S. history (particularly the 19th and 20th centuries), women’s and gender studies, labor, social welfare, law, consumer culture.

 

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Rich Keiser

Department of Political Science

 

Prepared to advise students who have taken previous courses with me.  Topics would include

 

1) poverty, wage policy, health care, economic development, as well as others.

 

2) African American politics since WWII

 

3) Suburbanization, American suburbs

 

4) Comparative analyses of white ethnic groups and/or people of color in the struggle for political and economic advancement in the U.S.

 

5) Conceptualization of politics in 20th century a/m

 

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Michael Kowalewski

English & Director of American Studies

 

I am prepared to advise American Studies students in the following topic areas:

1)  American literature

Especially:  19th and 20th century fiction, 19th and 20th century poetry, "high" modernism, southern literature, literature of the American West, American Indian literature, creative non-fiction (journalism, nature writing, the literature of travel and exploration, social protest writing), and contemporary poetry and fiction

 

2)  American film history

 

Especially:  Hollywood genres, classical Hollywood narratives, Los Angeles and the rise of the film industry, the history of documentary filmmaking, and Hollywood and the depiction of American history

 

3) "Place" in American culture and art

 

Especially:  environmental issues, geography, urban planning, rural communities, agriculture, regional identity in literature and art (particularly the West and the South)

 

4) Popular Culture in America

Especially:  consumer culture, the role of sports, television journalism, fashion and body image, and contemporary music (particularly rock n roll, hip hop, and country-western)

 

5) Anything Having to do with California

 

Especially:  the Gold Rush, California art (painting; photography; spray-can murals), film, architecture, California history, California and the Pacific Rim, the literature of Los Angeles, John Steinbeck

 

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Jennifer C. Manion

Department of Philosophy

 

History of moral philosophy, contemporary moral philosophy (applied ethics,

such as medical ethics, as well as ethical theory more generally --  I am

particularly interested in moral psychology/development), feminist theory,

social and political philosophy (such as the issues around pornography and

hate speech) and gender/queer theory (such as the

essentialist/constructionist debate and theoretical discussions of

sexuality).

 

I am particularly interested in philosophical issues about violence, in

philosophical analysis of psychoanalysis, and in philosophical explorations

of emotions such as shame and empathy.

 

I am comfortable with both postmodern philosophical analysis and

Anglo-American philosophical methodology.

 

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Lance T. McCready

Educational Studies

 

I am prepared to advise American Studies students in three broad topic areas:

 

1)  Racial Inequality and Education

 

This area covers research and theories that explain the reproduction of racial inequality in U. S. society and education, as well as how racial formation and racial identity constitute  space, place, and time. This area is meant to situate educational practices of Black students in the United States within a broader historical, international, and theoretical context.

 

2)  Gender, Sexuality, and Schooling

 

This area is primarily concerned with how masculinity and femininity are constructed through social practices and policies in schools.  Given my focus on the experiences of students who embody multiple identities and how these subjectivities are practiced in educational institutions, I am also interested in theoretical frameworks and writing that offer strategies for interrelating race, class, gender, and sexuality on both the micro- and macro-levels.

 

3)  Critical Educational Studies

This area focuses on theories and methods that chart a new direction for “critical” educational research.  Critical theory is theory which “undertakes simultaneously critique of received categories, critique of theoretical practice, and critical substantive analysis of social life in terms of the possible, not  just the actual” (Calhoun, 1993: 63).  Critical educational studies are fundamentally local and ethnographic, yet move beyond the school to examine links between local cultural practices and the community, the region, the state, and the economy.

 

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Andrew Rosa

Minority Scholar-In-Residence

 

There are three principle areas that I would feel very capable in advising American Studies majors.  They are:  19th and 20th century African American social movement history; 19th and 20th century African American intellectual history; and research methods in African American history.  My background in theses areas is extensive and covers a wide range of subjects relating to  African American history.

 

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John Schott

Director of Media Studies

 

Pleased to support work in:

 

Work in nonfiction [documentary] film or television, independent cinema, social history of media in the Fifties and the avant-garde.

 

Topics in digital media, new media and cyberculture, along with related public policy issues.

 

Production projects in video or audio for fulfillment of comps. Particularly nonfiction projects which address topics appropriate to American Studies.

 

 

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Bob Tisdale

Department of English

 

I would be prepared and willing to advise American Studies students in several areas:

 

  1. American autobiography and memoir: writers from Samuel Sewall and Ben Franklin to Mary McCarthy, Tobias Wolff, and Maxine Hong Kington.
  2. 19th and early 20th century American literature and its cultural context: Specifically, both gothic and transcendental versions of American Romanticism, the so-called American Renaissance of the 1820s to 1860 (Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson), post Civil War Regionalism, Realism, and Naturalism (as seen in Twain, James, Crane, Wharton, Chopin, and Dreiser, Cather, et al.).
  3. Modernist and Contemporary Literature: Literature that represents a shift in world view, sensibility, and idiom form American realism and naturalism: writers of fiction fro Hemingway, Faulkner, and O’Connor to Pyncheon and Morrison: poets from Pound, Eliot, and Stevens to Gary Snyder, Simon Ortiz, and Rita Dove.
  4. Topics relating to immigration: Push and pull factors influencing immigration, acculturation, assimilation, generational conflicts, ethnic enclaves, labor markets, inter-ethnic strife, language acquisition, federal immigration policy, etc.
  5. African American and Native American literature: Poetry and fictive prose writers from James Weldon Johnson to Toni Morrison.  In American Indian writing, especially N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan.

 

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Wilson Valentín-Escobar

Andersen Fellow in American Studies

 

I can advise American Studies students in the following areas:

 

Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, and Post-Colonial Studies

            Birmingham School, Frankfurt School, Sub-Altern Studies

 

Oral History Theory and Methodology

 

Latina/o Studies

Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora

Latina/o social movements

Latina/o  vernacular and expressive practices

Popular Music

 

Sociology

Sociology Theory

Sociology of Culture

Sociological Qualitative Research Methods

Sociology of Race

Social Movement Theory

 

Diaspora Formations

 

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Sarah Wadsworth

Department of English

 

I am prepared to advise American Studies students in the following areas:

 

1) American literature and culture before 1900--especially the American

Renaissance, popular / noncanonical fiction, women's writing, literary

regionalism, and travel writing

 

2) The History of the Book--all aspects of early American print culture,

especially the history of reading, publishing history, illustrated texts,

and the materiality of print

 

3) Children's literature

 

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Serena Zabin

Department of History

 

I would be interested in directing comps projects on a variety of topics dealing with early America.  I would be particularly happy to direct comps dealing with:

Cross-cultural contact

Colonialism and empire in early America

Race in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century

Political culture

Early American theater and literature

Print culture and knowledge

The intersection of race and gender in the British colonies

America in the early modern Atlantic world