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

2) Issues in urban educationEthnography of urban classrooms, culturally relevant pedagogy, multicultural education

3) Intersections of literature and pedagogyHow 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 environment and culture in the West.

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Nancy Cho

Department of English

Research and teaching interests:

19^th and 20^th 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 historyEspecially: silent film, Hollywood studio system, the classical Hollywoodstyle, 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 theoryEspecially: 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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Adriana Estill

Department of English and American Studies

I am prepared to advise in the following areas:

Latino Studies;

U.S. Latino literature, all periods;

Contemporary poetry in the U.S.; I am especially interested in politically and/or socially engaged texts;

Transnationalism, especially as seen in literature, popular culture, and the mass media;

Beauty and body image;

Popular culture in the U.S., particularly magazines, movies, and television, especially if considering race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality;

Theories of feminism and corporeality, cultural studies, race and ethnicity, multi/bi-racial identities, and place.

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Annette Igra

Department of History

I am prepared to advise comps in the following areas:

U.S. history (particularly the 19^th and 20^th 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 20^th century a/m

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Michael Kowalewski

Department of 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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Elizabeth McKinsey

Department of English and American Studies

I am prepared to advise comps students on topics concerning literature, art and cultural history of America, particularly in the early national period and the 19th century. I have also taught or researched colonial American literature and history, the South in the 20th century, women’s literature, and regionalism. The history of the idea of America, the landscape, religion, education, the West, and the role of the artist in American society have also captured my interest at various times.

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Michael McNally

Department of Religion

I am able to advise comps topics that relate to the following research interests and teaching competencies:

Cultural and Intellectual history of American Religions

Native American Religious and Cultural Traditions
Relationship between culture, especially religious culture and the American landscape
Cultural history American healing traditions

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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. 19^th and early 20^th 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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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