- American Studies Program - Wesleyan University

		Center for the Americas
		American Studies Program
		Latin American Studies Program

		Program Description
		Majors Committee
		Forms
		Faculty & Office Hours
		Courses
		Concentrations
		Comparative Americas Courses

Abelove, Henry

habelove@wesleyan.edu

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Henry Abelove is is the author of The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists, and of Deep Gossip; and he is co-editor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, and of Visions of History. He is presently at work on two new projects. One is a book on George Berkeley and colonialism. It is tentatively titled A Cure for Empire. A first installment will soon appear in Raritan. The second is a book on the cultural expressions of gay liberation in its formative years. This is tentatively titled The Poetics of Gay Liberation.

Cutler, Jonathan

jcutler@wesleyan.edu

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Hill, Patricia R.

phill@wesleyan.edu

Office Hours:

Professor of History Patricia Hill specializes in 19th-century U.S. cultural, women's, and religious history. Her study, The World Their Household, examines the ways in which the Protestant mission movement worked to produce cultural transformations abroad while reflexively transforming American culture. She has participated in recent regional and national discussions focusing on internationalizing the American Studies curriculum.

Karamcheti, Indira

ikaramcheti@wesleyan.edu

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Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies Indira Karamcheti is an important new voice in the field of postcolonial literature. Her broad ranging interests in the geographics of marginality encompasses Caribbean and African-American literatures.

Kauanui, J. Kehaulani

jkauanui@wesleyan.edu

Her first book, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity is newly released from Duke University Press. Kauanui is the producer and host of a weekly public affairs radio program, "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond," which airs each Tuesday from 4-5pm on WESU, Middletown, CT. The program archives can be accessed at: www.indigenouspolitics.com. She is currently embarking on two new book projects. One is, Decolonizing Interventions: Essays on Gender Politics and Hawaiian Nationalism, and the other is titled, Hawaiian New England: The Grammar of American Colonialism. Kauanui sits on the following editorial boards: American Indian Quarterly; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Hulili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being; Journal of Pacific History; and Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific.

McAlister, Elizabeth

emcalister@wesleyan.edu

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Associate Professor of Religion Elizabeth McAlister is a specialist in the study of African-based religions in the Americas, with a particular focus on Haiti. Her work addresses the broader issues of religion and the social construction of race. She is the author of Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora (University of California Press, 2002).

McCann, Sean

smccann@wesleyan.edu

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Sean McCann studies late-nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and its relation to contemporaneous political developments. He is the author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2000), which received honorable mention for the America Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies. His essays have appeared in American Quarterly, The Common Review, ELH, Radical History Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and several edited volumes.

Milroy, Elizabeth

emilroy@wesleyan.edu

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Elizabeth Milroy teaches the history of art and material culture in North America. Her courses range from general surveys of art in the United States and Canada from First Contact to 1945, to courses treating the history of sculpture and courses in the history of cultural landscapes and historic preservation to advanced seminars in cultural institutions and exhibitionary practices as well as the work of individual artists such as Thomas Eakins and Georgia OKeeffe. She also teaches a junior colloquium on material culture studies for the America Studies program. A specialist in the history of cultural institutions and cultural landscapes in the United States, in particular those in Philadelphia, she has organized exhibitions and has published numerous articles and catalogue essays. Her most recent publications include A Crowning Feature: The Centennial Exhibition and Philadelphias Horticultural Hall in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (2006), For the like Uses, as the Moore-Fields: The Politics of Penns Squares, in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (2006) and Images of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, an essay in the catalogue of the major Thomas Eakins exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in 2001. She is the principal author of Painters of a New Century: The Eight and American Art (1991) and coeditor of Reading American Art (1998). Her current book project is A Greene Country Town: William Penns Legacy and the Birth of Philadelphias Public Parks.

Pfister, Joel

jpfister@wesleyan.edu

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Joel Pfister, Kenan Professor of the Humanities, has written THE PRODUCTION OF PERSONAL LIFE: CLASS, GENDER, AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IN HAWTHORNE'S FICTION (Stanford University Press, 1991); STAGING DEPTH: EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE POLITICS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOURSE (University of North Carolina Press, 1995); (co-editor of) INVENTING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL: TOWARD A CULTURAL HISTORY OF EMOTIONAL LIFE IN AMERICA (Yale University Press, 1997); INDIVIDUALITY INCORPORATED: INDIANS AND THE MULTICULTURAL MODERN (Duke University Press, 2004), CRITIQUE FOR WHAT? CULTURAL STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES, LEFT STUDIES (Paradigm Publishers, 2006) and THE YALE INDIAN: THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ROE CLOUD (Duke University Press, 2009). He teaches the core theory course, "Cultural Power and American Studies," in the American Studies Program as well as English courses in American literature and culture from the colonial period to the present. Professor Pfister has received several fellowships, such as an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and a Rockefeller fellowship, and has lectured in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as well as the United States and Canada. Recently he served as chair of the American Studies program and is now chair of the English department

Potter, Claire B.

cpotter01@wesleyan.edu

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Claire Potter focuses her research on the social and cultural dynamics of state formation in the 20th century. She is the author of a major study of the FBI's war on midwestern bandits in the 1930s and currently working on a book which explores the impact of historical writing about race and citizenship on nationalist discourse in the United States. A third project in its early stages focuses on the federal campaigns against pornography initiated in the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations. She teaches the survey courses on U.S. Foreign Relations (which highlights interhemispheric relations), Politics and Culture of the Southern States, and post Stonewall queer political thought; as well as seminars on the New Deal, crime, and the Cold War. Claire blogs at http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/

Tang, Amy Cynthia

atang@wesleyan.edu

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Weiss, Margot

mdweiss@wesleyan.edu

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Margot Weiss holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies from Duke University. Her ethnographic research focuses on contemporary sexual cultures and politics in the United States. She teaches courses in queer studies, transnational sexualities, feminist anthropology, neoliberalism and American culture, and performance studies.