- American Studies Program

		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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Professor of English Henry Abelove is both an eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture specialist and a leading figure nationally in the emerging field of Queer Studies. He 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.

Berndt, Christina Gish

cberndt@wesleyan.edu

Cutler, Jonathan

jcutler@wesleyan.edu

Goldschmidt, Henry

hgoldschmidt@wesleyan.edu

Office Hours:

Hasratian, Avak

ahasratian@wesleyan.edu

Office Hours:

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

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Professor Kauanui has co-edited three special issues of the following journals: "Migrating Feminisms" Women's Studies International Forum (1998);"Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge," The Contemporary Pacific (2001); and "Women Writing Oceania: Weaving the Sails of the Waka," Pacific Studies (forthcoming Summer 2008). Her first book, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Indigeneity and Sovereignty is forthcoming from Duke University Press, Fall 2008. Her scholarship appears in the following journals: Social Text, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, American Studies, Comparative American Studies, The Hawaiian Journal of History, Mississippi Review, Amerasia Journal, Women's Studies International Forum, and American Indian Quarterly. She is currently embarking on two new book projects: Native Hawaiian Feminist Decolonization that explores gender politics in indigenous Hawaiian nationalist struggles, and Hawaiian New England: The Grammar of American Colonialism. Along with Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Kauanui is the co-editor of a new e-journal Critical Indigenous Studies, which will be launched in May 2008. She also 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).

Milroy, Elizabeth L.

emilroy@wesleyan.edu

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Professor of Art History Elizabeth Milroy is a scholar of late 19th- and early 20th-century North American art, with particular focus on the history of cultural spaces. She has published on both American and Canadian painters, sculptors and printmakers, including Thomas Eakins, Emma Stebbins, and the early 20th century exhibiting group known as "The Eight." Her most recent publications include an essay on the Great Central Sanitary Fair, held at Philadelphia in 1864, and an essay on the creation of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park system. The latter is a chapter in her current book project which is a study of the politics of public space and public culture in the city of Philadelphia during the middle decades of the 19th century. She offers courses in the history of painting, sculpture, the graphic arts and the decorative arts in the United States, focusing on the transmission of the European tradition to the New World, as well as seminars on the history of consumerism as evidenced in the fine arts; she also teaches the American Studies junior colloquium on the theory and praxis of material culture studies.

Pemberton, Gayle

gpemberton@wesleyan.edu

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Nonfiction writing Film

Pfister, Joel

jpfister@wesleyan.edu

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Joel Pfister, professor of English and American Studies, has explored the cultural and literary history of subjectivity in 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). His most recent book is CRITIQUE FOR WHAT? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies (Paradigm Publishers, 2006). 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.

Potter, Claire B.

cpotter01@wesleyan.edu

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Professor of History 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.

Romano, Renee Christine

rromano@wesleyan.edu

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Renee Romano specializes in twentieth century African American history, with particular research interests in the civil rights movement, World War II, sexuality, and historical memory. She is the author of "Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America" (Harvard University Press, 2003; paperback edition, University of Florida Press, 2006). She has also co-edited the anthology, "The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory" (University of Georgia Press, 2006). She is currently working on a book that explores the efforts by southerners to come to terms with the racial crimes of the civil rights era. This new work explores topics such as contemporary trials for civil rights era crimes (like the Sixteenth Street Church Bombing trials). the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and other organizations that are working for reconciliation or reparations throughout the South. Professor Romano teaches survey courses on African American history, World War II, and U.S. Foreign Policy, as well as specialized courses on historical memory, the modern black freedom struggle, and race and sexuality.

Slotkin, Richard S.

rslotkin@wesleyan.edu

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Olin Professor of English and American Studies Richard Slotkin has established a reputation as one of the preeminent cultural critics of our times. His award-winning trilogy on the myth of the frontier in America, which includes Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation offers an original and highly provocative interpretation of our national experience. He has also published three historical novels: The Crater: A Novel of the Civil War; The Return of Henry Starr; and Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln. In his more than 25 years at Wesleyan, he has helped to establish both the American Studies and the Film Studies Programs. He offers interdisciplinary courses in American literature, history and film. In 1995 he received the Mary C Turpie Award of the American Studies Association for his contributions to teaching and program-building.

Weiss, Margot Danielle

mdweiss@wesleyan.edu