Faculty

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.

Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology J. Kehaulani Kauanui whose dissertation was entitled "Rehabilitating the Native: Hawaiian Blood Quantum and the Politics of Race, Citizenship, and Entitlement" has research interests in 1930s scientific studies on "hybrid Hawaiians" and attendant issues of eugenics and governmentality; Pacific Islander diasporic politics in the United States; historicizing Hawaiian presence in America, and Hawaiian nationalist models of citizenship and decolonization in relation to gender and sexuality. Her work appears in Amerasia Journal, Women's Studies International Forum, Pacific Studies, The Contemporary Pacific, and Social Text. She currently serves as a member of the Coordinating Committee for the Summit on the Status of Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians in Higher Education.

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.

Professor of History Ann Wightman specializes in Latin American colonial history. Her award-winning Indigenous Migration and Social Change analyzes the impact of Spanish colonization on traditional Indian communities. She is continuing her research on Andean society in her current study of kinship ties within the Indian community of seventeenth-century Peru. In 1996, she won a university award for excellence in teaching.

Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology 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. http://mdweiss.faculty.wesleyan.edu

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS 2008-2009

Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows:

Professor Abby Clouse specializes in the contemporary politics of indigenous cultural property rights, material culture and identity politics, and North American cultural museums as the sites (or contact zones) in which these cross-cultural contestations and collaborations play out.  Her work appears in Journal of Popular Culture and Journal of Material Culture.

Professor Marc Hertzman defended his dissertation in Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May, 2008.  He has taught courses about Brazil, the Caribbean, Spanish America, and the African Diaspora and won two teaching awards while at the University of Wisconsin.  He has also received numerous fellowships and in 2008 was invited to participate in the Emerging Scholars Speaker Series at Penn. State’s Africana Research Center. http://mhertzman.faculty.wesleyan.edu