News and Events
Recent News
Faculty Member Julie Reuben writes on indoctrination in the classroom for The Chronicle.
Jewel Pereyra, current doctoral candidate, will be presenting Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Sound Cultures and Dance Performances as part of the 2023-2024 New Directions in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Seminar Series on October 26.
Hua Hsu, PhD ’08, wins the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography for his book Stay True.
A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu
“This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
Dr. Hsu joins a strong community of previous Harvard affiliated Pulitzer Prize winners, including American Studies graduate Salamishah Tillet, PhD ’07.
Karen Kramer, current doctoral candidate, is a recipient of the 2023 Curatorial Award for Excellence for her work at the Peabody Essex Museum.
Brandon Terry, in a recent episode of the New York Times-produced Ezra Klein Show, discusses the work and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Listen here.
The Program in American Studies congratulates Imani Perry, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Professor Perry received her PhD in Harvard’s Program in the History of American Civilization, now American Studies, in 2000.
Upon accepting the award, Dr. Perry said, “I write for my people. I write because we children of the lash-scarred, rope-choked, bullet-ridden, desecrated are still here, standing.” She continued, “I write for the sinned-against and the sanctified. I write for the ones who clean the toilets and till the soil and walk the picket lines. For the hungry, the caged, the disregarded, the holding on — I write for you. I write because I love sentences, and I love freedom more.”
South to America is Perry’s seventh book; her previous books include May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, which won the John Hope Franklin Award for best book in American Studies from the American Studies Association.
To read an excerpt of Dr. Perry’s book, please click here.
Students and Alumni at the ASA 2022 Annual Conference:
We are proud to announce the following honors from the American Studies Association 2022 Annual Conference:
STEPHEN VIDER, who earned his PhD from our program in 2013, has received Honorable Mention for the ASA’s 2022 JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN PUBLICATION PRIZE for the best book in American Studies published during 2021. The honored book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (The University of Chicago Press), is based on the Harvard dissertation Stephen wrote with a committee that included Nancy F. Cott (chair), Robin Bernstein, Glenda Carpio, and Margot Canaday. The John Hope Franklin Publican Prize committee wrote, “Stephen Vider’s The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II flips the lens through which historians have viewed the transformation of the private sphere over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States and the post-World War II domesticity and gender, to make an original argument about significance of queer forms of home life to LGBTQ people and politics since the mid-twentieth century. With previous queer historiography focusing largely on the public sphere, Vider examines gay marriages and camp cookbooks of the 1950s and 1960s, queer homeless youth shelters, communes, and post-Stonewall lesbian feminist experiments in domestic redesign. Beautifully written, witty, and inventive in its construction of an unexpected and visually rich archive, The Queerness of Home not only makes the case that twentieth-century domestic environments are fundamental to an understanding of LGBTQ individuals in the modern United States, it opens new ways of imaging and pursuing intersectional American Studies scholarship.”
ALLISON PUGLISI, who earned her PhD from our program in 2022, has received Honorable Mention for the ASA’s 2022 RALPH HENRY GABRIEL DISSERTATION PRIZE for the best dissertation in American Studies completed between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022. Allison received this honor for “Redefining Residency: Black Environmental Thought in New Orleans, 1929-1998.” Her committee included Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (chair), Robin Bernstein, Tiya Miles, and Annelise Orleck.
LORGIA GARCÍA PEÑA, a former faculty member and mentor to many students in our program, has won the ASA’s 2022 ANGELA Y. DAVIS PRIZE for outstanding public scholarship. The prize committee wrote, “As a scholar whose work engages the fields of Ethnics Studies, Black and Caribbean Studies, Latinx Studies and American Studies, Professor Lorgia García Peña has an impressive record of award winning research, interconnected public engagement and dynamic mentoring practices. She has also sustained a commitment to activism across multiple sites from her foundational work in building Freedom University as an alternative educational space for undocumented scholars in Georgia to her collaborative Archives of Justice, a transnational digital humanities research and teaching project. This type of generative and generous scholar-activism makes García Peña’s a fitting exemplar of the Prize’s emphasis on ‘scholarship for the public good’ and scholars who work ‘to educate the public’ and ‘address inequalities in imaginative, practical, and applicable forms.’ . . . The capaciousness of García Peña’s innovative transnational and interdisciplinarity scholarship and her rootedness in and responsiveness to the communities in which she is teaching and living, puts into action investments in creating ‘a more just world.’ This work is also grounded in, what numerous letter writers have noted as, García Peña’s fundamental commitment to a ‘radical practice of care’ both ‘within and beyond’ the limits of the university. Lorgia García Peña is a scholar-activist able and willing to confront the challenges of our moment, and it is with great pleasure that the committee awards her the American Studies Angela Y. Davis Prize.”
Upcoming Events
American Studies Spring Dissertation Colloquium
April 29, 2024
9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Thompson Room, Barker Center
American Studies Fall Dissertation Colloquium
December 6, 2023
9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Thompson Room, Barker Center
Welcome Back Reception
September, 2023
American Studies Dissertation Colloquium
May 1
9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Thompson Room, Barker Center
American Studies Dissertation Chapter Colloquium
May 2
9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Thompson Room, Barker Center