Past Dissertations

Students of American Studies are engaged in a wide variety of research interests and disciplines. Explore a selection of past dissertation work of our alumni below.

“The Right to Tell: Listening Practices, Race, and Recordings, 1947-1974”
Michael King, 2020

“Child Writers’ Collaborations across Age and Race in Circa-1970 America”
Amanda Fish, 2019

“Future Monumentality”
Evander Price, 2019

Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, 1700–1820″
Whitney Robles, 2019

“‘Onward, Christian Soldiers:’ American Populism and the Religious Imagination in the Wake of World War I”
Colin Bossen, 2018

“The Illumined Wastes: America’s Forgotten Aesthetics”
Steven Brown, 2018

“The State in the Station: The Nineteenth–Century American Train Station and State Power”
Zachary Nowak, 2018

“A Global Vision: Dr. Ana Livia Cordero and the Puerto Rican Liberation Struggle, 1931-1992,”
Sandy Placido, 2017

Equality by Degrees: Abolitionist Colleges and the Throes of Integration, 1833-1895″
John Bell, 2017

“Feast, Fast, and Flesh: Hunger and Conflict in New England and New France, 1637-1763”
Carla Cevasco, 2017

“Hawthorne’s Magnalia: Retelling Cotton Mather in the Provincial Tales”
Jacob Spencer, 2017

“Purifying the World: Americans and International Sexual Reform, 1865-1933”
Eva Payne, 2017

“Consumable City: Race, Ethnicity, and Food in Modern New Orleans”
Theresa McCulla, 2017

“Encountering and Collecting the Sacred Body Through Relics in Early American Protestant Culture, 1750-1870”
Christopher Allison

“Cold War Bohemia: Literary Exchange between the United States and Czechoslovakia, 1947-1989”
Brian Goodman, 2016

“Everybody Is a Star!: Uplift, Citizenship, and the Cross-Racial Politics of 1970s U.S. Popular Culture”
Scott Poulson-Bryant, 2016

Exceptions to Exclusion: A Prehistory of Asylum in the United States, 1880-1980″
Yael Schacher, 2016

“Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge About Homosexuality, 1920–1970”
Anna Lvovsky, 2015

“Tin Lizzie Dreams: Henry Ford and Antimodern American Culture, 1919-1942”
Aaron Hatley, 2015

“Islands of Labor: Community, Conflict, and Resistance in Colonial Samoa, 1889-1919”
Holger Droessler, 2015

“Riding Bareback: Rodeo Communities and the Construction of American Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Twentieth Century”
Rebecca Scofield, 2015