American Literature and Culture

The special area of strength is our largest, with numerous PhD candidates working in these fields and an increasing number of PhD graduates now tenured or in tenure lines at colleges and universities around the country. The Americanist faculty is particularly strong in African American studies, with the work of Jennifer James, James A. Miller, and Gayle Wald directly focused on African American literature and culture, and with the work of Antonio López and Robert McRuer also sustaining important connections to the field. The program has additional strengths in an array of other fields concerned with the construction of subjectivities and identities in modernity and postmodernity; these include Asian and Asian American studies, postcolonial theory (particularly postcolonial studies of India), women’s studies and gender studies, feminist theory, Latino/a studies, lesbian and gay/queer studies, disability studies, popular culture studies (particularly studies of music and American culture), and composition theory. Doctoral candidates in these fields are completing dissertations on discourses of addiction in twentieth-century cultures, the intersections of Asian American studies and disability studies, the ethics of “standard English” in the composition classroom, and many other topics.

Publications by faculty interested in postcolonial studies, American literary and cultural studies, and theoretical considerations of subjectivity address a wide range of issues. Recent important book publications include:

Marshall Alcorn, Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire
Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities
Ann Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder
Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
James A. Miller, Moments of Scottsboro: The Scottsboro Case and American Culture, 1931-2001
Jennifer James, A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War-World War II
Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India
Chris Sten, Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts; The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel; Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic Novel; co-editor, "Whole Oceans Away": Melville in the Pacific
Antonio López, Havana to Harlem: Race and Diaspora in Twentieth-Century Cuban-American Literature and Culture (forthcoming, NYU Press)

Recent PhD dissertations in postcolonial and American subjectivities include:

Amy Nelson Bangerter, ‘Chinese Youth and American Educational Institutions, 1850-1881’ (2005)
Shannon Cate, ‘Not Our Memory: Contested Visions of Family at the Turn of the American Century’ (2004)
Colin Ambrose Clarke, ‘In the Ward: Issues of Confinement in Mid-Twentieth Century American Poetry’ (2001)
Brian Flota, ‘Flight to San Francisco: Bay Area Literature and Multiculturalism, 1955-1979’ (2006)
Joseph Fruscione, ‘Modernist Dialectic: William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the Anxiety of Influence, 1920-1962’ (2005)
Lisbeth Fuisz, ‘Contested Narratives of Nation Building: Schools and the Construction of a Unified Citizenry in Twentieth Century U.S. Culture’ (2006)
Sharon Hanscom, ‘The Invisible Communists: Women’s Conception of Emancipatory Politics’ (2005)
Kathleen Iudicello, ‘Women Take Stage: Performance Art, Punk Rock, and Pussycat Fever’ (2005)
Kathleen Laura MacArthur, ‘The Things We Carry: Trauma and the Aesthetic in the Contemporary U.S. Novel’ (2005)
Wes Mantooth, ‘“You Factory Folks Who Sing This Song Will Surely Understand”: Cultural Representations in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan’ (2004)
Timothy K. Nixon, ‘The Homo-Exilic Experience: Queerness, Alienation, and Contrapuntal Vision’ (2005)
Dolen Perkins, ‘Mob Stories: Race, Nation and Narratives of Racial Violence’ (2002)
Carmen Phelps, ‘Performative Politics in Chicago: The Black Arts Movement, Women Writers, and Visions of Nation and Identity’ (2004)
Satarupa Sengupta, ‘Citizenship and Expatriation in U.S. Women’s Fiction, 1868-2004’ (2005)
David Tritelli, ‘Proletarian Literature and Everyday Life’ (2005)
Timothy F. Waltonen, ‘Toward a “Prosaics” of Contemporary American Short Fiction: Metonymies of “City Life” in Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, and John Edgar Wideman’ (2004)
Jeri Zulli, ‘Puritans, Patriots, and Proto-Science Fiction: The Influence of Early American Culture on the Production and Consumption of Science Fiction and Utopian Fiction in American Literature