2016 American Studies Senior Symposium & Party | Tuesday, December 13th • 11-4pm Presentations • 4pm Annual Party

Join the American Studies Program for the 

2016 American Studies Senior Thesis Symposium and Annual Party!

Tuesday, December 13th: 11am-4pm, Thesis Presentations | 4-6pm Annual Holiday Party

Walsh Library, 4th Floor, O'Hare Special Collections Room, Fordham Rose Hill Campus

This year's senior thesis projects take up widely varied topics, among them,  the role of racist tropes in the demise of Ohio's shopping malls; the history of the rainbow flag in LGBTQ rights movement; faith and identity development; feminism and Disney's Frozen; social criticism in The Wire; the power of prison education; mobilizing NYC's Asian American communities; labor unions, the New Left in the Vietnam War era; and the impact of rent stabilization on NYC apartment maintenance.

11-12:15  Identities in Context

Brendan Caulfield: “O’er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Gay”:
The Rainbow Flag and the Construction of LGBTQ Nation

Katherine Mobilia: Frozen and Feminism: Why Bloggers Can't 'Let it Go'

Marlena Gutierrez: My Mothers’ Daughter: Voicing Identity through Lived Catholicism

1:00-2:15  Alternative Narratives

Rebecca Sinski: Imagination and Narrative as Reform: Social Criticism in The Wire

Tyler Tagliaferro: The Mall Killers: Racism & Rumor in the Demise of Three Ohio Shopping Malls

Madelyn Murphy: Our Stories Plant Seeds: The Transformative Power of Prison Education

2:30-3:45 Policies & Politics

Shelley Wu: Asian Americans for Equality: Mobilizing Asian American Communities in New York City

Melanie Sheehan: Exploding Mines: The Rank-and-File, the New Left, and Vietnam-Era Militancy in the UMWA

Ben St. Clair: Broken yet Stabilized
Repairing NYC’s apartments goes deeper than removing rent regulations

4-6: Annual Party and Celebration of our Seniors, the American Studies Class of 2017!

For more information, contact amerstudies@fordham.edu.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration: Citizenship in Campaign 2016 and Beyond

Join the American Studies Program, the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Institute, the Department of African and African-American Studies, and the Center for Race, Law, and Justice for a public conversation on Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration: Citizenship in Campaign 2016 and Beyond. 

Thursday, November 3rd
7:00-9:00pm (doors open 6:30)
Fordham University, Lincoln Center
Law Building - LAW-3-20
150 W. 62nd Street, New York, NY 10023

This event is free and open to the public and features:

Afua Atta-Mensah, Executive Director of Community Voices Heard, a member-led multi-racial organization, principally women of color and low-income families in New York State that builds power to secure social, economic and racial justice for all.

Arlene Dávila, Professor of Latino/Latina studies at NYU, has written seven books on issues ranging from media depictions of Latinos, marketing to Latinos, cultural politics in Puerto Rico, and the Latinization of the United States.

Angelo Falcón, Executive Director of The National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP), a nonpartisan center established in 1982 in New York City, originally as the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy (IPR).

•     •     •

The American Studies CAMPAIGN 2016 series is made possible by the generous support of the Associate Vice President and Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; the Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill; and the co-sponsorship support of the Center for Race, Law and Justice; Fordham’s McGannon Communication Research Center; Latin American and Latino/a Studies; the Department of Communication and Media Studies; and the Department of African and African-American Studies.

10/26 Panel: Who Gets to Vote? And Who Votes? Francis Fox Piven, Ari Berman & Zachary Roth on Voter Suppression

Join the American Studies program for a wide-ranging conversation on two of the most critical issues in American political life: Who gets to vote? And then, who does vote?

Wednesday, October 26th: On Voter Participation and Voter Suppression" — a conversation with Francis Fox Piven, Ari Berman, and Zachary Roth

7:00-9:00pm | Fordham University, Lincoln Center, Lowenstein Hall, 12th Floor Corrigan Lounge, 113 W. 60th Street, New York, NY 10023 | Admission is free. Open to the public.

Who gets to vote? And then, who does vote? These two questions are fundamental to any democracy. But given the shape of the 2016 presidential election cycle, and the Supreme Court's 2013 decision to roll back many provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the question of voter franchise takes on renewed importance this year.

Fordham's American Studies Program will host a public discussion with nationally-recognized experts on voter suppression and voter participation in the United States.

Ari Berman, author of the Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015), a history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and a fellow at The Nation Institute.

Francis Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of twelve volumes, including the groundbreaking Why Americans Don't Vote (1988) and Why Americans Still Don't Vote (2002), and Suppressing the Black Vote (2009).

Zachary Roth, author of The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (2016), is a reporter for MSNBC and a widely published journalist.

Moderator: Christopher Dietrich, Associate Professor of History and American Studies, is also a 2016 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Junior Faculty Fellows at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Please note: Thanks to the generosity of our speakers, a limited number of complimentary copies of their recent books will be available.

The American Studies CAMPAIGN 2016 series is made possible by the generous support of the Associate Vice President/Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill; and the co-sponsorship support of the Center for Race, Law and Justice; the McGannon Communication Research Center; Latin American and Latino/a Studies Institute; the Department of Communication and Media Studies; and the Department of African and African-American Studies.

Collaboration and Community at the Futures of American Studies Institute

— a report from the 2016 Futures of American Studies Institute (FASI) at Dartmouth College by Callie Gallo, GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship Winner, 2016

The Futures of American Studies Institute
is an annual program at Dartmouth College

The 2016 Futures of American Studies Institute (FASI) at Dartmouth College welcomed scholars and graduate students from around the world for a week of programming featuring up-and-coming research in the field. As a fourth-year PhD candidate in the English Department at Fordham, I arrived in Hanover, New Hampshire on a warm and sunny day in June ready to learn about the latest areas of study, meet a cohort of unique professionals, and develop my own research project.

Less than a week later, I walked away from FASI with a new appreciation for the diverse and cutting-edge work of new and established scholars, including program directors Donald Pease (Dartmouth University) and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University), as well as my peers. It was a great privilege to receive the GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship and be given the opportunity to represent Fordham at such an innovative and prestigious event.

One of the unique features of FASI is the collegiality and collaboration between the featured speakers and attendees. Graduate students, junior faculty, adjuncts, writers with book projects, and senior faculty were all encouraged to share, debate, and exchange ideas in Q&A sessions, workshops, and on our down-time. All of the individuals who ran the Institute, as well as my session leader Winfried Fluck of Freie Universität in Berlin, encouraged me to network with scholars and talk about our projects in a friendly and supportive environment. We met in daily seminars where we became acquainted with other works in progress, gave feedback, and discussed the content of the daily plenary presentations. By fostering a collegial atmosphere, FASI gives scholars at all levels a way to learn from each other and exchange ideas that simply doesn’t happen at a typical conference.

This year, each plenary session at FASI was organized around a “Question Worth Asking” in the field that engages with issues or topics that American Studies scholars are or should be talking about right now. Some of these questions included “Why (not) surface reading now?,” “Afro-pessimism? Afro-optimism?,” “Affirmative biopolitics?,” and “How has digitization changed the archive of American Studies?” In addition to lively Q&A’s after each presentation, attendees also exchanged reactions and questions on twitter using the hashtag #FASI16.

Each plenary had a distinct focal point, but all sought to attend to re-think current critical and theoretical approaches. Yet as the event took place shortly after the mass shooting tragedy in Orlando at Pulse nightclub, and in the wake of a year marked by a series of high-profile police shootings of African Americans, many were eager to incorporate more discussion of those events and how to address them meaningfully through scholarship.

Callie's seminar group included, from left: Tim Salzer,
Katrina Kelly, Isil Özcan, Winfried Flick, Stephen Pasqualina,
Callie Gallo, Jesse Raber, Silke Schmidt, Sally Anderson
Boström, Greg Chase, and Joe Varghese Yeldho. 

Eric Lott (CUNY Graduate Center) and Sandy Alexander (MIT) displayed some of the ways American Studies scholars are analyzing racial violence in their presentations on responses to racial divisions in popular culture and through black protest. Soyica Diggs Colbert (Georgetown University) and Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University) also gave stirring talks about the artistic practices of African American women and the possibilities for optimism amidst racial strife.

Two of my favorite presentations were delivered by Patricia Stuelke (Dartmouth College) and Annie McClanahan (University of California, Irvine), who responded to the question “Was … a neo-liberal fantasy?”. Stuelke looked at the “antiblack acoustics” of the US occupation of Panama and analyzed the military’s selected playlist of 90s pop and rock (e.g. “Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee” by Tom Petty, and “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley) that blared through General Noriega’s abandoned Presidential Palace.

In contrast, McClanahan examined endless economic growth as a neo-liberal fantasy that rejects the prospect of long-term stagnation, even as economists from the eighteenth century onward have predicted its onset. They both gave eye-opening and accessible presentations that resonated because of their unique case studies.

Being surrounded with such innovative and thought-provoking work at FASI gave me new perspectives from which I can approach my dissertation and find ways to be in conversation with scholars in my field. Additionally, the Institute professionalized me by pushing me to network and engage with scholars and to make connections with fellow graduate students. I left Dartmouth College feeling reinvigorated and excited about my research. Given the immersive and collaborative environment I found myself in at FASI, it’s easy to see why any scholar would jump at the opportunity to return time and time again.

Editor's Note: Callie Gallo was a recipient of the 2016 GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship which provides support for Fordham graduate students to attend American Studies summer institutes both in the U.S. and abroad. For information on this the 2017 GSAS-American Studies Summer Fellowship, contact amerstudies@fordham.edu with "2016 GSAS-American Studies Summer Institute Fellowship" in the subject line!

”Man Enough?" – Scholar-Activist Jackson Katz to Speak Th•9/29•7pm on masculinity and the 2016 Presidential Campaigns

Internationally-recognized gender scholar and activist Jackson Katz to speak at Fordham (9/29, 7-9pm) on masculinity and the 2016 Presidential Election!

Please join American Studies for the kick-off event of our CAMPAIGN 2016 public programming series: "Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity" - a multimedia presentation by award-winning scholar-activist Jackson Katz.

In this richly illustrated talk — just days after the historic first debate of the 2016 general election campaign — Jackson Katz will explore the role that white male identity politics are playing in the race to elect potentially the first woman president of the United States.

Thursday, September 29, 7-9:00 P.M. (doors open at 6:30)
Fordham University Law School, Room 3-02
150 W 62 Street, NYC (Broadway/Columbus; A, C, D, B or 1 train to Columbus Circle) Free and open to the public.

Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is an educator, author, filmmaker and cultural theorist who is internationally renowned for his pioneering scholarship and activism on issues of gender and violence. He is co-founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program; creator of the award-winning educational documentaries Tough Guise and Tough Guise 2; and author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. He lectures widely in the U.S. and around the world on violence, media and masculinities.

This event is the kick-off event of the American Studies Fall CAMPAIGN 2016 Speaker Series. Stay tuned for news of our upcoming programming.

Sponsored by the American Studies Program, with the McGannon Communication Research Center and the Department of Communications and Media Studies,  Fordham University.

Fall 2015 Senior Symposium and Annual Celebration

Join us for the American Studies Senior Thesis Symposium on Friday, December 11, 11-4pm with a celebration and holiday party at 4pm.

2014 Senior Thesis Symposium & Holiday Party

Please join us for the 2014 American Studies Senior Thesis Symposium & Holiday Party. The symposium panels run from 11-4pm and the party commences at 4pm. All are welcome!

A Report from the 2014 Dartmouth “Futures of American Studies Institute”

By Christy Pottroff

The 2014 Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College was an intense, exhausting, and transformative week-long experience featuring twenty-seven plenaries by distinguished American Studies scholars. While the Institute benefited my scholarship, my academic networks, and my morale, in this post I want to focus on how one of the plenary lectures – CUNY Graduate Center Professor Duncan Faherty’s “’Revolution, molasses, spirits, and sugar’: Isaac Mitchell, Narrative Temporality and the Haitian Revolution,” transformed the way I understand my own work.

Professor Faherty, author of Remodeling the Nation: the Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858, began his plenary remarks by calling to mind Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant” that was then on display in Brooklyn.

"A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" by Kara Walker

Walker’s exhibition, Faherty noted, allows us to view simultaneous temporalities in the same space. If you’ve made the trip to Williamsburg to see the monumental sculptures, you can attest to this: the sugar figures recall the history of slave labor in the Caribbean and the soon-to-be-demolished factory stands as the once leading sugar refinery in the United States. While viewers take pictures with their phones the sugar babies’ bodies sweat molasses and break under their own weight. All at once the immense temporary exhibition speaks to race, slavery, womanhood, sexuality, commodity, consumption, labor, and economics from the late 18th century to the present moment.  Faherty observed how the exhibition forces viewers to confront the historical roots and routes of global economic production. The exhibition’s global economic subject matter and textured temporalities, he asserted, have an unexpected resonance with the early American novel.

Faherty’s lecture focused on these unexpected resonances by looking at the aesthetic practices of a neglected swatch of novels written in the United States between 1800-1820, among them Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum (1811). Like Kara Walker’s installation, these early 19th-century novels address slavery, revolution, and the global market with temporal moves that collapse, skip, and echo traditional narrative structure.  Faherty demonstrated how these temporal shifts are related to a contemporary preoccupation with revolution. References to the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and other insurrections fold into one another; in doing so, the novels suggest that these revolutions—what might seem like geographically and temporally disparate events—all arose from the same revolutionary energy. By bringing past histories of revolution together, these early novelists sought to arouse revolutionary action against present injustices. These early 19th-century novels are unfamiliar and, frankly, weird for twenty-first century readers—they are messy and disjointed, with unbelievable plots and geographically expansive settings. Duncan’s lecture suggested ways to “read” these novels and absolutely convinced me that the period deserves more consideration. It was an exciting talk, and it will shape my current research in two ways.

First, Duncan’s explanation of the novels’ aesthetic practices is directly relevant to texts that fall within the scope of my dissertation. As Duncan has shown, the recent attention to what Thomas Allen (2008) has called “America’s manifold temporal cultures” gives us the tools to read these texts. I won’t dismiss Anne Royall’s The Tennessean (1827) for its countless imprisonments, fast-forwards, flashbacks, mistaken identities, and unexpected reunions (one with a long-lost horse!). Instead, I will consider what these strange moments might say about an evolving and revolutionary national identity.

Perhaps even more energizing than Duncan’s model for reading was the scope of his lecture. By making a comparison between Kara Walker’s 2014 exhibition and novels from 1800-1820, he shows why the humanistic study of materials from the early nineteenth century matters. These peculiar novels were not merely distractions from reality in the early national period, and current scholarly engagement with them is not simply an act of isolated nostalgia. Instead, attentive and close reading of these texts—much like “reading” Kara Walker’s exhibition—can be central to understanding our reality. Early national novels speak to the complex history of race, revolution, and global exchange, factors that are relevant to contemporary national politics. Following Duncan Faherty’s example, I hope that my own work will succeed in drawing connections between historical texts and current events without sacrificing the complexities or specificities of either.

Editor’s Note: Christy Pottroff, a Fordham English Doctoral Candidate, attended the Summer 2014 Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute on a Fellowship awarded by the Fordham American Studies Program and GSAS. This is the second of two posts from Fordham participants in the Dartmouth Futures Institute and is part of our new online initiative to foster dialogues on and in American Studies.

Selfhood and Society in the 21st Century: A Report from the 2014 Dartmouth “Futures of American Studies Institute”

By Julia Cosacchi

Individuality and community are themes that lie at the heart of the field of American Studies. The 2014 Dartmouth Futures of American Studies offered many opportunities to reflect on how the emergence of social media and data-based decision-making affect the relationship between the individual and the community.

My academic interests involve community formation and identity, and one of my favorite aspects of the Institute was a distinctly 21st century experience of community: following the Twitter conversation generated by the hashtag #FASI14. Tweets throughout the plenaries distilled the presenters’ main ideas and posed questions that generated discussion in the Q&A period after each talk. Tweets in between sessions fostered professional and intellectual networking, highlighting the particular strain of humor shared among a hundred-plus American Studies scholars. Since the conclusion of the Institute, I’ve been considering the two communities generated over the course of the week—the live community and the virtual community—and so in this blog post I’d like to write about some of the approaches to contemporary issues of selfhood, representation, and community in a hyperconnected, data-driven world presented by speakers at the Institute.

Annie McClanahan presents
"Credit, Debt, and Social Personhood" /
Image courtesy The Futures of American
Studies Institute, Dartmouth University

University of Wisconsin Professor Annie McClanahan’s talk struck at the crossroads of the digital and the “real” world: she examined creative projects that critique our data-driven world and reclaim the possibility of self-representation despite the weight of the external and qualitative stereotypes imposed upon us. Cornell English Professor Michael Cobb’s talk addressed the problem of how to go about interpreting these new, digital modes of representation while preserving old modes of connection and relationship.

McClanahan’s talk “Credit, Debt, and Social Personhood” resonated in particular with the Institute’s graduate student majority—people who are all too familiar with the ways that contemporary culture judges individuals on the basis of their credit scores rather than their characters. Taking as her starting point the commercials from FreeScore [dot] com that “personify” healthy credit scores as robust, young, white men (and an unhealthy credit score as a balding, paunchy, masked, though still caucasian male), McClanahan traced the history of credit scoring and juxtaposed it with transformations in narrative representations of character in contemporary novels. Early methods of credit scoring relied on moral characteristics (is this person reliable, honest, trustworthy?) until the quantitative revolution in the late 1970s ushered in an interest in demonstrated behaviors (has this person made monthly payments regularly?). This shift led to the practice of using empirical data and mathematical algorithms to predict human behavior—in this case, the likelihood of an individual defaulting on their loans.

McClanahan likened this shift in credit scoring methods to shifting modes of narrative characterization in contemporary novels, drawing a helpful analogy to frame her reading of passages from Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010): old modes of credit scoring : realist novels : : new modes of credit scoring : contemporary novels. In the second half of her talk, McClanahan focused on contemporary artistic representations of debt such as Mathew Timmons’ print-performance-art work CREDIT (2009), “a book the author himself lacks the cash or credit to buy,” and Cassie Thornton’s art that visualizes and debt as a material object (for example, as a giant rock treated like a beloved pet, as in “How I Feel” [2012]).

Similar ideas about individuality in tension with digital and quantitative representation also appeared in Cobb’s presentation, “Your Love Life in Ruins,” which was a hybrid of academic lecture and performance art. Cobb assessed the state of desire in the twenty-first century’s “new mediated landscape”: a landscape that fosters the narcissistic impulses of the millennial generation. Cobb observed that digital media—Facebook, Tinder, Twitter—distance the objects of our desire even as they increase our intimacy with data-based representations of selfhood via painstakingly curated profiles and posts. In response, he proposed a new, slower-paced mode of interaction with these fragmentary self-representations. Cobb’s talk focused on the ways that an awareness of fragments, which make sense only when considered or imagined as parts of a larger whole, can help us to recalibrate our engagement with the swirling vortices of new media in today’s hyper-connected age. Advocating for the “interval of the statue,” Cobb suggested that instead of swiping and refreshing our screens and devices, we take time to pause in contemplation and reflection, allowing ourselves to more deeply engage with and more fully understand the whole that is only represented and implied by selected fragments.

In this new, digital age, the ways that we represent ourselves and others are changing and concerns about representation are taking on new meanings. One of my takeaways from the Futures Institute--and from #FASI14--is that representation and community formation are deep concerns of American Studies at every level and in every era. As McClanahan and Cobb both suggested in their talks, communities evolve in response to shifting modes of representation, and it is our task as scholars to level a critical eye at these changes if we are to bring our collective understanding up to speed.

Editor’s Note: Julia Cosacchi, a Fordham English Doctoral Candidate, attended the Summer 2014 Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute on a Fellowship awarded by the Fordham American Studies Program and GSAS. This is the first of two posts from Fordham participants in the Dartmouth Futures Institute and is part of our new online initiative to foster dialogues on and in American Studies.

American Studies Director Micki McGee Wins ASA Claude Award for Neurodiversity Article

American Studies
Director Micki McGee

The American Sociological Association's Claude Award was presented to Professor Micki McGee this weekend at the ASA's Annual Meeting in San Francisco.  McGee received the award for her essay on neurodiversity published in Contexts in Summer 2012.  The Claude Awards are designed to recognize "outstanding contributions to Contexts . . . as judged by the members of the magazine's editorial board." The award series is named after Claude Fischer, the ASA magazine's founding editor.  Please join us in congratulating Professor McGee on this honor.

Christina Greer's Black Ethnics Wins 2014 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award

American Studies and Political Science Professor Christina Greer’s Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford, 2013) has been awarded the National Conference of Black Political Scientists’ 2014 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award. One member of the awards committee noted that Professor Greer's scholarship fundamentally reorients the way that we must think about African American politics and race relations in the United States, observing that the book is “game changer in the fields of African-American politics and racial and ethnic politics.” Congratulations to Professor Greer on this exemplary professional recognition!

Anthropologist and American Studies Professor Ayala Fader Garners NSF Support

Professor Ayala Fader

Anthropologist and American Studies Professor Ayala Fader has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to support her project, "Religious Orthodoxy and New Media Technologies."  The project builds upon Dr. Fader's research on non-liberal Jews in Brooklyn and shows how the contemporary struggle over the Internet and other new media is part of a wider generational backlash against a "slide to the right."  More broadly, Fader's scholarship shows how new media acts as a lightening rod for wider changes and debates about morality, citizenship, difference, and shifting communal boundaries. Congratulations to Professor Fader!

Catch Christina Greer on NY1 News Tuesday Evening After the State of the Union Address

American Studies and Political Science professor Christina Greer
comments on the inauguration of Mayor Bill De Blasio, January 1, 2014.

American Studies and Political Science professor Christina Greer —who has been a featured commentator on NY1 News throughout the recent mayoral race — will provide analysis on NY1 again this coming Tuesday evening, January 28th, after the State of the Union address.

Tune in on Tuesday evening around 10pm (or just after the President's address wraps up) to catch her stellar commentary, or check out her recent Op-Ed in the New York Times. You can also follow Professor Greer on Twitter @Dr_CMGreer.

Greer is the author of the recent monograph Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013).

American Studies Senior Thesis Symposium & Annual Celebration | Monday, December 9th, 11-5:30

Please join us for all or part of the American Studies Senior Thesis Symposium and Annual Celebration next Monday, December 9th. The talks run from 11am to 4pm in the O'Hare Special Collections Room on the 4th floor of Walsh Library, and are followed by a gala reception that runs from 4 until 5:30.

Topics this year include: masculinity in the American West, hair straighteners and black identity, the rise of zombie dystopias in The Walking Dead, street art, the closure of Brooklyn's 5Pointz and other adventures in hip-hop culture, Irish dance and the Irish diaspora, the NFL and the U.S. military, the transfeminine prison experience, black Dandyism and street etiquette, disposable culture and the Solo cup, choral arrangements of spirituals, U.S. intervention in Peru, the perils of the "Hastert Rule," critical analyses of Breaking Bad, Beverly Hills 90210 and Gossip Girl, and much, much more.

Faculty discussion moderators will include Seminar Directors Professors Christiana Z. Peppard (Theology) and Dennis Tyler (English) along with Professors Margaret Schwartz (Communications), Kirsten Swinth (History), O. Hugo Benavides (Anthropology) and American Studies Director Micki McGee (Sociology).

Peppard on Pope Francis: ". . . he's a lot more Karl Marx's economic analysis meets Jesus in the underbelly of 21st century capitalism."

Christiana Peppard on Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium

Earlier this week Pope Francis released an apostolic exhortation denouncing economic inequality and free market ideology, noting that:

"While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation."

Fordham American Studies and Theology Professor Christiana Z. Peppard, who specializes in ethics, joined Bloomberg TV's Street Smart to discuss the Pope's Evangelii Gaudium and summed up the Pope's position: "He's not Milton Friedman — he's a lot more Karl Marx's economic analysis meets Jesus in the underbelly of 21st century capitalism." Peppard praised the potential of the Pope's exhortation to turn Catholic's toward "the broader swath of Catholic social teaching." See the full interview with Professor Peppard on Bloomberg TV.

American Studies Professor Dennis Tyler, Jr. on "What Ralph Ellison Can Teach Us About Trayvon Martin"

Ralph Ellison

Read American Studies Professor Dennis Tyler, Jr. on "What Ralph Ellison Can Teach Us About Trayvon Martin" at Feminist Wire. Tyler notes . . .

"In light of the recent decision by the school board of education in Randolph County, North Carolina, to ban Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man from their libraries—partly because of a parent’s complaint that the book is not age-appropriate material for teenagers and partly because one board member claimed he could not “find any literary value” in the text—I cannot help but reflect on a few of the key lessons I’ve learned from the novel, particularly as I attempt to cope with the verdict in the Zimmerman trial." Continue reading at The Feminist Wire . . .

Message from the New Director

Welcome back, American Studies Majors and Minors!

Dr. Micki McGee, 
Director, American Studies

I am thrilled to have been elected to direct Fordham’s Program in American Studies and looking forward to an exciting year ahead. I want to thank the American Studies affiliated faculty and the Executive Committee for their confidence in my leadership and for this honor.

As those familiar with the American Studies Program know, I am stepping into a position previously filled, in turn, by three remarkable scholars: Dr. Oneka LaBennett, Dr. Glenn Hendler, and Dr. Kirsten Swinth (and others before them!). Professor LaBennett recently accepted a position as Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. Congratulations to Dr. LaBennett, whose contributions to American Studies during her tenure were significant. LaBennett organized important programs on racial formations and forged alliances with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and with the African and American American Studies Program here at Fordham. We are fortunate that Professors Hendler and Swinth continue with us at Fordham, chairing the Departments of English and History, respectively. These three leaders have developed and sustained a remarkable program that is well-respected throughout the field for its interdisciplinary rigor and commitment to social and economic justice.

In the coming year, I plan to follow in the direction instituted by our previous leadership, continuing to raise the regional and national prominence of Fordham’s American Studies Program. I come to this position with a rich work experience as a curator and cultural critic and as an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, with an emphasis on the sociology of culture. My scholarly work includes research on artists communities, autism, and American self-improvement culture. I draw on theories and methodologies from sociology, digital humanities, media studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, American studies, curatorial studies, and art and aesthetic theory. As an instructor, I have taught numerous courses crosslisted in American Studies, among them Popular Culture (SOCI-2960), Art and Society (SOCI-3003), and Art Worlds (SOCI/ANTH-3004), and have advised countless graduate and undergraduate students working on American Studies topics. I have found the American Studies students enrolled in my courses at Fordham to be exemplary in both their intellectual curiosity and engagement in contemporary social issues.

Under my direction, American Studies students can expect that we will maintain the rigorous, supportive, and dynamic program that Professor LaBennett cultivated. This course of study will continue to prepare you to engage with the world beyond Fordham. I will draw on my years of experience in curatorial work at the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum, and New York City's Artists Space, and my research as a Draper Fellow at New York University, to continue the University’s mission of studying and serving New York City communities. We will also continue our tradition of collaboration with other departments and interdisciplinary programs including African and African American Studies, English, Theology, Women’s Studies, History, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Anthropology and Sociology, to name only a few.

This year I'll be teaching the Approaches to American Studies junior seminar, previously taught by Professor Hendler. Our work in that course will continue Professor Hendler's vision of dynamic interdisciplinary engagement and will focus on the topic of technology. We'll be using the Keywords Collaboratory for much of our research, and exploring some of the new techniques of analysis available through other advanced digital technologies. Our Senior Seminar will be directed by the remarkable team of Dr. Christiana Peppard (Theology) and Dr. Dennis Tyler (English), who will focus on the theme of "American Icons and Religiosity." (Check out Dr. Peppard's appearances on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry Show). Last, and possibly most important of all, our dedicated Graduate Assistant, Jamie Bolker from the Department of English, will play a vital role in keeping everything running smoothly for the Program.

I invite American Studies majors and minors, and those interested in learning more about the Program, to visit me in FMH 405D. You can stop by to chat. Or, better yet, if you want to be sure we'll have a relaxed time to talk, sign up for an appointment by visiting my office hours schedule online.

And be sure to make a note of our exciting upcoming September events: a lecture by Dr. Philip Deloria, on "American Indians in the American Popular Imagination," sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and co-sponsored by American Studies, English, History and Latin American and Latino Studies, will take place on Wednesday, September 25, 1:30, in the Butler Commons of Duane Library. 

And our Open House for Majors and Minors will take place Thursday, September 26th from 3:30-5:00pm with Dr. Deloria as our honored guest.  Refreshments will be served, conversation will be lively, and all are welcome!  Mark your calendars and join us for a wonderful afternoon.

For more detailed information on both of these events, visit our Program News and Announcements Page.

I look forward to meeting each of you, to many wonderful conversations, and to an exciting year ahead.

Warmly,

Dr. Micki McGee
Director, American Studies
Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology

Glenn Hendler on Gun Control

Read American Studies Affiliated Professor Glenn Hendler's thoughtful and important article "To the NRA, and to Legislatures that Submit to the NRA's Will":

I get the pleasure of guns; I really do. For a few summers in the 1970s and early 1980s I taught riflery at a summer camp. I was a pretty good shot myself, and I quite enjoyed target shooting. So much of the rest of summer camp involves running, yelling, team sports, kicking a ball, swinging a bat. Those things are fun, but the rifle range was a pleasurably different world, characterized by calm, control, patience, quiet. And, interestingly, it was not the all-male world one might expect. Girls were often better at target shooting than boys, perhaps because they didn’t tend to link the sport with the Dirty Harry and Rambo movies that were running through many boys’ heads. I liked my job. [To read more, click here . . .]

Oneka LaBennett Quoted in Elle Magazine

American Studies Director Professor Oneka LaBennett is quoted in the April issue of Elle Magazine, currently on newsstands. The issue has hip hop artist Nicki Minaj on the cover with a photo shoot and story about her inside. The story quotes LaBennett's Ms. Magazine article about Minaj. The whole article is not available online yet, but here is where LaBennett is quoted:

Anthropologist Oneka LaBennett, an associate professor of African and African American studies at Fordham University, has noted that the controversy extends far beyond loyal viewers of American Idol. "Minaj has become a lightening rod for conversations about race, youth, girls, and beauty standards," she wrote in response to some critics' claims that the rapper glamorizes traditionally white standards of beauty. "Minaj's prismatic wigs. . . defy the easy categories of 'black' or 'white' hair.  Like 'the black girl' herself, Minaj is a complex figure who 'flips' mainstream norms in a manner that often goes unrecognized." 

You can check out selected parts of the article and photo shoot with Nicki Minaj on Elle's website.

Christiana Peppard on the Melissa Harris-Perry show

Dr. Christiana Peppard

Fordham American Studies affiliated faculty member, Christiana Peppard discusses morality, the Pope, and gun control on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry Show! Check out Prof. Peppard's segments here:

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On "the rebirth of morality"

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"A real-world ethics test"and "practicing what you preach on a global scale . . ."