American Studies

Thesis

Thesis work is guided and advised by the American Studies Committee.

Selected Past Theses

2015-16

  • Simon Gonzalez
    Cycles of Colonial Control: Language, Representation, and the Transnational Subject in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  • Laura Klinkner
    Unspeakable Things (Un)spoken: Interpretations of America’s Slave History from Margaret Garner to Beloved

  • Ben Steele
    The Rise of Walkability: Assessing the Socioeconomic Impact of the New Urbanist Paradigm

  • Katharina Schwaiger
    Of Homes and Homelessness: De-domestications in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Rose Ausländer

2014-15

  • Ben Steele
    The Rise of Walkability: Assessing the Socioeconomic Impact of the New Urbanist Paradigm

  • Katharina Schwaiger
    Of Homes and Homelessness: De-domestications in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Rose Ausländer

2010-11

  • Jamison Wyatt Loos
    Integration or Revolution? Robert F. Kennedy, The Black Panther Party, and the Economics of Race, 1965, 1968.

2008-09

  • Devin Thomas McGeehan Muchmore
    American Citizens of the Sea: Maritime Labor, The Seamen’s Act and the Languages of Citizenship, 1890-15.

2007-08

  • Amy Elizabeth Lawrence
    Romare Bearden, August Wilson, and the Blues: A Tradition of Aesthetics and on Aesthetics of Tradition in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson.

2006-07

  • Robin Socolar Blanc Public School Choice: Institutional Change and Educational Organizationin Historical Perspective.

  • Dana Wiggins Logan The Greatest Churches Have Yet to Be Organized: Architecture and Religion at the Drive-In Church.

2002-03

  • Claire Wells Dennerlein
    "Let Us All Be Kissing-Friends": Tracing a Common Thread through the Fiction and Anthropological Writings of Zora Neale Hurston.

2000-01

  • Adam Harris Adler
    Blues Figure and Ground: Romanticism Meets Social Realism in Analysis of Blues Musician Robert Johnson.

  • Sarah Dorothy Wald
    (Re)Imagining Nature and Humanity's Relation to It: Nature and Identity in New Visions of the American West.

1998-99

1996-97

  • Amanda Levinson
    Mujeres, Chingadas and Atravesadas: The Virgin of Guadalupe, La Malinche, and the Creation of an Alternate Chicana Aesthetic Tradition
    » Thesis Abstract

1995-96

  • Ben Harris
    Ambivalence and Multivalence: Christopher Columbus in the Contested Historical Memory of 19th-Century America
    » Thesis Abstract

  • Sara Padilla
    To Choose is a Jailbreak : an Oral History of a Mexicana
    » Thesis Abstract

  • Michael Kim
    Poetry and an Asian American Textual Coalition
    » Thesis Abstract

1994-95

  • Amy Isabel Catania
    (Re)membering African American History and Literature in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred
    » Thesis Abstract

  • Moloy Good
    "Freedom Now" to "Black Power": The Civil Rights Movement in Consensus and Conflict from 1954 to 1968