American Studies

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Snapping Beans

Explores the role of the South in Black queer lesbian experiences of hurting and healing.

Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas

Examines the reception of Brazil’s most-canonized writer in the United States to shed light on questions of Blackness and hemispheric American experience.

Crossing Digital Fronteras

Demonstrates the liberatory potential of Latinx Digital Humanities at Hispanic-Serving Institutions and in Latinx Studies classrooms.

Reclaiming Time

Offers an interdisciplinary feminist framework for conceptualizing time and temporal justice as a form of reparation.

The Recursive Frontier

Shows how the myth of the American frontier persists as an ever-present, oppressive set of ideas about space, mobility, and race in the mid-twentieth-century literature of Los Angeles.

Utopian Imaginings

Challenges readers to use utopian thinking and practice to counter the conditions of the present and create an alternative future.

Early Jazz

A concise history of early jazz, from its major innovators to its unrecognized heroes.

The Biggest Thing in Show Business

A freewheeling, nonlinear exploration of the performing duo and their decade-long collaboration from 1946 to 1956.

Transforming One's Self

A fresh and rigorous interpretation of William James's ethical theory, showing how experimenting with life's opportunities can transform one's self and life.

Casseroles, Can Openers, and Jell-O

An “all-you-can-eat” tour of American life in the postwar period, told through the foods we loved.

Blues on Stage

Tells the story of classic blues singers from Ma Rainey to Bessie Smith.

New York's Great Lost Ballparks

Tells the story of New York's playing grounds, teams, and ballparks of yesteryear.

The Hard Sell of Paradise

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai’i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Nietzsche in Hollywood

Argues that Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch was a central concern of filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s.

No Jurisdiction

A deeply personal study of post-9/11 film that exposes how genre can frame the shifting meanings of the War on Terror and its impact on American law and culture.

Whiteness at the End of the World

Examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic films express white racial anxiety.

Drops of Inclusivity

A critical view of race relations on the island of Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1965.

Through the Periscope

Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.

Enduring Critical Poses

A celebration of Anishinaabe intellectual tradition.

Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism

Unique empirically grounded analysis of how audiences negotiate sexism and feminism across media, from popular television shows to dating apps.

Varieties of American Sufism

Participant-observation-based studies that explore a range of Sufi movements operating across the contemporary American religious landscape.

Funny How?

Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.

Rumble and Crash

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century.

Multicultural Poetics

Argues that multiculturalism and hybridity are key components of the nation’s poetry and its culture.

College Bound

Argues that first- and second-generation Jewish American writers had an ambivalent relationship with educational success.