Asim Ali (aali@umd.edu)
Asim Ali is a doctoral candidate. His research interests include cyberculture, media and television studies, race and slavery, and religion in American culture. He founded and directs the Project on Religion, Culture, and Globalization.
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Aaron Allen (aron1@ucla.edu)
Aaron is a first year Ph.D. Student in the Department of American Studies. He recieved his B.A. in Sociology and M.A. in African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include mixed race studies, intersectional approaches to black identity, visual/popular culture. He his specifically interested in examining mixed race male identity as it relates to notions of authentic black male masculinity.
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Portia Barker (portia.barker@yahoo.com)
Portia is a first-year Ph.D. student in American Studies. Her research interests include African-American material culture, African-American middle-class, and African-American Women's Studies. African American folk art and lore as well as contemporary pop culture including TV, film and music are also of interest. She earned a B.A. in History from Texas Christian University in 2006 and an M.A. in American Studies from The University of Alabama in 2008. Portia is a native of Houston, Texas.
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Darius Bost (bostdr4@gmail.com)
Darius Bost is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. His research interests include feminist theory, queer theory, masculinity studies, trauma studies, and black literatures and cultures. He is particularly interested in researching how black men negotiate their gender and sexual identities through traumatic experiences. He earned an M.A. in English from Rutgers University-Newark and a B.A. in Communication from Wake Forest University.
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Aaron Bryant (aebryant@umd.edu)
Aaron is curator for the James E. Lewis Museum of Art at Morgan State University. His honors include a Burroughs-Wright Fellowship with the Association of African American Museums, a Lord Baltimore Fellowship with the Maryland Historical Society, an Exhibition Research and Design Fellowship with the Historical Electronics Museum, and a Gertrude Johnson Williams National Literary Prize. His current curatorial projects include: “Most Daring Dream: Robert Houston Photography and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign,” a traveling exhibition of photographs taken during Houston’s Life Magazine coverage of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s March in DC; “Paper, Paint and Steel: The Art of Mel Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt and William T. Williams,” a collaborative project with the four artists; and “William H. Johnson: An American Modern,” a traveling exhibition and catalog organized in association with the Smithsonian. Aaron has written for Black Enterprise, The Crisis Magazine, Africana.com, the New England Theatre Journal, Black Issues Book Review and Callaloo. He received his Bachelors in History from Duke and his Masters in Fine Arts from Yale.
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Cornelia Cody (cornelia.cody@nyu.edu)
Cornelia is a Ph.D. student. Her research focuses on humor, specifically New York City humor. Her dissertation will be on the humor elements of the New York City personal experience narrative. Cornelia is an adjunct instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She teaches a course titled “What’s So Funny About New York?” for the Undergraduate Drama department.
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Maddy Fickes (mfickes@umd.edu)
Maddy is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. She received her Bachelor's degree in American Studies from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in May of 2007. Her primary research interests surround the disadvantages shared by young people growing up in extremely rural and/or urban settings that stem from the similarly low incomes of many families in such areas. In order to stay engaged and motivated in her work, she draws on her experiences surrounding her own upbringing in a tiny Pennsylvania town and her move to Baltimore to attend college. Also, she loves working face to face with people, and as a result, relies on ethnographic methods for most of her research projects.
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Bethany M. Gibson (bgibson1@mail.umd.edu)
Bethany is a second year Masters candidate. Her scholarly interests are in gender studies, popular culture, and ethnography. However, she plans to focus her scholarly article on pet ownership - particularly dogs - and and why people perceive themselves to own pets. She would also like to see how issues of identity and control impact dog ownership and play a role in the relationship between owner and pet. Bethany completed her Bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in American Studies and Women’s Studies. Originally from Maryland, she is excited to have such a fantastic program so close to home.
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Kenyatta Dorey Graves (kdg1906@umd.edu)
Kenyatta Dorey Graves is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. His research interests include African American identity politics and the oral, written, and visual representations of black same-gender-loving men. Kenyatta’s general interests include literature, film, pop culture, folklore, and material culture. He earned a BA from George Mason University and an MFA from the University of Maryland. Kenyatta has published literary criticism and fiction and is a self-employed K-12 education consultant, specializing in curriculum, instruction and professional development for various school districts across the nation.
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Beth E. Graybill (bgraybill@LMHS.org)
Beth is ABD in American Studies. She is working with John Caughey
on her dissertation,"Negotiating Business: the Strategies of Amish Women
Entreprenuers in the Lancaster County, Pa., Tourist Market." Her
research interests include gender and material culture, women and religion,
women's work and small-business entreprenuership. Beth is employed as director of the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society in Pennsylvania.
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Daniel Greene (dan.greene10@gmail.com)
Dan is beginning the American Studies Ph.D. in Fall 2010. He received his B.A. in English and Psychology from the University of Maryland and is excited to return. After graduation, Dan worked as a counselor at a local mental health clinic. His research interests include visual culture, the history of science and technology, media studies, and social scientific approaches to digital media and its users. Dan is a University Flagship Fellow who tries to find time for the good things in life: cooking, comic books, soccer, and all things D.C.
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Elizabeth M. Hagovsky (sinisterwisdom@yahoo.com)
Elizabeth is an M.A. student with interests in film theory and production,
with a specific focus on documentaries and ethnographic film.
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Robb Hernandez (robbher3@umd.edu)
Robb Hernandez is a Ph.D. student in the program. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a B.A. in Ethnic Studies and a B.S. in Broadcast Journalism. He also holds a M.A. in Film and Television from UCLA. His research focuses on Queer Latina/o Visuality, Art Museum Preservation/Exhibition and Chicana/o Avant-Gardism and Contemporary Art in L.A. He is the Founder and Director of the Latina/o Studies Working Group, and pursuing a certificate in Museum Scholarship and Material Culture. He has taught courses in Black Social Protest Movements, Chicana/o History, Culture and Theory, and American Television History.
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Douglas Ishii (dishii@umd.edu)
Douglas S. Ishii is a Ph.D. student who is approaching candidacy. He met the requirements for the Critical Theory Certificate in spring 2010. His research engages the broad fields of aesthetics, affect theory, critical ethnic studies, pedagogy, and popular culture. He has presented work on a range of subjects, including student organizations, television, American literature, and popular music at local, regional, and national conferences. He graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and completed work in the Cultural Studies program at Claremont Graduate University. Before entering the program, Douglas worked as an academic counselor, and completed a research internship with the National Japanese American Historical Society. Douglas is currently a graduate instructor for the department, and serves as one of the 2010-2011 Honors Humanities Teaching Fellows. His pastimes include providing a running commentary on bad TV, acting as the appointed '08 cohort social chair, assisting in editing the department newsletter, and forever searching for great places to eat.
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Bailey Kier (bkier@umd.edu)
Bailey is a Ph.D. student. His research interests include the
intersections of gender, class, race, and sexuality. He focuses on the
connections, contradictions, and meshing of queer and working class cultures.
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Tiffany King (tking@umd.edu)
Tiffany King is a first year doctoral student. Her research areas include Black women's activism, historical memory, Black feminism, transnational feminism and state theory. She holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA from the University of Toronto.
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Rebecca Krefting (Beck) (beckortee@starpower.net)
Rebecca Krefting, who goes by Beck, is a doctoral candidate whose research focuses on the comic performances of women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her dissertation, “Charged Performances: Economy and Motive in Women’s Humor,” explores the way women’s comedic discourses negotiate citizenship in the US. She earned a BA in English and Psychology at the University of Alabama, Huntsville and an MA in Women’s Studies at Ohio State University. She is currently the Program Director for the African-American Studies Department, a graduate instructor in American Studies and African American Studies and works as co-director for the Comedy Club, a middle-school after school program that teaches young people how to write and perform sketch comedy and improv. Her essay, “Who Knew Public Scholarship was so Fun(ny)?: Practical Applications Within and Beyond the Academy,” will be published in Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy this fall. Also forthcoming is her essay, “Laughter in the Final Instance: Nation and Economy in Humor,” which is included in the edited collection The Laughing Stalk (2009). She has presented her research nationally and internationally and was a PAGE Fellow for Imagining America (2007). When she’s not cracking jokes or studying them, she enjoys swimming, biking, hiking, yoga, riding horses, cooking and eating good food, walking her dogs and singing in the shower (badly).
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Henrike Lehnguth (hlehnguth@umd.edu)
Henrike Lehnguth is a doctoral candidate in American Studies, whose research interests focus on film studies and visual culture with an emphasis on representations of Arabs and Muslims, film realism and the blurring of fiction and documentary materials, global cinema, and issues of power and violence. Her dissertation, "Into the Dark Chamber of Terror: ‘The War on Terror’ in Visual Culture" theorizes fiction film engagements with key events that have come to define the Bush Adminstration's "war on terror." Her scholarly publications include an article, entitled "Sleepers, Informants, and the Everyday: Theorizing Terror and Ambiguity in Benjamin Heisenberg's Schlaefer," which was published in the anthology From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After In Fiction and Film From Outside the US, as well as an article, entitled "Trans/lating the War on Terror for Turkey: The United States, Honor and The Valley of the Wolves,” which appeared in the anthology Trans/American, Trans/oceanic, Trans/lation: Issues in International American Studies. She also teaches in American Studies and has worked as the Coordinator for Graduate Student Programs at the Center for Teaching Excellence. She has earned an equivalent of a B.A. at the Free University of Berlin and a master's degree at the University of Texas in Austin.
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Justin Maher (justintmaher@gmail.com)
Justin Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies program. Justin’s research interests include cultural landscapes, urban studies, popular culture, queer studies, and critical studies of difference. His dissertation uses textual and ethnographic analysis to examine how rhetorics of racial, ethnic, sexual, and class ”diversity" are employed in the inequitable development of Washington D.C. He has taught courses in U.S. popular culture, cultural landscapes, new media, and social theory for both the American Studies Department and the Honors Humanities program. Justin received a B.A. in English and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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Shayna Maskell (shaynamaskell@yahoo.com)
Shayna Maskell is studying for her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Maryland, writing her dissertation on the Washington D.C. punk rock scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the lens of social movement and subcultural theory. She has previously been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, presented papers on Patti Smith and music as a form of social change, “Bad Brains and the Construction of Identity,” “Class and Race in D.C. Punk Rock,” and “The World Social Forum and Post-Colonialism.” Prior to her time at Maryland, she received her master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California, where she taught writing for three years and received two teaching awards.
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Jarah Moesch (www.thejarahtree.com)
Jarah Moesch
is a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds a BA from University of Maryland and an M.F.A. in Integrated Media Art from Hunter College. She is also affiliated with Digital Cultures and Creativity, a Living-Learning program in the Honors College, and is a HASTAC Scholar for 2010-2011. Her current work is grounded in queer theory and intersectionality and uses performance as a methodology to interrogate how shifting internal identities and external histories are produced through non-visible social networks made present through mobile technologies. Jarah’s artwork revolves around concepts of gentrification, privacy, and performance of gender, identity, sexuality in everyday life through the intersections of power and ritual in public space. Her artwork – from online and street-level games, to video art and performance – has been exhibited worldwide.
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Johonna McCants (johonnam@yahoo.com)
Johonna McCants is a Ph.D. student and graduate
instructor whose work focuses on youth organizing, social movements,
and incarceration.
Her research investigates juvenile justice organizing among African-American
and Latino youth. Johonna also serves as a founding coordinator
of the Carceral Studies Working Group at the University of Maryland,
an interdisciplinary group engaged in research, education and activism
related to the incarceration of marginalized communities. She holds
Bachelors degrees in Journalism and Interdisciplinary Studies from
the University of Missouri-Columbia.
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Teresa Moyer (tsmoyer@gmail.com)
Teresa Moyer is a Ph.D. student in American Studies who is pursuing a certificate in Museum Scholarship and Material Culture Studies. She holds a B.A. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College and a M.A.A. in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland. Her current research focuses on the interpretation of the past and present at museums and parks. Other academic interests include the epistemology of material culture, curatorial method and theory, the question of relevance, and the application of archaeological resources to social justice issues. She has conducted numerous public history and archaeology projects with museums, national parks, and local historical organizations in the mid-Atlantic region. Her favorite cookie is chocolate chip.
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Christine Muller (cmuller1@umd.edu)
Christine is a doctoral candidate in her sixth year. Her primary interests in life writing, popular culture, and literature explore how people generate meaning from everyday life through narrative. Specifically, she is interested in the cultural implications of experiencing and witnessing traumatic events such as September 11, which her dissertation, “The World is Old and New Again: Cultural Trauma and September 11,” explores in terms of subjectivity, agency, and responsibility under conditions of precarious and vulnerable knowledge and power. Her publications include “Witnessing the Fall: September 11 and the Crisis of the Permeable Self,” a chapter in the 2009 edited collection, The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: September 11 and Beyond; “Spotlight Essay/Visual Culture: Falling Man by Richard Drew and Related Images,” a short essay in the 2010 edited collection September 11 in Popular Culture: A Guide; and “Power, Choice, and September 11 in The Dark Knight,” a chapter in the forthcoming edited collection Film and Television Superheroes in the New Millennium. She has taught Introduction to American Studies, Diversity in American Culture, and Terrorism and Popular Culture at the University of Maryland, College Park and Multicultural America at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has a B.A. in history and psychology and an M.A. in English from Villanova University, where she also spent five rewarding years as Assistant Director of the University's interdisciplinary Honors Program.
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Kristina Nies (kristina.nies@gmail.com)
Kristina is a first year student in the program. She received her M.A .in Gastronomy from Boston University and B.A. in History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests involve looking at how persons transitioning genders (re)negotiate foodways.
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Krista Park (kristamariepark@gmail.com)
Krista M. Park’s dissertation will examine lifestyle, constructions of identity, and American leisure practices through the lens of the marathon. Her methodologies include ethnography, discourse analysis, and spatial analysis using GIS. Tangential scholarly interests include methods of urban and social planning that encourage sustainable, healthy communities. Professionally, Krista is a project manager for geographic programs for the 2010 Census, and she plans to build a career in government project management and demographic research.
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Manon Parry (parrym@mail.nlm.nih.gov)
Manon Parry is curator of the exhibition Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health at the National Library of Medicine. She has taught business history at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and is co-editor, with Ellen S. More and Elizabeth Fee, of Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Her research interests include disability and the history of medicine, and she is currently writing her dissertation on the use of mass media to promote family planning, 1914-1984. View the exhibition online at: http://apps.nlm.nih.gov/againsttheodds/index.cfm
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Gabriel Peoples (gpeoples@umd.edu)
Gabriel Peoples studied English and African studies at The University of Michigan. He went on to study Africana studies at Cornell University. He is interested in researching and actively participating in Black expressive subcultures. As far as teaching, he would like to engage in innovative ways to integrate creative expression with the academic classroom.
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Christopher J. Pérez (chripere@gmail.com)
Christopher is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of American Studies. His work has been largely informed by poststructuralist thought, queer theory, and cultural studies scholarship. Christopher holds degrees in English Literature, Women's Studies, and American Studies. His current research interests include transnationalism, ethnography, and intersectional approaches to identity. Christopher's specific research in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland is an ethnographic exploration of gay men living in the US under political asylum. Christopher also teaches "Introduction to Popular Culture and Cultural Studies" in the Department of American Studies and is the GSG representative for American Studies.
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Dawn Reynolds (dawnrey@yahoo.com)
Dawn is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate instructor in the Department of American Studies. Her dissertation is tentatively titled, "Narratives of Trauma in Contemporary Women's Scrapbooks." Dawn has presented papers at several regional and national conferences, and recently published an article in Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of the National Sexuality Resource Center. She has taught several courses for the department, including "Introduction to American Studies," "Diversity in American Culture," and classes for the Freshman First and Academic Achievement Programs. Dawn holds a Bachelor's degree in American Studies from Brandeis University.
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Paul Saiedi (psaiedi@gmail.com)
Paul is new to the east coast, hailing from Southern California and is a first year PhD. Student who recently received his Masters Degree in American Studies from the California State University of Fullerton. He is currently pursing research on the history and experiences of Middle Eastern Americans and the ways that they have been situated and left out of various discourses in American thought. His broader academic interests are centered on how marginalized communities or communities labeled as such, resist power structures and embody their resistance in art.
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Jennifer
Stabler (js482@umail.umd.edu)
Jennifer is a Ph.D. student concentrating on historical archaeology,
cultural landscapes, and material culture. She is interested in the
formation and development of rural communities in Central Texas and
the role of women, children, and ethnic minorities in the farm economy.
She also works in the History Department for the Combined
Caesarea Expeditions, an archaeological project on the coast of
Israel, under the direction of Prof. Kenneth G. Holum.
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Heidi Temple (htemple@umd.edu)
Heidi is a fourth-year Ph.D. student who has completed the Women's Studies Certification. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Heidi graduated with a B.S. in Education - English and Communications from Kutztown University and taught high school English, Speech and Theatre for 7 years. She left teaching to return to graduate school full time and earned an M.A.in Theatre Studies and a Museum Studies Certification from Florida State University in 2004. Her current work focuses on Disability Studies and questions of identity and othering in popular culture (tv, film, and theatre), as well as exploring the idea of the body as a public space. Her dissertation work explores the rhetorics of American feminism from a Disability Studies perspective.
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Catherine Stewart Thomas (sbcsthomas@yahoo.com)
Catherine is a Master's student concentrating on 18th and 19th
century material culture and historic preservation. She also has full-time
job as Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts at the Baltimore Museum of
Art.
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Judith Church Tydings (jtydings@xecu.net)
With an MA in History from St. John's University, New York, Judith is ABD in American Studies working with John Caughey. In her eighth decade herself, her dissertation, Yankee Women Coming of Age: Life Histories and Cultural Significance (the working title) explores the foreign terrain of old age with some old women. Thirty years after de Beauvoir's work, "we're still pioneering - this must be rough country indeed." (L. Marshall NWSA Journal 4/2006) Judith's interests include the nascent field of Age Studies, feminist gerontology, New England Studies, and contemporary American memoir.
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Maria E. Vargas (mvargas5@umd.edu)
Maria is a first year Ph.D. student in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a Minor in Spanish from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM. Her research interests include intersectional approaches to identity in contemporary diasporic Latina lesbian communities that span different "borders." Maria has conducted primary research in New Mexico and Chicago including an ethnographic project with Latina lesbians in the Southwest border (El Paso/Juarez and rural New Mexico and Mexico) and a focus group study with Latina lesbian students in Urbana-Champaign that examined representations of "lesbians" in popular culture. She is currently working towards expanding her research base by incorporating issues of immigration among Latina lesbians in major metro poles including Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago, IL and examining how meanings are made within those spaces.
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Maria I. Velazquez (maria.i.velazquez@gmail.com)
Maria Velazquez' research interests include constructions of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary media. She also works on issues related to the mechanisms of collective memory as they pertain to communities of color. She interned this summer at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and will be working with the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity during the academic year. She is entering her second year in the program.
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Jessica Walker (jessica.kenyatta.walker@gmail.com)
Jessica is a first year Ph.D. student in American Studies. She received her B.A. from Bowdoin College in Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies in 2009. Jessica’s research interests focus on exploring the relationship between black women and their preparation, cooking, and consumption of “soul food.” This exploration is in response to the persistence of the trope of the magical Black female that cooks effortlessly without recipe. This trope defines images of Black womanhood across discipline, historical period, and source. It is the current lack of any modern ethnographic account of how Black women relate to the food they prepare that is responsible for the constant perpetuation by scholars of sometimes homogenous and uncritical images of Black womanhood. She aims to delve into the historical and social context in which these tropes were created, and use ethnographic methodologies in uncovering how, in the practices of everyday life, Black women negotiate these tropes when they prepare, cook, and talk about food. Other interests include material culture, Black Feminist Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Feminist Theory. Jessica is a native of Cleveland, Ohio.
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Elise White (elisemwhite@gmail.com)
Elise White is a doctoral candidate whose interests include youth
organizing and activism, ethnography, and the school-to-prison
pipeline. She is currently conducting dissertation research with
young women in an alternative-to-incarceration program in New York
City. She also designed and runs a youth organizing program for young
people who live in the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, is a member of the
New York Juvenile Justice Coalition, and sits on the junior board of Advocates for Children of New York.
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Amelia Wong (awong22@umd.edu)
Amelia Wong is a Ph.D. candidate. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Museums, Social Media, and the Fog of Community," is an interrogation of how museums are constructing community through social media in the interest of democratic reform. Other academic interests include public history, the collecting impulse, and concepts of space; non-academic interests involve the pursuit of the perfect pie, a balanced handstand, good sightlines at concerts, and more time to read books not related to her research. She holds a B.A. in History/Art History from UCLA and has held several positions in humanities research in Los Angeles and the mid-Atlantic area. She currently works full-time managing social media outreach at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was the inaugural Field Visiting Scholar at the National Building Museum.
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