Cornell University Registrar

Program Description

Although there is no formally structured graduate program in American studies, research graduate students in any field at Cornell can elect American studies as a minor field. In order to declare a graduate minor in American studies, students should discuss how an interdisciplinary minor in American studies may fit into their overall interests with an American studies faculty member. They must also make sure that declaring a minor in American studies is compatible with the requirements of their major field and secure the approval of their special committee chair. They will have to constitute their special committee so that one special committee member represents American studies. Once this has been determined and a minor field member selected for their committee, students must also apply at https://asianamericanstudies.cornell.edu/aasp-graduate-minor-application. 

This is a minor field. Application for admission is made only to the major fields. After matriculation, a student may select minor subjects from the major or minor fields.

Graduate Minor Field Requirements

For students in graduate research degrees, earning a “minor” in a specific subject or concentration is not explicitly linked to the completion of coursework but is instead defined by the student’s special committee. Faculty serving on the student’s special committee each represent a concentration. Because many graduate faculty are active in more than one graduate field or academic discipline, students and faculty should be clear about which concentration will be represented when a committee is formed.

Faculty

Begum Adalet

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Empire, Racism, Radical Internationalism, 20th century political thought

Chloe Ahmann

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Environmental anthropology, political anthropology, STS, urban history, climate change, waste, racism, time and event, social movements, late industrial US, ethnographic theory

Misha N. Ailsworth

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Black girlhood studies, developmental and community psychology, education, the impact of families, communities, and schools in shaping Black girls’ mental health and wellness using a cultural-assets perspective

Edward E. Baptist

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American studies

David Alexander Bateman

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Democratic institutions, including legislatures and political rights, and as well as on ideas and ideologies of democracy, race, and racism.

Richard F Bensel

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American political development; state formation; comparative political economy; the United States Congress

Jeremy H. Braddock

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: 20th century american literature and culture, modernism, cultural institutions, media and book history

Mary Pat Brady

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies

Derek S Chang

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Asian American, African American, and 19th Century U.S. history; U.S. race relations; American religion

Eric T Cheyfitz

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American studies

Michell Chresfield

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Black and Indigenous history, histories of race-making in the 20th century, histories of medicine and science, and histories of gender and sexuality.

Monica Cornejo

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Human (im)mobility; Interpersonal communication processes; Immigration incarceration systems; Advocacy Communication; Health & wellbeing

Ambre Dromgoole

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Twentieth and twenty-first century african diasporic music traditions, black feminist thought and sound, africana religions, performance and sound studies, black sacred sound, popular music studies

Patricia Ekpo

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Black visual art, black critical and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, racial ecologies and spatiality

J. Ellen Gainor

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American Drama and Theatre; Women and Theatre

Maria Cristina Garcia

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: immigration and ethnic history; folklore

Shannon Marie Gleeson

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Immigration, labor, inequality, law and society

Lawrence B. Glickman

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Cultural, intellectual and labor history

Sabine Haenni

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American cinema, silent film, mass culture, cinema in the context of other media (including theater), theories of race and ethnicity, immigrant cultures, urban studies

Rebeca L. Hey-Colon

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Afro-Latinx and Latinx studies, Caribbean studies, Afro-diasporic religions and spirituality

Juliana Hu Pegues

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, women of color feminisms, queer of color critique.

George Hutchinson

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American modernism, African-American literature, race in American culture, Walt Whitman

Karen Jaime

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: film and culture; spoken word poetry; hip-hop theatre studies; critical race theory; women of color feminisms and queer color critique

Karim-Aly S. Kassam

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Indigenous and place-based ecological knowledge, human ecology, Ethnobiology, Biocultural diversity, Stewardship, Ecological calendars, Pluralism, Ways of knowing, Food sovereignty and security, Medicinal plants (health sovereignty), Participatory action research, Climate change impacts and adaptation, Natural resource policy and management, Development studies, Indigenous land and marine use mapping, Gender analysis, Arctic social science, Social history of Muslim societies, Social change in indigenous communities, Community economic development

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: US political and social history after World War II; the welfare-state and mass-incarceration

Ruth Lawlor

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: U.S. foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, history of war and armed conflict, global history, gender & sexuality, imperialism

Alexander Livingston

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: democratic theory, american pragmatism, 19th - 20th century american political thought

Mary Loeffelholz

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Nineteenth - and early twentieth-century U.S. literature, American poetry, transatlantic literary relations in the nineteenth century, history of U.S. higher education.

Kate McCullough

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American studies

Tejasvi Nagaraja

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Modern American history, labor & capitalism, race & carceral, war & empire

Mendi Lewis Obadike

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Sound Art, Sound Studies, Black Studies, Conceptual Art, Media Art.

Paul A Ortiz

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Race and ethnicity; labor; African American and Latinx Histories; American literature; social movements

Jon William Parmenter

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: American studies

Isabel M Perera

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: How politics shape the social policies, labor markets, and overall economies of affluent democracies, focusing on the United States and Western Europe.

Xavier Pickett

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Africana Religions; Theories and Methods of (Black) Religion; Black and Womanist Theologies; Ethics (and what some call) Moral Philosophy; Political Theory/Philosophy; Emotions & Affect Theory (and what some call) Moral Psychology; Pragmatism; Aesthetics; New Religious Movements; Sociology and Social Theory; African American Philosophy; Science & Technology, particularly machine learning; Black Radicalism (and what some call) Nationalism.

Benjamin Piekut

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: experimental music, improvisation, cultural studies, jazz, popular music and sound studies

Riche D. Richardson

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: African American and American literature, Toni Morrison, black/Africana studies and civil rights history; Southern studies; race, gender and sexuality studies, black feminism, masculinities and femininities; cultural studies, including black popular culture, film studies, Oprah and Beyoncé studies; critical theory; and the body.

Aaron J. Sachs

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: american culture, environmental studies

Nicholas G. Salvato

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: american cinema and media; 20th century theatre and performance; television and popular culture; feminist and queer theory

Shirley R Samuels

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: 18th and 19th century American fiction; American women writers

Casey Schmitt

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Early America, Slavery, Caribbean History, History of the Atlantic World, Legal History, Imperialism, Comparative Colonialism, Maritime History, Smuggling and Illicit Economies

Anna Shechtman

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: 20th and 21st century media industries, film and television studies, feminist and queer theory, critical theory

Samantha Noelle Sheppard

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Film and media studies; Black cultural production; sports media; gender studies

Camille Suarez

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: 19th century U.S.; race making; ethnic history; settler colonialism; environmental history; public history

Emma R Teitelman

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Labor and working-class history; political economy and capitalism; the history of the US state

Lindsay C Thomas

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Contemporary american literature and culture; digital humanities; cultural studies; media studies; sociology of literature

Sofia A. Villenas

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: anthropology of education, critical race studies, Latina/Chicana Germanisms, civic education, ethnography and narrative

Sara L. Warner

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: performance studies; theories of sex, gender and sexuality; theater and social change; the American prison system

Kristen J Warner

• Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
• Concentrations: American Studies: American studies
• Research Interests: Racial representation at the levels of industrial practices such as casting as well as the implications of employment for creative professionals both in front and behind the camera.