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AMERICAN STUDIES FACULTY & STAFF |
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Program Adminstration
Delbanco, Andrew
Adams, Rachel
Darling, Angela
Board of Advisors
Alden, Jenna
Amdur, Robert
Doherty, Megan
Dyson, Erika
Hardesty, Michele
Klock, Sarah
Tamara Mann
Montas, Roosevelt
Serlen, Rachel
Shoop, Casey
Spiegel, Maura
Takayoshi, Ichiro
Thomas, Robert
Vlagopoulos, Penny
Interdepartmental
Committee of
Affiliated Faculty
Rachel Adams
Robert Amdur
Casey N. Blake
Alan Brinkley
Andrew Delbanco
Robert A. Ferguson
Eric Foner
Todd Gitlin
Farah Griffin
Alice Kessler-Harris
Roosevelt Montas
Sarah Phillips
Ross Posnock
Wayne Proudfoot
Rosalind Rosenberg
Maura Spiegel
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Program Administration
Professor Andrew Delbanco,
winner of the 2006 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia
Graduates, is the author of Melville: His World and Work
(2005), which won the Lionel Trilling Award and was a finalist
for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in biography. The Death
of Satan (1995), Required Reading: Why Our American Classics
Matter Now (1997), and The Real American Dream (1999)
were named notable books by the editors of The New York Times
Book Review. The Puritan Ordeal (1989) won the Lionel
Trilling Award. Among his edited books are Writing New England
(2001), The Portable Abraham Lincoln (1992), volume two
of The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (with Teresa Toulouse),
and, with Alan Heimert, The Puritans in America (1985).
Andrew Delbanco's essays appear regularly in The New York Review
of Books, The New Republic, Raritan, and other journals, on
topics ranging from American literary and religious history
to contemporary issues in higher education. In 2001, he was
elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and named by Time Magazine as "America's Best Social Critic."
In 2003, he was named New York State Scholar of the Year by
the New York Council for the Humanities.
Professor Delbanco has received fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a member of the
inaugural class of fellows at the New York Public Library Center
for Scholars and Writers. He is a trustee of the National Humanities
Center and the Library of America, and has served as Vice President
of PEN American Center. Since 1995 he has held the Julian Clarence
Levi Professor Chair in the Humanities at Columbia University.
His new book, Melville: His World and Work has just been
published in the United States (September, 2005) by Alfred A.
Knopf. It will appear in Britain under the Picador imprint,
and in German translation, to be published in 2007 by Hanser
Verlag.
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B.A, University of California,
Berkeley (1990); M.A., University of Michigan (1992); Ph.D.,
University of California, Santa Barbara (1997). Professor Adams
specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United
States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender,
and sexuality, and disability studies. She is currently writing
a book on cultures of the North American continent, which includes
materials from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Her first book,
Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination,
was published by the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2001.
She is also co-editor (with David Savran) of The Masculinity
Studies Reader, which was published by Blackwell Press in
2001. She is editor of a critical edition of Kate Chopin's The
Awakening (Fine Publications, 2002). Recent articles have appeared
in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History,
American Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Camera Obscura, GLQ, and
Signs. For three years she served as Managing Editor of Camera
Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. In 2004-2005
she was a Global Fellow at UCLA's International Institute.
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ROBERT AMDUR
Acting Associate
Director of American Studies |
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| Email: |
rla2@columbia.edu
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| Office: |
719 International Affairs
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| Office
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By appointment |
| Phone
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212-854-6698
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ANGELA
DARLING
Assistant
Director of American Studies |
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| Email: |
amd44@columbia.edu
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| Office: |
415
Hamilton Hall
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| Office
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Mon-Fri
9-5 |
| Phone
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212-854-6698
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Board of Advisors |
The Board of Advisors for American Studies includes
Professors Delbanco and Adams as well as the following personnel:
Jenna Alden is a Ph.D. candidate in US History. She graduated from
Wesleyan University in 2000, having majored in American Studies and
written a senior thesis about the design and marketing of the minivan.
After working for a few years as curatorial assistant at the Museum of
Television and Radio in New York, she started Columbia's Ph.D. program in
(20th-century) American History in September 2004. Her interests
include the history of psychology, 20th-century religious movements, and corporate culture. She is working on a history of postwar sensitivity training.
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Megan Doherty first became interested
in American Studies in the seventh grade. As the only American
child at an Australian school, classmates repeatedly asked her
to regale them with celebrity anecdotes, TV show spoilers, and
descriptions of cool products - and later, to debate the unwelcome
intrusion of these same things into Australian life. Her undergraduate
Honours thesis at the University of Melbourne considered American
tourism in Europe in the 1920s, particularly the ways individuals
pursued art, literature and intellectualism to gain the type
of cultural capital they felt their native land lacked. At Columbia
Ms. Doherty is exploring international attitudes towards mainstream
American culture, with particular focus on the ways individuals
construct identities with reference to (or in rebellion against)
dominant US notions of success, conformity and artistic expression.
She recently finished her Masters thesis on the architectural
and cultural repercussions of the Carnegie Endowment's 1923
reconstruction of a small town in northern France called Fargniers.
In her spare time, Ms. Doherty gives historical walking tours
of New York for Big Onion, explores Brooklyn restaurants, and
tries to forget she's a grad student for long enough to read
some novels.
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B. A., Mount Holyoke College (1999);
M. A., Columbia University (2004); M. Phil., Columbia University
(2006). Erika Dyson is a Ph.D. candidate in the North American
Religious History Program at Columbia and an instructor in the
University Writing Program. She specializes in nineteenth-century
American religious movements (such as the Spiritualists and
Latter-day Saints), intersections of religion and law in nineteenth
and twentieth century America, and the so-called battle between
religion and science.
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B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison (1999); M.A., Columbia (2000); Ph.D., Columbia (2007). Michele Hardesty specializes in twentieth-century U.S. literatures and cultures, with interests in literature and politics, U.S. countercultures, transnationalism, and travel. She is currently a Lecturer in Columbia College's Core Curriculum, where she teaches Literature Humanities. She is currently developing a book based on her dissertation, "The Ambivalent American: Political Travel Writing during the Cold War."
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B.A., Duke University (2001); M.T.S.,
Harvard Divinity School (2005). Tamara Mann is a Ph..D. candidate
in American History. After time spent in various departments,
including Philosophy, Political Science, Religion and History,
Tamara is thrilled to be involved in this interdisciplinary
program. Her research focuses on the way American cultural institutions
have imported, organized and returned—either voluntarily
or after judicial intervention—cultural objects. She is
interested in how cultural categories are formulated and modified
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Outside of
school, Tamara loves to cook, eat and dance. Her current obsessions
are P.T. Barnum, Arrested Development and any recipe by Ina
Garten.
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A.B., Columbia, (1995), M.A., Columbia
(1996), Ph.D., Columbia (2004). Roosevelt Montas specializes
in Antebellum American literature and culture, with a specific
interest in citizenship and American national identity. He has
also taught both Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization
in the Columbia College Core Curriculum, where he is a Lecturer.
His dissertation, "Rethinking America: Abolitionism and
the Antebellum Transformation of the Discourse of National Identity,"
won the 2004 Bancroft Award. He is currently writing a book
on the same subject.
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Rachel Serlen is a PhD candidate
in American Literature. She graduated from Yale in 2004 and
then spent two years working a succession of short-term jobs
- teaching English in France, measuring trees in New Hampshire,
farming in Vermont - before returning to academia. She won the
2007 Bunner Prize for her master's thesis, "The Grammar
of Democracy," which contends that underexamined aspects
of poetic form participate in the creation of national community
in nineteenth-century American popular verse. Current interests
include didactic fiction, the fin de siecle, and wilderness
literature.
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Casey Shoop is a Ph.D candidate
in the department of English and Comparative Literature. He
specializes in 20th century American literature and film, with
specific interests in urban theory and regional literature from
the American West. He is currently at work on a dissertation
about the California culture industry and issues of historical
representation. Specifically, he hopes to examine the question
of why history is so often imagined as endingfor better
or worse!in California. The work will include a whole gallery
of quintessential California characters, from writers and film-makers
to hacks and hucksters.
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Maura Spiegel teaches the Introduction
to American Studies, and various courses in contemporary American
Fiction, American literature of the Progressive Era and of the
Nineteenth Century. She also teaches and writes about American
film. She is the Co-Editor of the journal Literature and
Medicine, and she is involved with the Narrative Medicine
Program at Columbia's School of Physicians and Surgeons. She
has special interests in American photography, stand-up comedy,
the city in literature and film and the dynamics between history
and memory.
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Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University,
Department of English and Comparative Literature. B.A. The University
of Tokyo; M.A. The University of Tokyo. Ichiro Takayoshi is
a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature, U.S.
foreign policy, American political thought, and theory of translation.
He translated Don DeLillo's Underworld into Japanese (with Nobuo
Kamioka, Shinchosha, 2001). His translation of David Mitchell's
Number9Dream is in press (Shinchosha, 2006). He is currently
working on two new translations: Richard Powers' The Time of
Our Singing and Echo Maker (Shinchosha, forthcoming). He has
academic articles published on a wide range of American authors,
including William Burroughs and Henry James. He is currently
working on his dissertation titled "Empire on Paper: Isolationist
and Interventionist Literature in the United States, 1939-1941."
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Robert Thomas is a fourth-year,
history Ph.D. student. His interests include 20th century US
intellectual history, historiography and science. Before returning
to school, Mr. Thomas worked in various editorial jobs for major
US news outlets, including Newsweek and WNET13. He is a founder
of Candide Media (http://www.candidemedia.com)
and served as its president from 1997 to 2001. Mr. Thomas holds
a master's in international affairs from Columbia, a BA in history
and German from UC Davis, and is a US Navy veteran. He is a
native of Pennsylvania.
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Penny Vlagopoulos is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her major interests include 20th-century American literature and film, with an emphasis on narrative, politics, and nationhood; African American studies; 20th-century underground movements; and theories of race and gender. She holds an M.A. and M.Phil. in English from Columbia. She is currently at work on her dissertation, “Voices From Below: Locating the Underground in Post-World War II American Literature.”
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Interdepartmental Committee of Affiliated Faculty |
| Rachel Adams (English) |
| Robert Amdur
(Political Science) |
| Casey N. Blake (History) |
| Alan Brinkley
(History) |
| Andrew Delbanco
(English) |
| Robert A. Ferguson (Law) |
| Eric Foner
(History) |
| Todd Gitlin (Journalism
and Sociology) |
| Farah Griffin (English
and African-American Studies) |
| Alice Kessler-Harris (History
and Women's Studies) |
| Roosevelt Montas (Core
Curriculum and English) |
| Sarah Phillips
(History) |
| Ross Posnock (English
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| Wayne Proudfoot (Religion) |
| Rosalind Rosenberg (History) |
| Maura Spiegel
(English) |
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