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Contributor's Notes

Matthew Axtell is Assistant Counsel for Environmental Law in the Washington , D.C. Headquarters office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (B.A. History, 1998) and the University of Virginia (J.D. Law, 2002). His essay on an unfinished canal in pre-Civil War Virginia was awarded the 2004 Levinson Prize by the Society for the History of Technology as the best unpublished debut in the History of Technology field.

Allison Bailey recently received her masters degree in American studies from Columbia University.

Jenna Berger is an M.A. student in Public History at the University of Houston . She is currently working on her thesis “Survivors' Journeys: Holocaust Survivors and the New Lives They Built in Houston.” She holds a B.A. in History from the University of California , Santa Barbara.

Grace Russo Bullaro is an Assistant Professor at City University of New York, Lehman College, where she teaches English, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary courses. She has published widely in the areas of film studies, literature, and popular culture and is also the editor of Beyond Life is Beautiful, a collection of essays on the films of Roberto Benigni. She is currently working on a book about Italian director Lina Wertmuller.

Lou Caravella is a masters candidate in the American Studies program at Columbia University . He holds a B.A. in Religion from Georgetown University.

Joanna Colangelo is pursuing her Master's degree in American cultural studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  Her primary writing and research interests lie in American film comedy, political satire and the reconciliation of American tragedy in American humor.  In 2002, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Skidmore College with an honors degree in American Studies.

John Davenport is pursuing an M.A. in geography at California State University, Northridge. He holds a B.A. in Geography from the University of Oklahoma.

Matt Delmont is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University , studying media, education, and youth in post-WWII United States. He holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard.

Ann Douglas is the Parr Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Before Columbia , Professor Douglas taught at Princeton from 1970-74—the first woman to teach in its English Department. She received a Bicentennial Preceptorship from Princeton for distinguished teaching in 1974, and a fellowship from the National Humanities Center in 1978-79 after publishing The Feminization of American Culture (1977). She received an NEH and Guggenheim fellowship for 1993-94. Her study Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's (1995) received, among other honors, the Alfred Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, the Lionel Trilling Award from Columbia University , and the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians. She has published numerous essays, articles and book reviews on American culture in papers and periodicals such as The New York Times , The Nation and Slate , and introductions for Little Women , Uncle Tom's Cabin , Charlotte Temple , Minor Characters , The Subterraneans , Studs Longian , and Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader . In Spring 2002, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her work in History. She is currently at work on a book, Noir Nation: Cold War U.S. Culture 1945-1960 .

Tony Dokoupil is pursuing his doctorate in Communications at Columbia University. Prior to school he worked as staff writer for a now defunct film weekly, and as a faulty media strategist for a humongous public relations company. In school, he edits the Columbia Journal of American Studies, and is a frequent contributor to the New Partisan, Publisher's Weekly and New York Press. He holds a B.B.A. from George Washington University.

Jaime Noble Gassman is a 2002-2006 Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellow pursuing a Ph.D in American Studies at the University of Kansas . She received her M.A. with honors from Kansas in 2004. Her thesis investigated the rise of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Rasing (NASCAR) as a national phenomenon, focusing on the role of corporate sponsorship and media coverage.

Perin Gürel  is a doctoral student in American Studies at Yale University . She holds a B.A. in American Studies and English from University of California at Berkeley , where she studied with Folklorist Alan Dundes. Her current work focuses on the counterfactual Turkish novel, Americanization, and nationalism.

Jason Heard is an M.A. candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Central Oklahoma .

Ed Ingebretsen is the Director of American Studies at Georgetown University and an Associate Professor of English. His books include Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (1996) and At Stake: Monsters and a Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (2001). He writes extensively on popular culture, gender studies, and religion. He is an ordained priest in the American Catholic Church.

Wallace Jackson is Professor Emeritus in the English department of Duke University. He has written on a wide variety of neoclassic and romantic writers from John Dryden to William Wordsworth, with special attention to the poetry of Alexander Pope and, in a series of essays, to Thomas Gray. His books include The Probable and the Marvelous: Blake, Wordsworth, and the Eighteenth-Century Critical Tradition (1978); Vision and Re-Vision in Alexander Pope (1983); and two editions of critical essays on Pope's poetry. He has published articles and reviews in thirty or more academic journals and essay collections. On the tercentenary of Pope's birth he was one of the plenary speakers at the Clark Memorial Library. From 1992 through 1996 he was chair of the English department and now lectures at the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement.

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer in New York. A former publishing columnist for The New York Observer and entertainment reporter for the New York Daily News, she now writes for The New York Times, Elle Decor, Culture and Travel, USA Today and others. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she holds an undergraduate degree in American History and Literature from Harvard, and a graduate degree in American Studies from Yale.

Stephen Milioti is a freelance editor and writer based in New York . He's written feature stories, essays, reviews, and cultural criticism for publications including New York Magazine, The New York Observer , Time Out New York , Salon , Publishers Weekly , USA Today and the Boston Globe . He has also recently worked on freelance editing projects at Time Inc., Conde Nast Publications and The New York Times . Milioti has a BA in journalism from NYU, an MFA in writing from The New School, and an MA in American Studies from Columbia . 

James M. Salem is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama . He has published plays, songs, articles, and essays and is the author of eighteen books, including several reference works on Drama in America . His most recent work, The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R&B to Rock ‘n' Roll, was published in 1999 by the University of Illinois Press as part of its Music in American Life Series. His research on 1950s American has appeared in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies , American Music , American Studies Journal , American National Biography , Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History , and the Encyclopedia of the Blues .

Kerry Soper is an assistant professor of humanities, classics, and comparative literature at Brigham Young University.

Maria Luisa Tucker is an associate editor of the Columbia Journal of American Studies and a staff writer at AlterNet ( www.alternet.org). She has written for publications across the southwest including Phoenix New Times, The Press-Enterprise, and Austin Monthly Magazine. Her writing in the Santa Fe Reporter has garnered several awards, including a national first place award from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Maria Luisa graduated with honors from Texas State University with a B.A. in journalism in 2000 and received a Master of Arts in American Studies from Columbia University in 2005.

Andrea Weiss is Associate Professor of Film/Video in the Department of Media and Communication Arts at The City College of New York. Her documentary films include Escape To Life,  Seed Of Sarah, A Bit Of Scarlet, Before Stonewall (which won two Emmy Awards), and International Sweethearts Of Rhythm, among others. She is the author of Paris Was A Woman (Harper Collins, 1995), Vampires And Violets: Lesbians In Film (Penguin, 1993), and the forthcoming In The Shadow Of The Magic Mountain, a dual biography of Erika and Klaus Mann for which she was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University . He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).

Erica Wolff recently received her B.A. in American Studies from Columbia University. She works as a paralegal for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and plans on entering law school in 2006.

Hai Zhang is a Chinese-born photographer working in architecture in New York City. His pictures have been exhibited in Washington, DC, New York City, and London.

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