American Studies Fall 2011
Welcome to the first edition of the American Studies Department's newsletter! We have so much good news to share that it was difficult to decide what to leave out of the newsletter this fall.
Last spring we said goodbye (for now) to a superb class of AMS majors. As you'll see below, they are already succeeding at new jobs and in challenging graduate programs, internships and law schools. In addition, our class of 2013 is the largest in recent memory.
We also have a full slate of AMS visitors for the fall. Bryant Simon, American Studies professor at Temple, will be on campus on November 3, to talk with students about his recent book, Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. Pia Wiegmink, American Studies professor from Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz (Germany) will visit campus on November 10th and 11th. On October 24th, AMS will also hold its second annual "career lunch" with several alumni, including Anastasia Karel ('00), archivist at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and Emily Weir ('09), Assistant Director of the National College Advising Corps--Keystone Division. It's a busy, exciting time.
Keep in touch. Best wishes,
Alison Kibler
Chair, American Studies Department
Professor Kieran received his Ph.D. in American Studies from The George Washington University. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Drawing on his dissertation, his current book project, "Sundered by Memory: Foreign Policy, Militarism and the Vietnamization of American Memory," is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. Among other accomplishments, he is the co-founder of the War and Peace Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association.
Professor Kieran brings exciting new classes to AMS this year. He is teaching a new First Year Seminar, “9/11 and the 'War on Terror' in US Culture,” this fall, as well as electives in his specialty in the spring. This seminar examines how the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been represented in recent US culture. It examines how memoir, film, fiction, memorial practices, government documents, music, and media accounts shape the United States’ responses to 9/11 as well as debates over larger questions of race, gender, citizenship, patriotism, and the United States’ role in global affairs. Books and films include: Sebastian Junger, War; Bigelow, The Hurt Locker; and Don DeLillo, Falling Man.
Alysse Vaccaro, Eileen O'Reilly, Johanna Schein and Caitlin Black were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
Johanna Schein and Caitlin Black won the Sener Prize in American Studies.
Reed Armstrong is working at a healthcare advisory in Washington, D.C.
Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equality in Post Civil Rights America (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming in 2012), by Dennis Deslippe
In this new book Professor Deslippe considers the first fifteen years of affirmative action. In the late 1960s and 1970s, opponents of affirmative action filed so-called "reverse discrimination" charges with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and brought lawsuits in the local, state and federal court system. Opponents did not simply resist new programs for advancing the economic status of minority men and women of all races: rather, they harnessed "rights talk" to their own ends, making far-reaching claims about equality, justice and citizenship in the post-civil rights era.
The Sanctified Landscape: The Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909 (Cornell University Press, forthcoming in 2012) by David Schuyler
In his eighth book Professor Schuyler Schuyler examines the careers of a number of individuals whose paintings and writings were pivotal in the emergence of an appreciation of the valley’s history and who recognized the need to protect the landscape from overdevelopment at the turn of the twentieth century, which he presents as crucial to the beginnings of modern environmentalism. He analyzes their efforts to sanctify the river and define the responsibility their generation shared for preserving the landscape so significant in forging a regional and ultimately a national identity.
Olmsted Papers Come to Franklin and Marshall
David Schuyler (senior editor) and Greg Kaliss (associate editor) will complete volume nine of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers in the next three years. Established in 1972, the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project works to preserve Olmsted's legacy and restore his significant landscapes. Olmsted, landscape architect and park planner, was the architect-in-chief of Central Park. His design for Central Park was chosen in 1858. He constructed over 550 projects, including college campuses, the grounds of the U. S. Capitol and Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Volume nine centers on "The Last Great Comissions, 1890-1895," including the World's Columbian Exhibition (1893) and the Biltmore (the Vanderbilt estate in Asheville, NC). Professors Schuyler and Kaliss have been working with a Hackman scholar, Jeffrey Schlossberg, and Micah Wood as research assistant.
Professor Schuyler has been associated with the Olmsted papers ever since he was in graduate school, when he served as assistant editor of volume two, Slavery and the South, 1852-1857, which covers Olmsted's involvement with the sectional struggles of the mid-nineteenth century.
