Core Faculty |
Affiliated Faculty
213H Bailey Hall
785.864.2236
bchap@ku.edu
Ben Chappell is an Assistant Professor of American Studies.
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin
Ben has taught courses in areas such as immigration, globalization, cultural theory, ethnomusicology, popular culture, and anthropology. Research interests include Latino/a America, articulations of race and class, strategies of power, and performance in everyday life. His present project is an ethnographic inquiry into Mexican American lowrider car customization in Texas, emphasizing issues of cultural politics, space, and materiality. His most recent articles have appeared in the journals Cultural Dynamics and Western Folklore, and an essay on lowrider poetics is forthcoming in Cultural Studies: An Anthology from Blackwell. In future work he plans to explore regional hip-hop and the materiality of sound, as well as manifestations of "security" in everyday spatial politics.
Jacob S. Dorman is an Assistant Professor at KU who holds a joint appointment in History and American Studies with specialties in African American history, black religion, and 1920's Harlem.
Ph.D., UCLA
Dorman received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2004 and has held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities. He has published in the journal Nova Religio and in anthologies on new religious movements, alternative African American religions, and the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press will publish his manuscript, "Chosen People: Black Orientalism, Black Israelites and the Harlem Renaissance," which examines the way African Americans used Orientalist ideas to create new religious movements that critiqued racism and the discourse of civilization. Research fellowships from Yale's Beinecke Library and the Gilder Lehrman Institute have supported a second project, a cultural history of everyday life during the Harlem Renaissance, told partly through the letters and diaries of its artists. Dorman's interests include race, music, Rastafarianism, whiteness, and contemporary black and Jewish identities. He has also contributed to National Public Radio and to the online religious studies journal The Revealer.
Recently
Syllabus for HIST 696: Topics in Religion and Race
Syllabus for AMS 802: Theorizing America
Syllabus for AMS 805: Black History and Theory
Syllabus for AMS 101: Blackness, Whiteness, and Racism
"I Saw You Disappear with My Own Eyes": Hidden Transcripts of New York Black Israelite Bricolage" Nova Religio August 2007, Vol. 11, No. 1, Pages 61-83
213Q Bailey Hall
785.864.2303
flores@ku.edu
Ruben Flores is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas.
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
His research interests include Latin American migration to the United States, the comparative histories of Mexico and the US, and the development of the social sciences during the era of industrialization. He is especially interested in sociological approaches to politics and culture, the competing foundations of truth offered by science and religion, and the transformation of North America's rural communities.
Ruben is on leave for 2009-2010 semesters for his National Acadmeny of Education research fellowship.
721 Fraser Hall
785.864.9424
tgb@ku.edu
Tanya Golash-Boza has a joint appointment in Sociology and American Studies at the University of Kansas.
Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Tanya Golash-Boza received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2005 from the University of North Carolina. She is currently finishing up a book manuscript, tentatively titled: Yo Soy Negro: Discourses of Blackness in Peru. Yo Soy Negro is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in an Afro-Peruvian village called Ingenio. The manuscript explores the meaning of diaspora for an isolated village, and considers how discourses of blackness spread by the global media influence local conceptions of blackness. This discussion necessarily involves a dialogue between Latin American studies and Diaspora studies, and the book's conclusion reflects on what we have gained from bringing these two fields together.
Dr. Golash-Boza's research also considers racial and ethnic identification among Latinos and Latinas, as well as the human rights consequences of U.S. immigration policies. Some of her recent articles and book chapters include: "Latino Racial Choices: The Effects of Skin Colour and Discrimination on Latinos' and Latinas' Racial Self-Identifications" in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2008), "Human Rights in a Globalizing World: Who Pays the Human Cost of Migration?" in the Journal of Latino and Latin American Studies (2007), "Dropping the Hyphen? Becoming Latino(a)-American through Racialized Assimilation" in Social Forces (2006), and "Immigrant Rights as Human Rights" in Globalization and America: Race, Human Rights, and Inequality (2008). These works provide the basis for her next project, which examines the human rights violations of immigration policy in the United States.
Towards a Moratorium on Raids, Detentions, and Deportations, from Counterpunch.org, Sept. 12, 2008.
Professor Tanya Golash-Boza Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Tanya is on leave for her Fulbright-Hayes Faculty Research Abroad Award for the 2009-2010 semesters.
213J Bailey
785.864.2083
tanyah@ku.edu
Tanya Hart holds a joint assistant professorship in American Studies and Women's Studies.
Ph.D., Yale
Tanya's areas of interest are women's studies, African American studies, public health and medicine in U.S. history, and migration studies, all with an overarching emphasis on identity formation. She is currently working on a comparative analysis of anti-syphilis neighborhood health programs among African American, British West Indian, and Southern Italian women and the anti-prostitution movement of the first quarter of the twentieth century in New York City. Her future research will examine cancer as metaphor and reality within medical, political and popular discourses during the early national and antebellum periods of the United States.
Doctor Randal Jelks is an Associate Professor of American Studies with a joint appointment in African and African American Studies.
Ph.D., Michigan State
Professor Jelks' childhood home is New Orleans. He lived there until he was fourteen, whereupon he resided in Chicago until college. Although Jelks has lived in the North numerous years, he considers New Orleans to be his home.
Jelks is a graduate of South Shore High School (Chicago), the University of Michigan (BA in History), McCormick Theological Seminary (Masters of Divinity) and Michigan State University (Ph.D. in History). He is also an ordained clergy person in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Before joining the faculty of the University of Kansas, Professor Jelks taught at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Dr. Jelks was the 2006-2007 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Park Triangle, North Carolina and in 2008 he was the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas in American Studies.
Jelks has published both scholarly and journalistic articles. His research and writing interests are in the area of African American Religious, Urban, and Civil Rights History. Jelks most recent article is titled "Obama, Wright, and Trinity" for the Social Science Research Council blog The Immanent Frame. He has also published an award winning book titled African Americans in the Furniture City: the Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan (The University of Illinois Press, 2006). He is currently finishing a book on Martin Luther King Jr.'s mentor titled Benjamin Elijah Mays,: A Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South: An Intellectual Biography to be published by the University of North Carolina Press.
David M. Katzman is Professor of American Studies and courtesy Professor of History and African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas.
Ph.D., University of Michigan
With Sherrie Tucker, David edits the journal American Studies. He has been at Kansas since 1969 and has been a visiting professor at University College, Dublin (Ireland), the University of Birmingham (England), Tokushima University (Japan), the University of Hong Kong, and Kobe University. In 2002 he was a Fulbright lecturer in American Studies in Japan. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of two NEH Fellowships. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He was the 2002 recipient of the Ned N. Fleming Trust Award for Excellence in Teaching. Professor Katzman is the author of Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (1973, 1975); Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (1978, 1981); co-editor with William Tuttle of Plain Folk: The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (1982); co-author of Three Generations in 20th Century America: Family, Community, and Nation (1977, 1978, 2nd ed., 1982); and A People and a Nation (6th edition, 2000). He has co-edited Technical Knowledge in American Culture: Science, Technology, and Medicine Since the Early 1800s (1996).
David's research and teaching focus on American culture and race, ethnicity, identity, work, migration, and community. Currently his major project is on the African American urban working class in the 19th and early 20th centuries, examining the roles of race and work in the construction of African-American identities.
Cheryl Lester is the Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of English and American Studies. She is also affiliated with the programs in African and African American Studies and Jewish Studies.
Ph.D., (SUNY Buffalo).
A native Detroiter, Cheryl Lester is co-editor and co-translator (with Philip Barnard) of The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988) by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy and co-editor (with Alice Lieberman) of Social Work Practice with a Difference: A Literary Approach (2003). Her essays have appeared in Criticism, Modern Fiction Studies, American Studies, Faulkner Journal, Faulkner Journal of Japan, and in the books Cambridge Companion to Faulkner (1994), Faulkner in Cultural Context (1997), Faulkner and Postmodernism (2002), The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable (2000), and the Blackwell Companion to Faulkner (2007). Current research includes articles and a book-length project on William Faulkner's literary response to Great Migration in the era of Jim Crow.
Cheryl was awarded a Center for Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2001, a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 1998, a Center for Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1998, and an NEH fellowship in 1997. She co-directed (with David Katzman) an NEH Summer Seminar on African-American Migration and American Culture in 1996. In 1995, she was she was a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong, and in 1998 she was a visiting professor at the University of Gaston-Bergere in St. Louis, Senegal. She contributed to the development of the Jewish Studies minor in 2002 and the establishment of the Jewish Studies Program in 2008. She has served as a member and officer of numerous associations and boards, including the American Studies Association, the Mid-America American Studies Association, the Faulkner Society, KU Hillel, and the editorial board of American Studies. She was a fellow in the Postgraduate Program at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, Washington, D.C., from 1997-2001 and is currently a participant in the Postgraduate Seminar at the Kansas City Center for Family & Organization Systems.
212 Bailey
785.864.2305
SherrieTu@aol.com
Sherrie is co-editor, with David Katzman, of the peer-reviewed journal, American Studies. In 2004-2005, she was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University. Her research interests converge in overlaps of jazz studies, feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, theories of race and ethnicity, oral history, and historiography. She is the author of the award-winning book, Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s (Duke, 2000). Her publications on gender and jazz historiography include chapters in edited volumes: Ajay Heble and Daniel Fischlin, eds., The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue (2004), Chip Whitesell and Sophie Fuller, eds., Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (University of Illinois, 2002), and Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (Routledge, 2000), and in journals including Black Music Research Journal, American Music, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Oral History Review. She has conducted oral histories for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project, and recently conducted a feminist research study on gender and women in New Orleans jazz for the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. Her current projects include a second book project entitled Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke University Press). With Nichole T. Rustin, she is co-editing, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, a multi-authored volume of essays.
KU's Interdisciplinary Jazz Studies Group
Professor Tucker's Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Sherrie is on leave to work on her book Manuscript, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen for the Fall 2009 semester.
Professor of American Studies, is the author of Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Second Edition, 1996); "Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (1993); editor of W.E.B. Du Bois (1973); co-editor (with David M. Katzman) of Plain Folk: The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (1982); and co-author of A People & A Nation (6th Edition, 2001).
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
Bill's articles on social and cultural history, recent American history, and African American history have appeared in the Journal of American History, American Studies, Labor History, Agricultural History, Technology and Culture, and other journals. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. In support of his research, Tuttle has been awarded research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has also held fellowships at the Institute of Southern History, Johns Hopkins University; the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University; the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University; and the Henry A. Murray Research Center, Radcliffe College. He was appointed a Research Associate with the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Bill has lectured in Japan and Cuba on children's history and African-American history. His recent honors include the H.O.P.E. Award (Honor for Outstanding Progressive Educator) presented by the Class of 2001 at the University of Kansas; the W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching excellence, 1998; and the Denison University Alumni Citation, 1995. Finally, in 2004, Bill was named the recipient of two all-University awards, the Balfour S. Jeffrey Award for Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Chancellors Club Career Teaching Award. Bill and his wife Kathy have four children and three grandchildren.
Norman R. Yetman (retired) was Chancellors Club Teaching Professor of American Studies and Sociology and Courtesy Professor of African and African-American Studies. Norman joined the Kansas faculty in 1966.
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Norman was also a Senior Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University (1972-73), a Fulbright Professor at Odense University and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark (1981-82), a Visiting Professor of History at Hong Kong University (1996), and Fulbright-University of Salzburg (Austria) Distinguished Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences (2005). In addition to lecturing on topics dealing with American society and culture in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, in the summer of 1997 he was the featured speaker at the 17th Annual American Studies Forum sponsored by the Center for Asia-Pacific Exchange in Honolulu. Moreover, he has served as president of the Midcontinent American Studies Association (1970-71) and was the 1997 recipient of the Mid-America American Studies Association's Elizabeth Kolmer Mentoring Award. In 1991 Professor Yetman was named Chancellors Club Teaching Professor at the University of Kansas. In 1986 he received Mortar Board's Outstanding Educator Award; in 1999 the KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' J. Michael Young Award for outstanding advising; and in 2004 the KU Graduate School's Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award. In 2004 he was also the recipient of the American Studies Association's Mary C. Turpie Award for outstanding teaching, advising, and program development. Professor Yetman's major teaching and research interests focus primarily upon issues involving race, ethnicity, immigration, religion, and sport in American life. Among his publications are When I Was a Slave: Memoirs From the Slave Narrative Collection (2002); Voices From Slavery (also published under the title Life Under the 'Peculiar Institution': Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (1970; revised reprint edition, 2000); Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life (6th edition, 1999); and Sociology: Experiencing Changing Societies (7th edition, with Kenneth Kammeyer and George Ritzer, 1997). He has published articles on race and ethnicity in American Quarterly, Civil Rights Digest, Social Problems, and Sociology of Sport Journal, and he is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled The American Mosaic: Multicultural America in the Age of Globalization. From 1991 to 2005 he served as co-editor (with David Katzman) of the transdisciplinary journal, American Studies, for which he is now editor emeritus. He is the proud grandfather of Aidan and Lucy Yetman-Michaelson; because he wishes to spend more time with them, he retired from the American Studies faculty in May 2006.
