American Studies Proudly Welcomes David Roediger, KU Foundation Professor and Elizabeth Esch, Assistant Professor to the Department of American Studies and the KU Campus.

David Roediger has joined the Departments of American Studies and History as KU’s first Foundation Professor.  He comes to KU from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an internationally recognized and award-winning historian. His groundbreaking scholarship and teaching focus race, ethnicity, working class and labor in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, with a particular emphasis on whiteness and class. (Read here) He has also been elected to serve as the President of the American Studies Association, a three-year term that begins this Fall.  This semester, he is teaching a graduate course titled, AMS 998:  Seminar in Racial Formation in 19^th Century US and will teach AMS 110:  American Identities in Spring 2015, an introductory course to the field of American Studies that is also part of the KU Core curriculum.

We are excited about the arrival of Elizabeth Esch, who joins us from Barnard College -Columbia University.  She is an award-winning teacher and has been the recipient of a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities.  Her scholarly interests focus on transnational histories, the critical study of race, and labor and working class history.  She is co-author (with David Roediger) of the prize-winning book titled The Production of Difference:  Race and the management of Labor in U.S. History (Oxford University Press 2012). Professor Esch will be teaching AMS: 332 United States in Global Context this Fall and will offer a graduate course in Spring 2015.