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 in his first year 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
Last year he was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities and received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2004. He has published in the journal Nova Religio and in anthologies on new religious movements and on alternative African American religions. Oxford University Press will publish his manuscript, Moses and the Midianite: Black Israelites and Black Orientalism, 1898-1935, which critiques the concepts of syncretism and retention in the African Diaspora in light of polycultural alternative religious movements and the era’s 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.
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.
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
She has conducted ethnographic research in Peru that focused on racial identity, collective memory, and social whitening among Peruvians of African descent. Golash-Boza has also conducted research on the Latino/a community in the United States, and has published an article in International Migration Review on the advantages of bilingualism for immigrants in the US. Her current research is on the racial identity of immigrants of African descent. Her main areas of interest are race and ethnicity, Latin America, immigration, and ethnography.
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.
211 Bailey
785.864.2302
dkatzman@ku.edu
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.
213P Bailey
785.864.2309
chlester@ku.edu
Cheryl Lester is the Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of English and American Studies. She is also Chair of the Jewish Studies Steering Committee.
Ph.D., SUNY Buffalo.
Cheryl is the author, editor, and translator of books on American literature and critical and cultural theory. Her essays appear as chapters in books published by University of Mississippi Press, Blackwell, Cambridge, and Oxford, and her articles have appeared in American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Criticism, The Faulkner Journal, the Faulkner Journal of Japan, and Yale French Studies. With Philip Barnard, she is the co-editor and co-translator of The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988). With Alice Lieberman, she is the co-editor of Social Work Practice with a Difference: Stories, Essays, Cases, and Commentaries (2003). Her research was supported by a fellowship in 1995 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served as visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong (1997) and at the University of Gaston-Bergere in St. Louis, Senegal (1998). Her teaching has been recognized by a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (1998) and by Center for Teaching Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1998) and Graduate Teaching (2000). She teaches courses in 20th century American literature and culture, the literature and life writing of the family, cultural theory, and William Faulkner. Research interests include narratives of migration and immigration, focusing on articulations of dominant and marginal identities, belonging and estrangement, orientation and disorientation, safety and danger, self and other. Her present project is a literary and cultural analysis of 20th-century migration from the Jim Crow South as constructed in the writings of William Faulkner. Her most recent articles have appeared in the Blackwell Companion to William Faulkner and The Faulkner Journal. In future work she plans to explore post-Holocaust memoirs of transnational Jewish families.
213D Bailey
785.864.2304
schofield@ku.edu
Ann Schofield is Professor of American Studies and Women's Studies and served as director of Women's Studies between 1989 and 1991. She is also on the graduate faculty of the History Department.
Ph.D., SUNY, Binghamton
In 1999, she received a Kemper Teaching Award for Graduate Mentoring. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris XII and at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1994-95, she was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy. She has lectured on topics of gender and crime, biography and American culture, and mourning America in Australia, China, France, and Great Britain. Her publications include "to do and to be": Portraits of Four Women Activists, 1893-1986, published in 1997 by Northeastern University Press; edited editions of Rose Pesotta's Bread Upon the Waters and Sealskin and Shoddy: Women in American Labor Press Fiction; and articles in Labor History, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, and American Studies.
212 Bailey
785.864.2305
SherrieTu@aol.com
Sherrie Tucker is Associate Professor of American Studies.
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
213N Bailey
785.864.9476
tuttle@ku.edu
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.
2036 Wescoe
785.864.9476
kevinw@ku.edu
Kevin Whitehead is Lecturer in American Studies and English and a music journalist specializing in jazz and European improvised music.
M.A., Syracuse University
Kevin is the author of New Dutch Swing (1998) and editor of Bimhuis 25: Stories of Twenty-five Years at the Bimhuis (1999). His publications include articles in The Cartoon Music Book (2002), Jazz: The First Century (2000), Mixtery: a Festschrift for Anthony Braxton (1995), and Down Beat: 60 Years of Jazz (1995). He is jazz critic for National Public Radio's daily show Fresh Air and an editorial advisor and contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2001). Kevin has also written about music for many publications including the Village Voice, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, and the Dutch daily de Volkskrant. As an improvising musician he has recorded for the Atavistic and Hatology labels.He's at work on a book about jazz in relation to other musical genres.
2036 Wescoe
785.864.9476
nyetman@ku.edu
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.
