American Studies

David H. Miller

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David H. Miller is a musicologist and performing musician, with a B.A. in music from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University. David‘s research focuses on modernist music, particularly that of Anton Webern, and its performance and reception in the United States. He has published in the Journal of Musicology and Analitica, with forthcoming articles in the Indiana Theory Review, Transposition, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Additionally, David is currently working on a book project centered around Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, two musicians from Spokane, WA who built a massive collection of modernist music manuscripts during the 1960s and […]

Alexander Benjamin Craghead

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Alexander Benjamin Craghead holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. He also completed an MS in Architecture at Berkeley, as well as a Bachelor of Science degree in Communications from Marylhurst University. His research focuses on the intersection of technology, representation, and landscape, and he has written extensively about urban renewal, city planning, transportation technologies and photography. Additionally, he is a curator, photographer, essayist, and public historian whose work has appeared in several regional and national publications, notably Boom: A Journal of California, California History, Railroad […]

Sarah Gold McBride

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Sarah Gold McBride specializes in the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley, and taught in Berkeley’s History Department for two years before joining the American Studies faculty. She is also a co-founder of The Teaching History Conference. Dr. Gold McBride’s first book, Whiskerology, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more about Dr. Gold McBride’s teaching and research on her website.

Bryan Wagner

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Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has secondary interests in legal history and vernacular culture. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009), The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2017), The Wild Tchoupitoulas (33 1/3 Series, Bloomsbury, 2019), and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the […]

Shannon Steen

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Shannon Steen writes and teaches about race and performance, primarily in the intersection of the African American and Asian American worlds. She is the author most recently of Racial Geometries: The Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific, and American Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; part of the Studies in International Performance Series), and is co-editor of AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York University Press, 2006). She has published articles in Theater Journal as well as Essays in Theater/Études Théâtrales. She is currently at work on her new project ReOrientations: California and the […]

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

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Hertha D. Sweet Wong is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities. She writes about and teaches autobiography, Native American literatures, ethnic American literatures, and visual studies. Her most recent book is Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, she argues that grappling with the breakdown of identity and representation, late twentieth-century writers and artists experiment with innovative interart autobiographical forms in an attempt to challenge and convey ever […]

Christine Palmer

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Christine Palmer holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She also completed a Master’s in Anthropology at UC Berkeley and an AB in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Palmer’s research and teaching focus on the interplay between race, visual culture, literature, and cultural memory in twentieth-century popular and mass culture. Recent course offerings include: Going Nuclear! (co-taught with Mark Brilliant); American Media and Culture since WWII; James Baldwin’s America, 1953-74; The Future Then: Imagining American Tomorrows; “I’ll Be There for You”: Friendship in America […]

Beth H. Piatote

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Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale, 2013), which won an MLA award; and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint, 2019), which was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Award. Her […]

Leigh Raiford

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Leigh Raiford is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, writes and curates about race, gender, justice and visuality. She is the inaugural director of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She also serves as affiliate faculty in the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Raiford received her PhD from Yale University’s joint program in African American Studies and American Studies in 2003. Before arriving […]