The list below contains the student's name and dissertation title of recent graduate dissertations.

2022-2023

Diann Rozsa

History, Heritage, and Haunting: Educational Entanglements within Former Carceral Spaces

2021 - 2022

George Gregory Rozsa

The Nevada Movement: Trans-Indigenous Antinuclear Solidarity at the End of the Cold War.

2020 - 2021

Taylor Henry

“Same Time Tomorrow, Knuckleheads”: The Racial, Gendered, and Industrial Politics of Televised Sports Punditry

2019 - 2020

Stephanie Grossnickle-Batterton

"Ye Shall Know Them By Their Clothes": Rhetoric of Women's Religious Dress in the United States, 1865-1920

Chris Henderson
Pleasurable Labors: Activist Fandom, Sport Communities and the Performance of Place

James Oudenhoven
Making Cinema Anew: Film Criticism and the Making of the New American Cinema, 1959-75

Michael West
The Birth of the Pin-up Girl: The Creation of an American Wartime Social Phenomenon, 1940-1946

Diane Williams
Inside the AIAW: The Philosophy, People, and Power of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW)

2018 - 2019

Stacey Moultry
Mixed Race, Mixed Politics: Articulations of Mixed Race Identities and Politics in Cultural Production, 1960-1989

Dain TePoel
Endurance Activism: Transcontinental Walks and the Politics of Movement Culture

Katherine Walden
Remapping and visualizing baseball labor: a digital humanities project

2016 - 2017

Thomas Collins
The Creation of Cultural White Supremacy in Arizona, 1925-1940

Michael Winslow
Cultivating Leisure: Agriculture, Tourism, and Industrial Modernity in the North Carolina Sandhills, 1870-1930

2015 - 2016

Kara Fagan
Framing Sport as Art: The Spectacle of Female Athleticism in Classic Hollywood, 1935-1955

Matthew Hodler
The Greatest Olympian of All-Time?: The Ideological Implications of Celebrating Michael Phelps

Sang Uk Joo
Consuming Sporting Orientals: Reading Asian American Sport Celebrities

Marta Mack-Washington
From Both Sides of the Plate: Effa Manley and American Constructions of Race and Ethnicity 1900-1948

Eileen Narcotta-Welp
"The Future of Football is Feminine": A Critical Cultural History of the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team

Yu-kuei "Daniel" Sun
Sporting Taiwan: Transnational Athletes in the Age of Neoliberal Imperialisms

Ivana Takacova
Latent TB Positive in the U.S. War on Tuberculosis: Manufacturing the International Student as a Public Health Threat

Allison Wanger
"These Honored Dead": The National Cemetery System and the Politics of Cultural Memory since 1861

Larissa Werhnyak
O, Perjured Lover, Atone! Atone! : A Legal and Cultural History of Breach of Promise to Marry, 1880-1940

2014 - 2015

Jennifer Ambrose
Geographies of Responsibility: The Cultural Logic of 21st Century Weather Emergencies

Jae Chul Seo
"Yellow Pacific on White Ice": A Transnational and Post/Colonial Reading of Asian American & Asian Female Figure Skates in the US Media Representation

Daniel Taradash
Exodus of Champions: The Great Migration and the Shaping of the Civil Rights Activities of Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman

Matthew Thomas
Life Hacking: A Critical History, 2004–2014

2013 - 2014

Robert Albanese
Paying (for) Attention: Narrative, Control, and the Cultural Economics of Attention, 1997-Present

Wayne Anderson
Honest to Goodness Farmers: Rural Iowa in American Culture during the Great Depression

Kirsten Archer

Carla Emery and the Recreation of Homesteading

Craig Eley
Making Silence Audible: Sound, Nature, Technology, 1890-1970

Elisabeth Erickson (Health and Sport Studies)
Outrunning Cancer: Marathons, Money & Morality

David Barrett Gough

The Value of the Commonwealth: An Ecocritical History of Robinson Forest

Jonathan Hansen
Take a Chill Pill: A Cultural History of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Mark Mattes
Material Letters: Media Histories of Epistolary Communication, 1766-1867

Patrick Oray
"Another Layer of Blackness": Race, Class and Ethnicity in the U.S. Black Public Sphere

Sara Shreve

Futures So Bright: Solar Homes in Mid-Twentieth Century America

Nathan Titman
The Drift of Desire: Masculinity and a Gay American Work Ethic

Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza
"Tending to the Past": The Historical Poetics of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethew

Nicholas Yanes
Commodifying Counterculture: William Gaines, EC Comics, MAD Magazine, and the Rise of the Corporate Anti-Establishment

2012 - 2013

Derrais Carter

Beyond the Veil of the Secret City: New Negro Representation in the Nation's Capital, 1919-1935

Amanda Curtis (Health and Sport Studies)
"Minimum Essential Adjustments": Gender, Physicality, and Equality at the United States Military Academy, 1976-1980

Sarah Eikleberry (Health and Sport Studies)
More than Milk and Cookies: A Cultural Analysis of the College Playday

Cinda Nofziger
Vacation Views: Tourist Photography in the American West, 1945-1980

Gyorgy "George" Toth

Red Nations: The Transatlantic Relations of the Radical American Indian Sovereignty Movement of the Late
Cold War

Steven Williams
Smudging the Book: The Role of Cultural Authority in Tribal Historical Narratives and Revitalization at Rocky Boy

Amy Wilson (Health and Sport Studies)
A "Saga of Power, Money, and Sex" in Women's Athletics: A Presidents' History of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW)

2011 - 2012

Nikolas Dickerson (Health and Sport Studies)
Don't Fear the Reefer: Producing the Unproductive Body in Sport, Film and Advertisement

Eric Johnson
Crossover Narratives: Race, Genre, and Authenticity in 20th Century American Popular Music

Danielle Rich

Global Fandom: The Circulation of Japanese Popular Culture in the U.S.

Charlie Williams
Eros in America: Freud and the Counter-Culture

2010 - 2011

Betsy Loyd Harvey
Same Place Next Summer: Permanent chautauquas and the Performance of Middle-Class Identity

Sharon Lake
The Accidental Feminist: Iowa's Breastfeeding Firefighter and the National Struggle for Workplace Equity

Karen Smith
Framing Quilts/Framing Culture: Women's Work and the Politics of Display

Mark Warburton
"For the Purposes of Example and Justice:" Native American Incarceration in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1803-1849

2009 - 2010

Brian Hallstoos
Windy City, Holy Land: Willa Saunders Jones and Black Sacred Music and Drama

Sharon Romeo
Freedwomen in Pursuit of Liberty: St. Louis and Missouri in the Age of Emancipation

Barb Shubinski
DOCUMERICA’s America: Environmentalism, Documentary Photography and Landscape in the Environmental Protection Agency, 1971-1977

Nicole Kotrba (Health and Sport Studies)
Constructing Privacy: The Negotiation of Disclosure Management on a Women's Basketball Team

2008 - 2009

Rixa Freeze
Born Free: Unassisted Childbirth in North America

Sam Graber
Twice-Divided Nation: The Civil War and National Memory in the Transatlantic World

Erica Hannickel
An Imperial Vineland: Grape Culture in 19th Century America

Bobbi Knapp (Health and Sport Studies)
Smash Mouth Football: An Interpretive Study of Identities Constructed and Performed on a Women's Football Team

Patrick Naick
Representations of the Black Metropolis: Place and African American Identity on Chicago's South Side

2007 - 2008

Ulrich Adelt
Black, White and Blue: Racial Politics of Blues Music in the 1960s

Eleanor McConnell
A Scarce Plenty: Economics, Citizenship, and Opportunity in Revolutionary New Jersey, 1760-1820

Kirsten Bland Walters
Ultimate Spin: Contesting the rhetoric, countercultural ethos and commodification of the "Ultimate" frisbee sport, 1968-2008

2006 - 2007

Kristin Solli
North of Nashville: Country Music, National Identity, and Class in Norway

2005 - 2006

William Bryant
Whole System, Whole Earth: The Convergence of Technology and Ecology in Twentieth Century American Culture

2004 - 2005

Jennifer Pustz
The Servant Problem: Historic House museums and Social History

Russell Peterson
Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Late-Night Television Comedy

Jamie Schultz (Health and Sport Studies)
Moment of Impact: Race, Injury and Football in Iowa's Collective Memory

2003 - 2004

Mary Ann Beecher
A Place for Everything: The Influence of Storage Innovations on Modern American Domesticity (1900-1955)

Chris Poff Pandhi
The Western Ghost Town in American Culture, 1869-1950

2002 - 2003

Megan Nelson
Peculiar Ecology: Swamps and Culture in the Southeastern Borderlands, 1732-1937

Kevin Quirk
That’s What Books Can Do: The Multicultural Middlebrow

2001 - 2002

Laura Baker
Capitalism Beautiful & Consumer Democracy: Civic Ideals, Mass Culture, and the Public in Chicago, 1900-1925

Eliot Blake
The Magical Armchair: Private Power and the Commodification of Expressive Freedom

Taylor Lake
American Delsartism and the Bodily Discourse of Respectable Womanliness

Jane Simonsen
Making Home Work: Race, Gender and the Uses of American Domestic Space, 1850-1920

Michael Wiseman
Rising on the Levee: Stories After the Flood and the Reconstruction of Place

2000 - 2001

Michael Augspurger
An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune and the Culture of Corporate Liberalism

Sarah Fields
Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America

Allison McCracken
Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning and American Culture: 1928-1933

Lori Vermas
The National Trees: Celebrating the Sequoias—Their Trunks, Roots, Stump, Bark—and Their Depiction as Big Trees in America, 1852-1944

1999 - 2000

James Dorsey
The Quest for Doc's Garden: A Community Study of African-American Athletic Success

Markha Valenta
The Radical Folly of Love in (Post)Modern America: The Autobiographical Narratives of Dorothy Day

Daniel Lewis
Emanuel Leutze's Art of the Civil War Era: Romantic Histories of the Crisis of Union

Michael Lewis
Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal: The Transfer and Reception of Ecological Theories and Practices Between the U.S. and India, 1947-1997

1998 - 1999

Michael Burke
Difficult Belonging: An Ethnographic Look at How the Church Excludes

Franklin Hess
Importing ‘America’: Television Programming and Audience Identity in Urban Greece.

Eileen Roraback
The Defense of Self: Autobiographical Responses of American Intellectuals to the McCarthy Era

Jay Satterfield
The World’s Best Book: Taste Culture and the Modern Library

Ningping Yu
Manufactured Images: Four Chinese Travelers and Their Writing about American Women

1997 - 1998

Ilene Alexander
Learning in Other Ways: Toward a History of Feminist Pedagogy in the U.S.

John Baskerville
The Impact of Modern Black Nationalist Ideology and Cultural Revitalization on American Jazz Music of the 1960s and 1970s

Brett Beemyn
A Queer Capitol: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Life in Washington, D.C., 1890-1955

Derryn Moten
"A Gruesome Warning to Black Girls": The August 16, 1912, Execution of Virginia Christian

Matthew Pustz
Fanboys and True Believers: Comic Book Reading Communities and the Creation of Culture

Leslie A. Taylor
Veritable Hotbeds: Lesbian Scandals in the United States, 1926-1936

Rob Urstein
Aging, Activism, and Spirituality in an American Community

1996 - 1997

Natalie Robertson
A Cultural History of AfricaTown, USA, 1859-Present

Jennifer Strayer
No Place like Home: Domestic Models in Chicago's Public Places, 1919-1938

Greg Conerly
Policing the Boundaries: Defining African-American Lesbian/Gay Identity and Community Relationships

Catherine Lewis
From Temple to Forum: The Changing Face of the Chicago Historical Society

Daniel Nathan
Saying it's so: A cultural history of the Black Sox scandal of 1919

1995 - 1996

John Groch
Corporate Reading, Corporate Writing: MGM & CBS in the Land of Oz

Paul Gutjahr
Battling for the Book: The Americanization of the Bible in the Antebellum Publishing Marketplace, 1777-1860

Hongjun Su
Strangers within our gates: a study of four first-generation Chinese immigrant men's autobiographies, 1930s-1940s

1994 - 1995

Allison Kibler
Female Varieties: Gender & Cultural Hierarchy on the Keith Vaudeville Circuit, 1890-1925

Noliwe Rooks
Hair-Raising: African American Women, Beauty Culture, and Madame C. J. Walker

Nan Wolverton
Century farm: the shaping of an Iowa landscape, 1851-1951

Alan Spring
Public Intellectuals in the Culture of Personality: Democratic Discourse, Moral authority, and Intellectual vocation

Sharon Wood
Wandering Girls & Leading Women: Sexuality & Urban Public Life in Davenport, IA, 1880-1910

1993 - 1994

Kay Aldrich
Gender, Sexuality, & Kinship: Portraits of Lesbian. Families in the 1990s

Nancy Romalov
Modern, Mobile, and Marginal: American Girls' Series Fiction, 1905-1925