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The following contains the student's name and dissertation title of graduate dissertations from 1993 to the present. Additionally, some of our graduates' dissertations have gone on to be published as books.
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
Dissertations published as books
The following are books since the 1990s that were first American Studies dissertations at Iowa. Dissertation titles and abstracts may also be accessed at the American Studies Association website.
Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White
Adelt, Ulrich
Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White.
Rutgers University Press, May 2010.
An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America
Augspurger, Mike
An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America
Fields, Sarah
Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
An American Bible: a History of the Good Book in the United States
Gutjahr, Paul
An American Bible: a History of the Good Book in the United States
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Mercy, Mercy Me: African American Culture and the American Sixties
Hall, James
Mercy, Mercy Me: African American Culture and the American Sixties
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America
Hannickel Terry, Erica
Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013
Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville
Kibler, Alison
Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
The Changing Face of Public History: the Chicago Historical Society and the Transformation of an American Museum
Lewis, Catherine
The Changing Face of Public History: the Chicago Historical Society and the Transformation of an American Museum
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.
Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1945-1997
Lewis, Michael
Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1945-1997
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.
Saying It’s So: a Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal
Nathan, Daniel
Saying It’s So: a Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
The Black Image in the New Deal: the Politics of FSA Photography
Natanson, Nicholas
The Black Image in the New Deal: the Politics of FSA Photography
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
Trembling Earth: a Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp
Nelson, Megan Kate
Trembling Earth: a Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.
Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke
Peterson, Rusell
Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Voices from the Back Stairs: Interpreting the Lives of Domestic Servants at Historic House Museums
Pustz, Jennifer
Voices from the Back Stairs: Interpreting the Lives of Domestic Servants at Historic House Museums
Northern Illinois University Press, 2009.
Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers
Pustz, Matthew
Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999.
Redefining Black Film
Reid, Mark
Redefining Black Film
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women
Rooks, Noliwe
Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library
Satterfield, Jay
The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
Nature Writing: the Pastoral Impulse in America
Scheese, Don
Nature Writing: the Pastoral Impulse in America
New York: Twayne, 1996.
The Habit of Surviving: Black Women’s Strategies for Life
Scott, Kesho
The Habit of Surviving: Black Women’s Strategies for Life
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West
Simonsen, Jane
Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia
Snyder, Terri
Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Sequoia: the Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture
Vermaas, Lori
Sequoia: the Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003.
The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City
Wood, Sharon
The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.