Department of American Studies

Recent (90s, 00s) books that were first American Studies dissertations at Iowa

Adelt, Ulrich. Black, White and Blue: Blues Music in the Sixties. Under contract to Wesleyan University Press, expected publication date 2010.

Augspurger, Mike. An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Fields, Sarah. Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Gutjahr, Paul. An American Bible: a History of the Good Book in the United States, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Hall, James. Mercy, Mercy Me: African American Culture and the American Sixties, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Kibler, Alison. Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

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.

Lewis, Michael. Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1945-1997, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.

Nathan, Daniel. Saying It’s So: a Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Natanson, Nicholas. The Black Image in the New Deal: the Politics of FSA Photography, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Nelson, Megan Kate. Trembling Earth: a Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Peterson, Rusell. Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

Pustz, Jennifer. Voices from the Back Stairs: Interpreting the Lives of Domestic Servants at Historic House Museums. Under contract to Northern Illinois University Press.

Pustz, Matthew. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999.

Reid, Mark. Redefining Black Film, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Rooks, Noliwe. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Satterfield, Jay. The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.

Scheese, Don. Nature Writing: the Pastoral Impulse in America, New York: Twayne, 1996.

Scott, Kesho. The Habit of Surviving: Black Women’s Strategies for Life, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Simonsen, Jane. Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Snyder, Terri. Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Vermaas, Lori. Sequoia: the Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003.

Wood, Sharon. The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Full list of Department of American Studies disserations, 1993-present

Dissertation titles and abstracts may also be accessed at the American Studies Association website.