Return to: U of M Home

Joseph Bauerkemper's field of concentration involves study of the relationship between literature and various notions of nation and nationalism, especially study of texts that articulate literary critiques of modern state-nationalism and imagine alternative community formations. His dissertation explores the work of American Indian writers — especially the fiction and poetry of Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko—in order to apply these texts’ insights toward the disruption of the cultural, social, political, and economic imperatives of modern nation-states.

Christina Berndt's research focuses on the ways that American Indian people use familial relationships to maintain their own understandings of group identity and resist the imposition of nation-state definitions. Specifically she is writing about the Northern Cheyenne effort to remain in their Montana homeland by using kin ties to thwart U.S. government attempts to keep them in Oklahoma by imposing boundaries on kinship as well as land.

Pamela Butler's research focuses on race, cultural production, and the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational feminist politics. Her dissertation project looks at stories about women's recreational travel in the economic South, in order to think about the ways in which racialized notions of feminine agency and subjectivity are produced through the globalizing discourses of transnational mobility and cosmopolitanism.

Jill Doerfler is a fifth year student in American Studies. Jill is interested in the political motivations behind the disiplinary constructions of history and literature. Her dissertation examines the complex issues surrounding identity and tribal citizenship during the twentieth century for Anishinaabe people from the White Earth Reservation.

Michael Franklin uses queer, feminist, and postcolonial critiques to investigate transsexuality and travel. His work particularly focuses on how the transnational and imperial dimensions of the category 'transsexual' in Western medical theory and transpeople's everyday lives throughout the 20th century dynamically engages larger questions of race, capital, and imperialism.

Wendy Makoons Geniusz is a Ph. D. Candidate in American Studies. Wendy is Cree and is writing her dissertation on Ojibwe Plant Knowledge, its presentation in academic writings and its preservation in Ojibwe communities. Wendy works extensively with Ojibwe language revitilization programs, and for three years she was the director of the University of Minnesota's Ojibwe Language CD-ROM Project.

John Kinder's dissertation, Paying with their Bodies for the Nation's Desires: The Great War and the 'Problem of the Wounded Soldier,' explores the links between the wounded soldier's body, memory, and American war-making in the early 20th century. His research and teaching interests include disability studies, the history of medicine, the history of masculinity, modernism, violence and popular culture, and cultural studies of war and peace.

Daniel LaChance's research interests include the cultural life of the law in the United States. Specifically, he studies the way that punishment is represented in and understood by literature, film, political theory, and the media; the way that law uses and relies upon emotion and narrative; and the semiotics of death penalty practices.

Matt Martinez's areas of research and teaching interest include contemporary Indigenous cultural productions, Native peoples of the Southwest, film and photography. His dissertation examines early twentieth century travel photography and the marketing of the northern Pueblos of the Rio Grande.

Rafia Mirza studies the ways in which mass culture mediates questions of justice and legitimacy in the nation-state. Her specific interests include the formation of American Orientalism, which she argue begins to be codified with the rise of a political Islam associated with terrorism during the late Cold War. Her dissertation project focuses on post 1970s film and the racialized and gendered discourses around the figure of the terrorist in mass culture.

Ryan Murphy's work places ideas in political economy, cultural and social history, queer studies, and urban geography in conversation. Specifically, he examine struggles for workers rights in the airline industry, and the politics of identity that run through them, to look at the human consequences of a globalizing, transforming capitalist system, and to imagine new forms of resistance.

Working at the intersections of race, class, and gender, Melissa Olson's research interests include theorizing mixed-heritage American Indian post-coloniality in urban U.S. and Canada.

Jason Ruiz, a 5th year Ph.D. candidate, is currently a fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC, researching his dissertation. His work interprets U.S. popular culture and its treatment of the Mexican Revolution, analyzing racialized and sexualized constructions of "Mexico" in the American imagination. He is especially interested in how these constructions intersect with cultures of U.S. imperialism and nation building in the twentieth century. Jason has taught courses in Chicano Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies at the University of Minnesota and Metropolitan State University.

Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark's research interests focus on American Indian politics and Indigenous knowledge. Her dissertation examines Anishinaabe political thought and definitions of ownership and rights surrounding material and intellectual property, focusing on alliance formations and treaty relationships between the Anishinaabeg and other tribal nations and nation-states.

Harrod Suarez's work brings together Asian American studies and postcolonial and queer theory in order to consider the ways travel, transportation, and movement are represented as postcolonial formations related to U.S. empire and specifically in the Philippines.

Melissa Williams is a Ph.D. Candidate originally from Conway, Arkansas. Her dissertation, "No Place Like Home? Culture Wars in the Late 1980s Working-Class Family Sitcom," addresses post-World War II gender and class dynamics in mass media. specifically television. She teaches courses on 20th century American popular culture and politics, class visibility in the United States, and the Culture Wars.