Students & Student Interests

Eliza Young Barstow studies issues of gender, constructions of maturity, and religious identity among American evangelicals and fundamentalists in the twenty years following WWII. In examining how evangelicals and fundamentalists addressed the moral issues associated with advising young adults in the areas of dating, marriage, education, and careers, the dissertation is attentive to how these religious groups understood notions of maturity and adulthood. Undertaking this project involves looking at a wide variety of resources such as Billy Graham's sermons from the era, queries for advice written to Graham's "My Answer" column, articles in evangelical magazines such as "Youth for Christ" and "Moody Monthly," promotional materials for Bible colleges, and evangelical novels from the time period. As such, the dissertation offers insight into how these theologically conservative Protestants creatively reacted to and borrowed from "expert" ideas in the social sciences (most notably psychology) and how they dramatically augmented their own print culture during this era. Eliza received her B.A. in English from Penn State and her MPhil from Cambridge (UK). She currently resides in Charlottesville, VA.

George Blaustein received his BA in history and English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. His interests include 19th- and 20th-century American intellectual and religious history, post-WWII American cultural diplomacy, the international circulation of American literature, foreign perspectives on the United States, and 20th-century American music.

Sarah Anne Carter received her undergraduate degree in history from Harvard College (2002), an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware (2004) and an M.A. in History from Harvard (2006). Her dissertation explores the history of Object Lessons in nineteenth-century American life. She argues that the systematic study of material things via Object Lessons shaped the ways adults and children found meaning in their possessions, considered the connections among science, visual representation and morality, and understood conceptions of racial difference. Her research and teaching interests include American social and cultural history, material and visual culture, and the history of children, childhood and the family.

Holger Droessler received his M.A. in American Cultural History from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich in 2008. In his master thesis he explored the transatlantic debates about the Afro-German occupation children after the Second World War. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, American imperialism as well as German colonial history. Currently he is working on a project that seeks to open up a global perspective on political, legal and scientific discourses on interraciality at the turn of the twentieth century.

Altin Gavranovic studies freaks, witches, killers, eccentrics, revolutionaries, pirates, pornographers, spiritualists, bohemians, transcendentalists, hippies, modernists, free lovers, crazy persons, motorcycle outlaws, assorted zealots, and other manifestations of the weird and the unusual in American history. He is interested in the social distinction between difference and deviance, and the cultural sublimation of deviance into narratives of danger, adventure and authenticity. He is also interested in cultural and social theory, non-linguistic and non-rational forms of knowledge, radical politics, metaphysics, literature and fine head-wear.

Aaron Hatley received a B.A. in Music and the Integrated Program in Humane Studies from Kenyon College in 2008. His research interests include 20th-century American composers, performance practice, architecture, and intellectual history.

Jack Hamilton received his B.A. in English from New York University in 2003. His research interests include American popular and vernacular music, race, media, and cultural history, and he is currently working on a dissertation concerning popular music, identity, and racial imagination in the 1960s. Prior to graduate school he worked extensively as both a musician and a journalist, and has written on subjects ranging from bluegrass to professional basketball.

Brian Hochman received a B.A. in English from Amherst College in 2003 and a M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2004. His dissertation, Savage Preservation: Race, Realism, and the American Documentary, examines the relationship between documentary realism and American empire around the turn of the twentieth century. His research interests include: American literary history since 1850; film and media studies; and theories of race and ethnicity.

David Kim received an A.B. in American Studies from Columbia University (2006). His research interests include international adoption, transnational literature and ethnic studies, and economic history. From 2007-2009, David was a consultant with Katzenbach Partners LLC. He is currently a co-leader of the departmental Student Committee.

Eve Mayer received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, and an A.M. in History from Harvard in 2006. Her research interests include nineteenth-century cultural history, America print culture, literary history, and evolving concepts of citizenship. This year she is teaching "Native America: The East" and the History Department spring tutorial, and is working in Houghton's Modern Books and Manuscripts department.

Brian McCammack received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering (2004) from Purdue University, where he also received his M.A. in American Studies (2006). His dissertation focuses on the Great Migration in Chicago, bringing together environmental history, ecocriticism, and African American history and literature.

Nora B. Morrison received an A.B. in the History and Literature of America and France from Harvard College in 2000 and an A.M. in History in 2004, also from Harvard. Her dissertation is a cultural history of the rise of rhythm and blues music in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with a focus on the interplay of music, performance, race, business, and audience. Her interests include African-American and popular music, cultural exchange, film and video, and performance. She has recently written on Little Richard, Michael Jackson, W.C. Handy, and Jelly Roll Morton. In the past few years she has written a study of nineteenth century American opera buildings and sections of travel guidebooks to India, Mexico, and Greece. Her c.v. is at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~nbmorris.

Scott Poulson-Bryant received an A.B. in American Civilization from Brown University (2008), where he also taught classes in hiphop journalism and African American popular culture. His primary research centers around sentimentality and how it informs and helps to construct performance of race and gender in 19th- and 20th-century American (popular) culture. His interests also include film and media studies, genre fictions, (sub)urban social history, and queer cultural history. A founding editor of Vibe magazine, he is also the author of HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (2006).

Caitlin Rosenthal is a doctoral student in the History of American Civilization. Before coming to Harvard, she was a consultant with McKinsey & Company where she worked in a variety of industries ranging from energy to health care and non-profit management. Her experiences there contributed to her current interest in economic history, particularly accounting methods, workforce management, and labor photography. As an undergraduate Caitlin studied Political Science at Rice University in Houston. Outside of work and school, Caitlin enjoys painting, running, cooking, and making bad jokes.

Yael Schacher holds a B.A. in English from Columbia University and an A.M. in History from Harvard. Her primary interests are the history and representation of immigration and ethnicity and modern American intellectual history and cultural studies. She is working on a dissertation entitled "Refugees, their Advocates, and the Meanings of Refuge in 20th-Century America."

Summer A. Shafer earned her B.A. in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2008) with a focus on American political and cultural history. Her current research interests center on late 19th- and 20th-century U.S. foreign policy and military culture, the peculiar evolution of the socio-juridical concept of citizenship, as well as the impediments that immigrants have faced in obtaining the rights implied by citizenship since the end of the 19th century. She is particularly interested in the armed forces as an institutional engine of state expansion (both domestically and internationally) from the end of WWII to the present.

Stephen Vider received a B.A. in English and Psychology from Yale University in 2003. From 2004 to 2007, he worked for Nextbook.org, an online magazine about Jewish literature and culture (their archive can now be found at Tabletmag.com). His current interests include popular literature and culture, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, domesticity, food, and performance. He is currently working on a series of articles about the history of queer domesticity, and plans to write his dissertation on African-American, Jewish, and gay humor in the 1960s and 1970s. His writing has also appeared in the Village Voice, Newsday, and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. He blogs at the Lazy Scholar (http://lazyscholar.wordpress.com), a guide to digital archives for students and teachers of American history and culture.

Tom Wickman received an A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard College (2007), and an A.M. in History, also from Harvard (2009). His interests include the history of the colonial Northeast, early African-American history and literature, ecocriticism and environmental history, and the history of the book. He is currently pursuing two projects: one on representations of numeracy in early African-American writing, and the other on the energetics of overwintering in the seventeenth-century greater Northeast.

D. Clinton Williams received a B.A. from Oberlin College (2003) and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School (2005). He is currently exploring the intersection of religion, history and African American Studies, to locate the role religion played in American and African American social cultural movements in 20th-century America.