Students & Student Interests

Miguel de Baca. A fourth year in the American Civilization program, Miguel received his B.A. in American Studies with a specialization in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University (2002). His dissertation, Memory Works: Anne Truitt and Sculpture in the Sixties interrogates the aesthetic and political circumstances prompting the work of American minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt (1921-2004), who lived and worked primarily in Washington, D.C.  His additional interests include 19th and 20th century American art history, dance history, performance studies, and studies in gender and sexuality.  He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Erin Royston Battat received a B.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997. Since college, she has worked as a Jesuit Volunteer in child-abuse prevention, as a case manager for adults with mental illness, and as a high-school teacher. She is interested in 20th century cultural history; race and ethnicity in literature; labor history; gender studies; and American reform and the literature of protest. She is working on a dissertation entitled "I Ain't Got No Home Anymore: Race and Migration Narratives from the Depression to the Cold War," a comparative study of southern white, African American, and Chicano migration narratives. Texts include novels, autobiographies, popular histories, photographs, films, music, and graphic art.

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 of the United States, and 20th-century American music.

Sarah 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-based pedagogy and its relationship to nineteenth-century material and visual culture. Her research interests include American art and material culture, social and cultural history, gender, photography, museums, education and the history of childhood, adolescence and the family.

Marti Frank received a B.A. in American Studies and Philosophy from Georgetown University and an A.M. in History from Harvard. Her interests lie in the history of technology (specifically, energy-using technologies), business and organizational history, and economics. She is working to integrate these areas in her dissertation, tentatively titled, "In Perfect Order: New England Textile Mills and the Adoption of the Steam Engine, 1840-1910."

Scott Gelber received a B.A. in History and Education from Columbia University in 1999 and an A.M. in History from Harvard. He is interested in the social, political, and intellectual history of education in the United States. His dissertation, "Plain Talks on Plain Subjects: Academic Populism and Public Higher Education," explores the impact of the populist movement on state colleges and universities in Kansas, Nebraska, and North Carolina during the late nineteenth century. A former high school history teacher, Scott works as an advisor for the Teacher Education Program at the Graduate School of Education. Between 2004 and 2003, he served on the editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review.

Brian Hochman holds a BA in English from Amherst College (2003) and a MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2004). His research interests revolve primarily around 20th century American literary history; in particular, African American and regional fictions and their relationships to music, radio, recording technology, and the history of anthropology. He has published essays on the novelist, poet, and critic Nathaniel Mackey, and the jazz saxophonist Joe Henderson.

Hua Hsu received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. His interests include trans-Pacific/Asian American studies, literary transnationalism, philosophies of race and ethnicity, historical fiction, foreign perspectives on the United States, and American intellectual history (esp. 1910s-1940s). His dissertation, titled "Pacific Crossings," focuses on the anxieties and fantasies that commingled in the creation of China in the American imagination during the inter-war years. Hua is currently on the editorial board of the New Literary History of America (HUP, due 2009). He also writes about culture and politics for Slate, the Village Voice and various other publications.

Judy Kertesz is writing a dissertation titled "Skeletons in the American Attic: Curiosity, Science and the Appropriation of the American Indian Past." Her main interests include: Colonial British North America and the Early Republic, US cultural history, issues and representation; American Nationalism; Material Culture; African-American Studies; American Indian history and Tribal Sovereignty. She has organized a conference, "From The Gospel To Sovereignty," that commemorated the 350th anniversary of Harvard's Indian College. For more information, please click here.

David Kim received his A.B. (2006) in American Studies from Columbia University. His interests include 19th- and 20th-century American literature and intellectual history, narratives of transnational adoption, and scientific thought as it pertains to race and cultural narrative. He is an Adult Coordinator of the Harvard Korean Adoptee Mentoring Program (HKAMP) and will be an Assistant Public Service Fellow at Dudley House in 2007-08.

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 research interests include environmental literature, history, and policy, with particular attention to the ways in which these areas intersect with American religious practice.

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.

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. 

Zoe Trodd works on 19th and 20th century American literature (in particular American protest literature and African American literature) and the history of social movements. She also works on the history of photography and theories of historical memory. She has edited the anthologies Meteor of War: the John Brown Story (Blackwell 2004, with John Stauffer), American Protest Literature (Harvard University Press, 2006), and the forthcoming To Plead Our Own Cause: Narratives of Modern Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2007, with Kevin Bales), and has also published articles on radical violence, Ralph Ellison, Civil War photographs, 1930s documentary, Native American autobiography, the historical memory of abolitionism, and the Vietnam war. She has served as the Harvard GSAS student president and on the ASA Students' Committee, and is a director of the Zamani Foundation.

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.

Eliza Young studies issues of gender among American evangelicals in the 1940s and 50s. 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. Chapters for the dissertation arranged thematically and explore topics such as dating and marriage, parenting roles, education, careers, athleticism, and psychology. At its core, the dissertation seeks the origins of today's "family values" rhetoric among evangelicals, and it does this by examining how gender roles in 1940s/50s evangelical culture related to larger concerns about national identity. Eliza received her B.A. in English from Penn State and her MPhil from Cambridge (UK).