Assistant Instructors
Nicholas Bloom
Doctoral Student
Interests: 19th and 20th century US history; Atlantic slavery; the US South; early history of North America and the Caribbean; migration and diaspora; colonialism and modernity; critical theories of race and racism; critical theories of gender; intellectual history and political theory; radical political imaginary/the black radical tradition; Marxism; anti-colonial/postcolonial political projects; resistance literature; sports and popular music.
Kerry Knerr
Doctoral Student
Interests: Food studies, cocktail culture, economic history and geography, the erotics of consumption, representations of cannibalism, and affect and embodiment
Anna Lyon
Doctoral Student
Interests: US cultural history, medical history, reproductive technologies, critical race studies, queer studies, materialist feminism
Natalie Zelt
Doctoral Student
Interests: contemporary art of the United States, photography and its histories, critical race and gender studies, American cultural history, visual culture studies, material culture studies, curatorial practice
PhD Candidacy
Anneleise Azua
Doctoral Student
Interests: Folk Medicine, Oral History and Ethnography, Ethnic Studies, Latinx Studies, Anthropology, Gender Studies, higher education, health and medicine in the United States and Mexico, U.S.-Mexico Borderland History, Museum Studies, Public History
Christine Capetola
Doctoral Student
Interests: queer theory, black studies, gender studies, sound studies, affect theory, performance studies, 80's pop and r&b, contemporary synthpop
Joshua Kopin
Doctoral Student
Interests: 20th century cultural history, comics studies, affect studies, popular cultural studies, American religious history, political art, historiography, fame, men's style, writing pedagogy
Robert Oxford
Doctoral Student
Interests: South Texas fracking communities, ethnography, eco-critisism, petrol-politics, neoliberalism, and climate justice.
Caroline Pinkston
Doctoral Student
Interests: history of education, schools & community identity, collective memory & history, textbook studies, memorials & memorializing, education & curricular philosophy
Edwin Whitewolf
Doctoral Student
Interests: Cinema Studies and Media Studies, Native American Studies, Museum Studies, Critical Race Theory, Pop Culture and Spectacle, National Memory, 19th Century American History
PhD Students
Ja'nell Ajani
Doctoral Student
Interests: Modern and Contemporary Art, Commodification, Cinema and Media Studies, Visual Culture Studies, African-American art and art of the African diaspora, Media and Performance, and Popular Culture
Judson Barber
Doctoral Student
Interests: Public memory, public history, prison and carceral studies, restorative justice, cultural and human geography, feminist geographies, emotional and affective geographies, architecture and urban design, postmodernism, hyperreality, amusement, leisure, and cultures of American recreation.
Zoya Brumberg
Doctoral Student
Interests: The American west, migration, historiography, myth-making, public space, historic and environmental preservation practices, travel memoirs, landscapes as literary characters, 1960s-70s foraging and DIY guides, road trip movies, natural history museums, communicating on these topics heuristically
Leah Butterfield
Doctoral Student
Interests: Transnational Feminism, Queer Theory, Memoir and Personal Essay, Tourism Studies, Immigration Studies, Digital Humanities
Christine Castro
Doctoral Student
Interests: Chican@ Studies, Social Epistemology, Agricultural Labor & Immigrant history in California, Violence & incarceration in rural spaces, Collective memory
Holly Genovese
Doctoral Student
Interests: Incarceration, social movement history, African American history, black power, southern studies, prison literature, and creative nonfiction.
Kate Grover
Doctoral Student
Interests: American musical cultures and communities, 20th and 21st century cultural history, critical race and gender studies, feminist histories and practice, popular culture studies, performance studies, media studies, women in rock culture, the 1990s, historical memory and meaning-making processes, fandom, nostalgia, the politics of taste, stardom and celebrity studies, "cool"/"coolness" in the US.
Caroline Johnson
Doctoral Student
Interests: Images and visual culture, popular culture, comics and political cartoons, youth culture, consumer history, speech play and verbal art, gender theory
Andrea Remoquillo
Doctoral Student
Interests: Asian-American studies, transnational feminism, Filipino/a postcolonial studies, Filipino/Filipino-American diaspora, gender and sexual identity formation in the contemporary U.S., popular culture studies, ethnography.
Gaila Sims
Doctoral Student
Interests: Public History, Slavery, Museums, Public Memory, African American History, Black Feminism, Museum Education, Archives
Bahar Tahamtani
Doctoral Student
Interests: Academic: Representations of crime and violence, affect theory, photography, gender theory, digital and social media, 20th century American literature. Personal: Reading, video games, hiking, drawing.
MA Students
Sarah Carlson
Masters Student
Interests: archives, libraries, and museums; curation; public history and cultural heritage; arts and cultural management and entrepreneurship; critical race studies; heritage development and tourism
Kristen Wilson
Masters Student
Interests: 20th century U.S. history and culture, film studies, interaction of cultural production and political power, occupation and reconstruction, cultures of scarcity and plenty, public memory, myth-making, popular culture, children's literature, hyperreality.
