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| Research |
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Faculty |
Graduate Students
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Completed Dissertations |
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| Graduate
Student Research Projects |
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Jacob Berman researches the influence
of the image of the Arab on Ante Bellum American identity
formation. Drawing on political, geographical, social
and literary discourses circulating in pre civil war
America, he traces the way in which Americans negociated
their own cultural fissures, contradictions and anxieities
through representations of Arab space and people. |
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Karen Bishop's research interests
include exile studies, city studies and architecture,
translation theory, and modern poetry. She is presently
studying the changing condition of exile in a globalized
twentieth century as portrayed in contemporary Argentine
narrative and modern Spanish poetry. |
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Sharon P. Doetsch's dissertation,
“Rethinking the Third Wave as Queer Feminism,”
explores the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer activists to the politics of race,
economic justice, and disability from 1990 to the present.
It draws from the stories of those with multiple marginalized
identities, such as queer people of color and queer people
with disabilities, a theory-in-praxis capable of connecting
social movements that continue to stratify along lines
of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, and ability.
Her thesis names this theory “queer feminism”
and defines it based on interviews with contemporary queer
and feminist activists in Washington, DC, in relation
to published memoirs and histories of earlier feminist,
queer, economic and global justice, disability rights,
and antiracist activism and to theoretical work that crosses
these boundaries of identity. |
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Carina Evans's dissertation is
entitled “'Loving Blackness': The Neo-Slave Narrative
and Contemporary Revisions of Slavery,” and her
research interests include African American Literature,
American Race and Ethnic Studies, American Literature
Post-1865, and Early American Literature. |
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Nathan C. Henne's research interests
include Maya poetics,pre-Contact American literatures,
Literature of the Americas, magic realism, Miguel Angel
Asturias, the Popol Vuh and its residue in modern literary
movements, modernism and William Faulkner, hieroglyphics,
ur-rationalities, language theory, and translation theory. |
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James Hodge is currently completing
an essay for publication on painter J. M. W. Turner and
religious iconography for UCSB's New Visions of Nature,
Science, and Religion program. He continues to develop
projects on James Joyce's deployment of precinematic devices
in Ulysses as well as a genealogy of peepshows. He is
working with Professor Alan Liu and a team of graduate
students to produce a web project entitled The Agrippa
Files, an examination of the William Gibson and Dennis
Ashbaugh artists' book collaboration. He is also co-organizing
Music
and the Moving Image, a graduate student conference
January 14–15, 2006. |
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Susan Keller's dissertation is entitled
"Making up Modernity: Fashioning the Feminine in
early Twentieth-Century U.S. Culture." This project
focuses on modernism, makeup and the new woman in American
popular culture, literature, and film. |
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Danielle La France is studying
nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literatures
written in both English and Spanish from a cultural
feminist perspective. She is working on the evolution
of women's magazines and the development of literacy
among American women in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. She is also committed to literacy outreach
and teaching reading to adult learners. Please contact
her to find out more about how one hour a week of your
time can make the difference in someone's life. |
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Eric Martinsen is writing a dissertation
entitled "Narrativizing Global Moments in Twentieth-Century
Fiction and Film." Moments of cross-cultural engagement,
or "global moments," provide rich temporal and
spatial nodes for the analysis of how writers of fiction
represent globalizing forces and experiences. He investigates
fictional representations of the transformation of indigenous,
ethnic and postcolonial communities as they are inculcated
by the global. He also examines how narrative portrayals
of resistant and generative acts of reading that allow
local subjects to defy homogenization by adapting and
appropriating schemata to serve local interests from the
global “mediascape.” |
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| Jeanne
Scheper’s
dissertation, “Moving Performances: Traversing
Trans-Atlantic Modernism, 1892-1940,” investigates
cultural performances and emerging social identities
during the modernist period, 1892-1940. She recently
received a Graduate Division Humanities/Social Science
Research Travel Grant to conduct research at the Schomburg
Center for Black Research in Harlem and the Performing
Arts Library at Lincoln Center on performers Aida Overton
Walker, Josephine Baker, and Libby Holman, and writer
Nella Larsen. |
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In
Stacey Van Dahm's dissertation,
"Outside-In America: Soviet and Cuban Exile Literature
Narrating the Nation," she studies the ways exile
literature responds to cultural and national narratives
about what it means to be a national subject. Her work
focuses on Soviet and Cuban exile literature written
in the U.S. during the Cold War period. This study recognizes
the ways Cold War nationalist discourses construct the
ethnic, sexual, gender, and class identity of national
subjects, and is intended to model a global perspective
for understanding home, belonging and nation.
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