Support the ProgramAmerican Studies at Miami University
Faculty & Staff
Core Faculty
Sheila Croucher
Sheila Croucher (Ph.D. University of Florida, 1993) is a Professor of American Studies and Political Science. Her research and teaching interests include: cultural and political belonging, globalization, migration and North American Studies. She is the author of The Other Side of the Fence: American Migrants in Mexico (2009), Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World (2003), and Imagining Miami: Ethnic Politics in a Postmodern World (1997). Her current work focuses on the varied implications of globalization for the form and content of American nationhood. In 2003, Croucher was awarded the College of Arts and Science Distinguished Educator Award and in 1998 the Associated Student Government Outstanding Teacher Award. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
H. Louise Davis
Louise Davis (Ph.D. Michigan State University, 2008) joined Miami in fall 2010 as an Assistant Professor of American Studies and the Director of the Bachelor of Integrated Studies Program on the regional campuses. Her work focuses on ethical consumerism, social movements, transatlantic media and cultural studies, gender and youth studies. She has published articles on representations of the African Madonna and Child icon and celebrity activitsm. She is currently working on a book length exploration of an emerging transatlantic "culture of charity" that emerged out of Third World Aid campaigns of the mid-1980s. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Curtis W. Ellison
Curtis W. Ellison (Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 1970) is a Professor of History and American Studies emeritus and Director of the Michael J. Colligan History Project, Miami Hamilton & Hamilton Community Foundation. He is the editor and lead author of Miami University, 1809-2009: Bicentennial Perspectives, a bicentennial legacy project in 2009; and he initiated and served as major interviewer for the Miami Stories Oral History Project. In addition, he has published "Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven," a history of country music featuring ethnography of fan and artist performance. He has also co-edited "The Big Ballad Jamboree," a 1950s novel about country music by poet Donald Davidson. His early books were accounts of the critical reception of African-American novelists William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt and Martin Delaney. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Sandra Garner
Sandra Garner (Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 2010) joined Miami University in the fall of 2010 as a Heanon Wilkins Fellow. She specializes in American Indian and Indigenous studies in the Americas with an emphasis on the construction, circulation and material effects of representations of Native people. She is the 2011-2012 Heanon Wilkins Fellow in AMS. Her current work focuses on competing historical and contemporary narratives about the Newark Earthworks (Ohio), the largest geometric mound complex in the world. Her previous work about the site has included an oral history project on American Indians in Ohio, planning and implementing four educational, public symposiums about the earthworks, and a seventy mile pilgrimage walk from the mounds in Chillicothe to Newark. She is a content expert for a newly funded NEH project called Ancient Ohio Trails. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Adrian Gaskins
Adrian Gaskins (Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 2010) joined Miami University in the fall of 2008 as a Heanon Wilkins Fellow. He is currently a lecturer in Black World Studies and American Studies. His research interests are American and African American studies, 20th century American history, critical race theory, with specialties in empire, comparative diasporas, labor, and blacks in the military. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy (Ph.D. University of Bucharest, Romania, 2006) joined Miami in 2008 as a lecturer in American Studies. Her research interests focus on image studies and the literary representation of political ideologies. She is the recipient of the 2007 ICCS-CIEC Award for Best Doctoral dissertation in Canadian Studies. Her book manuscript explores the connection between the national mythologies of Canadian and American cultures and the debate over democracy and republicanism in 19th century North America. Godeanu-Kenworthy was a fellow at the JFK Institute for North American Studies in Berlin, Germany, at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and at the Institute for Canadian Studies, Ottawa, Canada, and a postdoctoral fellow at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Her other research interests include transnationalism, globalization, popular culture, and the comparative study of new literatures in English. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Kimberly Hamlin
Kimberly Hamlin (Ph.D. University of Texas, 2007) joined Miami in the fall of 2007 with a joint appointment in American Studies and History. Her work focuses on the intersections of science, religion, and gender. Her current project, From Eve to Evolution: Gender and the American Reception of Charles Darwin, examines the ways in which Darwinian evolution altered popular understandings of gender and influenced U.S. feminist thought. This project grew out of her dissertation "Beyond Adam's Rib: How Darwinian Evolution Redefined Gender and Influenced American Feminist Thought, 1870-1920," which was a finalist for the American Studies Association's Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize and the Organization of American Historians' Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. women's history. Her future projects include an analysis of scientific and popular ideas about sex determination, 1870-1970, and a biography of free-thinking feminist Helen Hamilton Gardener (1853-1925). Hamlin has also worked on the history of the Girl Scouts and served as historical consultant on the PBS documentary "Troop 1500. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Eugene Metcalf
Eugene Metcalf (Ph.D. University of California, Irvine, 1973) is a Professor of American Studies emeritus. His work focuses on the cultural politics of American art, particularly ethnic and folk expression. His early books explore the critical reception of African-American writers Paul Laurence Dunbar, William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnut and Martin Delaney. He has also written extensively on the cultural reception and significance of self-taught and outsider art, and he edited the book The Artist Outsider. In recent years Metcalf has focused his work on southern African American vernacular art, authoring essays , editing publications, and consulting on the creation of exhibitions, including projects at the Whitney Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Denver Museum of Art; the Walters Art Museum: and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is currently working on two exhibitions and their accompanying publications for the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Kelly Quinn
Kelly Quinn (Ph.D., University of Maryland, 2007) joined Miami in fall 2007 as an Assistant Professor in American Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the dynamic relationship between people and places. She is currently working on a critical biography of the African American architect, Hilyard R. Robinson, (1899-1986), which grew out of her dissertation, Making Modern Homes: A History of Langston Terrace Dwellings, a New Deal Public Housing Program in Northeast Washington, D.C. (recipient of the John Reps Prize for the Best Dissertation in Planning History, 2007). Quinn has served on committees for the American Studies Association, Arts of Citizenship, Imagining America, Oxford Farmers' Market Uptown, and Society for American City Regional and Planning History. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Damon Scott
Damon Scott (Ph.D University of Texas, Austin, 2008) is a lecturer in American Studies and Geography. His work focuses on the imprint of culture on urban landscapes and the ways different places can reinforce specific notions of self and community. His work is informed by current trends in cultural studies and geography that look critically at the concepts of culture, place and space in U.S. cities. His current project, The City Aroused, examines the intersections of urban redevelopment and sexual politics in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. As a consultant to a local architectural preservation group, he drafted an historical narrative and a public policy rationale for creating a GLBT historic district in San Francisco. He has taught several upper-division AMS courses in which students research and produce short documentaries 
on the impact of urban renewal on an Ohio city. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Marguerite S. Shaffer
Marguerite S. Shaffer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1994) is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History and the Director of the American Studies Program. Her work focuses on U.S. cultural history with an emphasis on conceptions of nature and the construction of public culture. She is the author of See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (2001) and the editor of Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States (2008). She has published a number of articles on tourism, national parks, scenery, and regional identity of the American West. She also has worked as a research associate for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and served as a consultant for the Autry Museum of Western History. Her current research focuses on the expressions and activities of popular environmentalism. In 2011, Dr. Shaffer received the Mid-America American Studies Association Elizabeth Kolmer Award for teaching and mentoring in American Studies. In 2010, she received the College of Arts and Science Distinguished Educator Award.
Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Helen Sheumaker
Helen Sheumaker (Ph.D. University of Kansas, 1999) is is a lecturer in American Studies and History. Her work focuses on issues of consumerism in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century United States. She is the author of Love Entwined: The Story of Human Hair Work in American Society, University of Pennsylvania Press (2007). She also co-edited Material Culture: An Encyclopedia with Shirley Teresa Wadja for ABC-CLIO press. She teaches courses in American Studies, Public History and Museums, Popular Culture, and American History. Her current research project is a cultural history of secondhand shopping in the U.S. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Kristen Williams
Kristen Williams (Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park, 2010) joined Miami in the fall of 2010 as a Visiting Assistant Professor in American Studies. Her scholarship focuses on the co-constitution of place, work and identity via contemporary site-specific tourist narratives. Her doctoral dissertation, Waterfronts for Work and Play: Mythscapes of Heritage and Citizenship in Contemporary Rhode Island, examines the relationship between heritage sites, urban culture, and civic life in present-day Rhode Island. She is the recipient of the Carl Bode Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]; Personal website
Peter W. Williams
Peter W. Williams (Ph.D. Yale University, 1970) is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies emeritus. He is the author of Popular Religion in America (1980); America's Religions: Traditions and Cultures (1989, 2001); and Houses of God: Region, Religion and Architecture in the United States (1997); and editor of the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience (1988, with Charles H. Lippy); the Encyclopedia of American Social History (1993, with Mary Kupiec Cayton and Elliott J. Gorn); the Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History (2002, with Mary Kupiec Cayton); and The Encyclopedia of Religion in America, 4 vols. (2009). He is also editor of the series Studies in Anglican History, sponsored by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, and Perspectives on American Religion and Culture (1999). He served as President of the American Society of Church History in 1998, and currently co-chairs the North American Religions section of the American Academy of Religion. His research interests focus on the built environment and landscape of religion in America and on religion and culture in the Progressive Era. Contact info and brief CV [PDF]
Affiliate Faculty
- Ann Elizabeth Armstrong
- associate professor
Department of Theatre
armstra2@muohio.edu - Ron Becker
- assistant professor
Department of Communication
beckerrp@muohio.edu - Robert Benson
- professor
Department of Architecture and Interior Design
bensonra@muohio.edu - Ann Michelle Jarrett Bromberg
- associate professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese (Hamilton Campus)
jarretam@muohio.edu - Andrew Cayton
- distinguished professor
Department of History
caytonar@muohio.edu - Mary Frederickson
- associate professor
Department of History
frederme@muohio.edu - Carolyn A. Haynes
- professor & director
Honors & Scholars Program
haynesca@muohio.edu - Tammy Kernodle
- associate professor
Department of Music
kernodtl@muohio.edu - Theresa A. Kulbaga
- assistant professor
Department of English (Hamilton Campus)
kulbagta@muohio.edu - Timothy Melley
- associate professor
Department of English
mellleytd@muohio.edu - Kate Rousmaniere
- professor, chair
Department of Educational Leadership
rousmak@muohio.edu - Susan Kay Sloan
- professor
Department of English
sloansk@muohio.edu - James E. Tobin
- associate professor
Journalism Program
tobinje@muohio.edu - Allan M. Winkler
- distinguished professor
Department of History
winkleam@muohio.edu
Staff
- Rene McKinstry
- program associate
Programs Office
120 MacMillan
mckinsdr@muohio.edu
(513) 529-5333 - Cathie F. Sherman,
- program associate
Programs Office
120 MacMillan
shermacf@muohio.edu
(513) 529-5333
Student Aids
- Rebecca Silverman
- silverre@muohio.edu
- Katie Hoovler
- hoovlekm@muohio.edu
- Stephanie Brock
- brocksn@muohio.edu