American Studies
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Faculty News
Kristina Bross' book, Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, co-edited with Hilary Wyss, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2008. The book was "beta tested" by AMST students in her "Early American Literature" and "Early Native Writings" classes.
She also has been elected to the executive council of the Society of Early Americanists; her term as president of the society begins in 2013. At the most recent meeting of the society, five graduate students from Purdue, including AMST student Karen Salt, presented their work and served as conference registrars. They were joined at the meeting by Sabine Klein (Ph.D. 2008). Purdue was the single largest contingent from any academic instutition at the meeting!
Susan Curtis has recently published a book entitled Colored Memories: A Biographer's Quest for the Elusive Lester A. Walton (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008). She was also selected as a 2009 Service-Learning Faculty Fellow.
Nadine Dolby is the recipient of the 2009 Discovery Award from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Purdue University.
Robert Lamb has recently published the following articles and book chapters:
- "'A Little Yellow Bastard Boy': Paternal Rejection, Filial Insistence, and the Triumph of African American Cultural Aesthetics in Langston Hughes's 'Mulatto.'" College Literature, 35.2 (2008): 126-53.
- "A Postmodern Subject in Camelot: Mark Twain's (Re)Visions of Malory's Morte D'arthur in a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." In A Companion to Arthurian Literature. Ed. Helen Fulton. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009: 403-19.
- "Flight of the Raven: A Retrospective on the Scholarship of G. R. Thompson." Special Double-issue Fetschrift in Honor of G. R. Thompson. Ed. Steven Frye and Eric Carl Link. Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation 39-40 (2006-2007): 1-16.
- Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. Accepted and forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in December 2009.
- A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 (2005: coedited with G. R. Thompson) being reissued in paperback by Wiley-Blackwell in July 2009.
He was named 2008 Indiana Professor of the Year, a national teaching award administered by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
He also received an Excellence in Teaching Award for both graduate and undergraduate teaching from the Department of English, Purdue University.
Professor Lamb was invited to give an address at "The Fourth World of Huckleberry Fin: Understanding Jim in the Historical Contexts of Minstrelsy, Antebellum Slave Capture, and the Fugitive Slave's Journey." Address presented to the History of American Civilization Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, December 15, 2008.
He also gave the address "'One was a coxcomb not to die in it': Historical Genre, the American Self, and the Response to Modernity in the Fiction of 'The Gilded Age' and 'Jazz Age,' 1865-1929." Address presented to Primary Source, Boston, MA, December 16, 2008.
Christopher Lukasik served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the American Studies Program at Purdue. He led faculty in constructing a new undergraduate major and minor in American Studies. He is pleased to report that the major, the minor, and three new undergraduate courses in American Studies are scheduled to begin at Purdue in Fall 2010.
His book, Discerning Characters: Distinction and The Face in American Culture, 1775-1850, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
His article, "Looking at the Over-Exposed: Visuality and Race in William Harnett's Attention Company!" is forthcoming in Callaloo.
This past year he served as a regional delegate in the MLA Delegate Assembly and as a consultant for the Project on the History of American Prints at The Center for American Historic Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. He was also selected as a Fulbright Scholar grantee to the Philippines where he will be teaching Interdisciplinary and Transnational Approaches to American Literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman in Manila in 2009-2010.
Nancy Peterson participated in the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society held in Charleston, South Carolina in July 2008. Professor Peterson is a lifetime member of the society, which is devoted to the study and teaching of the works of Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel Laureate for Literature. The conference included presentations by distinguished scholars, visual and performing artists, and local historians. One of the major events of the conference included performing a Maafa ceremony and placing a memorial bench - a "bench by the road," as Morrison calls it in an essay - on Sullivan's Island off the coast of South Carolina, which served as a major port of entry to North America for enslaved Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Professor Peterson's book, Beloved: Character Studies (Continuum 2008) was recognized for its scholarly contribution at the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society held in Charleston, SC, in July 2008. She delivered the Harriet A. Jacobs lecture sponsored by the African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue in March 2009 and spoke about "Toni Morrison, Theodore Gericault, and Incendiary Art." Professor Peterson has also been appointed to the editorial board of the Toni Morrison Review, a scholarly journal that will be launced within the next year. In October 2008, Professor Peterson was inducted into Purdue's Teaching Academy.
Ryan Schneider was awarded promotion to Associate Professor with tenure. His book, The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. DuBois: Emotional Dimensions of Race and Reform, is forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan and will appear as the third title in their Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance series. His essay, "Drowning the Irish: Natural Borders and Class Boundaries in Thoreau's Cape Cod," was chosen as the lead article for the 2008 special issue of American Transcendental Quarterly, and he was invited by the Thoreau Society to present a paper at the 2009 MLA conference. Professor Schneider also was awarded a fellowship from the Center for Undergraduate Instructional Excellence for a project on the development of undergraduate coursework in Critical Race Theory.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried was presented with the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy's highest award, the Herbert Schneider Award for 2009, given for her "distinguished contribution to the understanding and development of American Philosophy." She gave a paper examining identity and diversity as the Keynote Speaker for the Conference on Identity and Social Transformation, sponsored by the Central European Pragmatists Forum in Brno, the Czech Republic, and one on distinguishing myth from reality as an invited speaker for the Workshop on Pragmatism and the Ethics of Belief, at the Nordic Pragmatism Network in Jyvaskyla, Finland. She published an essay, "Thinking Desire: Taking Perspectives Seriously," in Reconstructing Democracy, Recontextualizing Dewey and another on "Jane Addams's Principled Compromises," in Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice.