Alumni News
This page currently provides a glimpse into the professional lives and accomplishment of about ten percent of UB's American Studies graduate alumni. Alumni are invited to send their news to Professor Kari Winter, Director of Graduate Studies, at kwinter2@buffalo.edu.
For more information on our Alumni, please click on this link to view the department's Ph.D. and M.A. Recipients
Simon Brascoupé
simonbrascoupe@hotmail.com
M.A., 1987
Employed at: Trent University
Simon Brascoupé is a Lecturer in the Department of Native Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario and an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University. Simon has a B.A. and M.A. from State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is also completing his Ph.D. He has a strong interest in traditional knowledge and sustainable development. Simon Brascoupe has forged considerable research of Indigenous sustainable developments, and has been a lecturer, delegate, and an organizer in a number of national and international sustainable development conferences and symposia. At the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, he was an official delegate, and wrote a successful negotiation treaty between non-governmental organizations and Indigenous Peoples. Since then, he has been very involved in promoting Indigenous Peoples harmonious development, the Biological Diversity Convention, and Agenda 21. In addition, Simon Brascoupé has been invited by international Indigenous leaders to act as a secretariat for them on matters related to the Commission on Sustainable Development. Simon is a published author of numerous books and articles and has written about Aboriginal art.
Visit his Web site at: http://users.adelphia.net/~kerussell4/exhibits.htm
Candace Broughton
cbroughton@cattlv.wnyric.org
Ph.D., 2004
Employed at: Cattaraugus-Little Valley CSD
Now in my 21st year as a school library media specialist, I am searching for a new way to tie my somewhat disparate interests (folklore, local history, rural women, Spain, Caribbean Studies, music) together. My dissertation focused on an alleged murder and subsequent murder trial that occurred in Cattaraugus County in 1875-76. In addition to my day job, I've taught two courses at UB and one at Albion Correctional.
Corinne Carey
careyc@hrw.org
M.A., 1992
Employed at: Human Rights Watch
Corinne is a researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch based in New York. She specializes in criminal justice issues, and economic, social and cultural rights. After earning her MA in American Studies with a concentration in Women's Studies, she worked for three years in Philadelphia with drug injectors at Prevention Point Philadelphia, one of the country's first needle exchange programs for the prevention of HIV/AIDS and the reduction of drug related harm. She then graduated from SUNY Buffalo School of Law, and went on to direct the Harm Reduction Law Project for five years. The HRLP provided representation to people struggling with addiction in cases dealing with police harassment, child custody, denial of welfare and housing benefits, and disability discrimination. Corinne has written on subjects dealing with legalizing syringes, policing pregnant drug using women, and drug testing welfare recipients. Her forthcoming work on denying public housing to people with criminal records will be released by Human Rights Watch in the fall of 2004.
Greg Dimitriadis
M.A., 1995
Employed at: University at Buffalo
Greg Dimitriadis (M.A., 1995) is core Adjunct Professor in the Department of American Studies. Tenured as an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at UB in 2004, Prof. Dimitriadis is the author or editor (alone and with others) of nine books. He also edits the book series Critical Youth Studies for Routledge. He earned his Ph.D. in Speech Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Chicago in 1999.
Luke Goble
lgoble@warnerpacific.edu
Ph.D. 2007
Employed at:
Warner Pacific College
Currently an Assistant Professor of Humanities and History at Warner Pacific College, a small liberal arts college located in Portland, Oregon. He teaches courses in History, Philosophy, Latin American Studies and Indigenous Studies. When he is not teaching, correcting papers or spending time with his two young daughters, he is working on a book entitled The National Unconscious: Indians and Nationalism in the Americas, among other projects.
Jason Harding
jason0lisa@earthlink.net
B.A. & M.A., 1995 & 1997
Employed at: Self-employed
After graduating from UB, I worked for the NMAI - Smithsonian Insitiution, the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation and did some work for the Haudenosaunee Standing Committee on Burial Rules and Regulations. I am now a happy stay at home Dad for my son, William, who is now a one-year old.
Barbara-Helen Hill
bh33@execulink.com
B.A. & M.A.
Employed at:
Self-employed
I have my own publishing business called Shadyhat books that I established to get my book "Shaking the Rattle Healing the Trauma of Colonization" back in Print. Besides writing and painting, I'm now going to school for Web page design and Quark Express for desk top publishing. Still writing and now working on an art career.
Louise George Kittaka
LGKittaka@aol.com
M.A., '97
Employed at: Freelance editor/writer
After completing my MA and moving back to Tokyo, Japan with my family, I resumed my career in publishing. I currently write for the Eiken, a national English exam, as well as for several other publishing companies, and I am associate editor for Tokyo Families magazine, a resource for English-speaking families in Tokyo. Two years ago I published my first book—a guide for Japanese mothers wanting to use English with young children—and a second is coming out in 2008. I had one small son of my own when I was a student at UB, and since then we added two daughters to the family, so it has been a productive few years in more ways than one.
Kris Kraus
kjkraus1234@hotmail.com
M.A., 2001
Employed at:
Legal Aid Society Federal Defender Division
Kris J. Kraus holds a B.A. in Theatre from SUNY College at Buffalo and an M.A. in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo. At U.B. he split his studies between ethnomusicology and Native American Studies with John Mohawk and Oren Lyons. His Master's project, Inner City Griots: The Cultural Assimilation of African American Oral Traditions, Musical Visions and Revolutionary Ideals into New York City Hip-hop Culture, argued the merits of university level hip-hop studies, while exploring the roots of his own decade-long career in music.
After leaving U.B., Kris began studies at the City University of New York School of Law, where he is currently a third year student. At CUNY, Kris has founded the school's first Criminal Law Society and its monthly journal "The Commentary," been elected the President of the Sports and Entertainment Law Student Association, named Co-Captain of the basketball team and selected as the student representative on the Admissions Committee. Kris has also served as a Teaching Assistant for both Torts and Criminal Law and was awarded the Charles H. Revson Public Interest Fellowship in 2002.
Kris currently works for the Legal Aid Society Federal Defender Division in Brooklyn assisting in representing indigent people charged with federal crimes. Previously he did the same in state court for Legal Aid's Criminal Defense Division in the Bronx.
Besides finishing his studies at CUNY, Kris is also working on a project that will tell the story of how his maternal grandparents survived both the Holocaust and a Japanese Prisoner of War camp during World War II. He lives with his wife, Mia, on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
David Michalski
michalski@ucdavis.edu
M.A., '94
Employed at:
University of California, Davis
After graduating with MA, Mr. Michalski moved to NYC to conduct an ethnographic study of corporate commuter culture. He recieved an MLS from Queens college, worked at the School of Visual Arts and then moved to California where he became the Psychology Librarian at UC Davis. His writings include "Cities Voices Memory Collage," a chapter in Art and the Performance of Memory (Routledge 2002), "The Bibliographic Imagination: Tracing the 19th Century Origins of the Internet," an essay in the Journal of American & Comparative Cultures, 23.3 & 24.4.
His book Cosmos and Damian: a World Trade Center Collage, an ethnographic scrapbook on corporate culture in New York City between 1994 and 2000, is forthcoming from Bootstrap Press. Mr. Michalski serves as contributing and electronic editor for the journal, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. More information can be found at: http://mypage.campuspipeline.com/michalski/
Michael Morgulis
michael@newbuffalographics.com
B.A., 1967
Employed at: Michael Morgulis Studio / New Buffalo Graphics
I am a self-employed print maker and graphic designer of posters, logos and t-shirt art. Known mainly for "The Buffalo Series" of images and products, I have created logos and posters for many local and national cultural institutions.
I was one of the first six graduate students in the American Studies program, directed by Larry Chisolm, in 1968. The two years I spent in American Studies had a profound influence on the direction of my life, and the time spent remains among my fondest memories.
Jessica Nathanson
janathanson@yahoo.com
M.A. 1996, Ph.D. 2003
Employed at:
Augustana College; Kilian Community College
Since coming to South Dakota in 2000, I feel as if I've had several incarnations: I did a stint in marketing for a local arts organization, became a (first-time) mother to Koan (now almost 2), renewed my connections to reproductive rights activism by joining the board of NARAL SD: Pro-Choice America; promoted natural birth education by joining the board of Birth Options Resource Network, SD; and continued teaching as an adjunct on two college campuses. I recently completed my degree and am currently writing and applying for teaching positions in Women's Studies. My article, "Pride and Politics: Revisiting the Northampton Pride March, 1989-1993," was published in 2002 by the Journal of Bisexuality; more recently (2003), my article, "Bearing Up: A Feminist Reflects on Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Childbirth," was published by Network News: The Newsletter of Sociologists for Women in Society.
Mark Anthony Neal
dr-yogi@att.net
Ph.D., 1996
University of Texas at Austin
MARK ANTHONY NEAL is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). Neal's essays have been anthologized in more than half-a-dozen books, including the 2004 edition of the acclaimed series Da Capo Best Music Writing, edited by Mickey Hart. Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies and Director of the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies (ICUSS) at Duke University. Dr. Neal previously held tenured associate professor positions at The University of Texas, Austin and the State University of New York at Albany. Dr. Neal also taught as an assistant professor at Xavier University, a historically black institution in New Orleans. He is a native of the place affectionately known as the "boogie-down" Bronx, NY.
The Washington Post (June 25, 2003) praised Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation for creating "a dense, sensuous space for a critical cultured black perspective" adding that Neal "may be the first writer capable of developing groundbreaking ideas in the academy and getting a new sticker on his "ghetto pass" in one stroke." Neal's previous book Soul Babies: Contemporary Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic was voted as one of the Top-Ten Books of 2002 by Africana.com. In Soul Babies Neal grapples with the complexities and contradictions of black life and culture after the end of the Civil Rights era. Exploring a range of contemporary black cultural expression from Good Times to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Neal traces the emergence of a "Post-Soul Aesthetic" that marks a profound
transformation of African American thought and experience. Neal's first book, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture, is described by Michael Eric Dyson as "one of the most brilliant analyses of the last 50 years of black popular music." What the Music Said is a book about communities under siege, but also communities engaged in various forms of resistance, institution-building, and everyday pleasures. Beginning with the Be-Bop era, Neal reads the story of "black communities" through the black tradition in popular music. Neal is a columnist for Africana.com and is a regular contributor to SeeingBlack.com, Popmatters.com.
Linda Phillips-Palo
Strikerlpp@aol.com
B.A. & M.A., '72 & '74
Employed at: Self-Employed
After completing my Masters Degree in American Studies I went to California where I was hired by Francis Ford Coppola who was looking for a"Secretary with a Masters Degree". From there I used my acting/teaching background to secure a position in the Casting Department of Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. Since then I have cast many feature films including "The Rainmaker" with Matt Damon, "The Virgin Suicides" for which I won the Artios Award (the highest award for casting directors), "Heaven's Prisoners", "The Secret Garden", "Jack", "Shetan, The Young Black Stallion", "Jeepers Creepers 2" and others. I credit my time at American Studies as both a student and a secretary as being the foundation of the career I have today.
Jodie Roure
Ph.D., Spring 04
Employed at: John Jay College of Criminal Justice [within the Puerto Rican/Latin American Studies Department], New York
Jodie G. Roure, J.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor, JJC Project Investigator, Summer Pre-Law program at St. John's University School of Law and Project Investigator for the NYC Human Rights High School curriculum program.
Janine Santiago
Ph.D., 2003
Employed at: SUNY College at Brockport
Janine Santiago (Ph.D., 2003) has been appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at SUNY College at Brockport after she completed her Ph.D. She previously taught there in a visiting position.
Shirley Tang
shirley.tang@umb.edu
Ph.D., 2002
Employed at: University of Massachusetts, Boston
Ph.D. dissertation: "Enough Is Enough!: Struggles for Cambodian American Community Development in Revere, Massachusetts" (Major advisor: Michael Frisch; Community members: John Mohawk, Jolene Rickard)
Shirley Suet-ling Tang holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in the American Studies and Asian American Studies Programs at University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her teaching/research/service interests are: comparative race, ethnicity, and culture; Southeast Asian American community studies; critical ethnography; transnational feminism; and activist art. She has rich experience in youth and community development in immigrant and refugee communities in Massachusetts, having directly participated as a frontline organizer in the Cambodian American community in Revere, MA, and led collaborative public health research projects in both the Vietnamese American community in Dorchester, MA as well as the Cambodian American community in Lowell, MA. She has completed "Community Development as Public Health/Public Health as Community Development: A Report on the HIV/AIDS Needs Assessment in Lowell, MA" (Boston: Massachusetts Asian AIDS Prevention Project, 2001), and recently selected to be the co-writer for the first national report on HIV/AIDS risks among Asian and Pacific Islander women. She is currently completing a manuscript on the development of the Cambodian American community in Revere, MA, focusing on the voices, experiences, and visions of street-involved young women.