Department Faculty
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Galen Brokaw |
Galen Brokaw specializes in colonial Latin America. His research and teaching interests include colonial historiography, Indigenous writing, Nahuatl language and literature, the Mesoamerican codices, the Andean khipu, and indigenismo. At present, his work focuses on the interaction between indigenous media and alphabetic script during the colonial period.
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Jose Buscaglia Associate Director of AMS Graduate Studies, MA Advisor |
Jose Buscaglia's research interests include Caribbean mulataje and metaphorical subjectivity; coloniality and post-national studies; travel narratives, piracy, contraband and peoples of the sea; the Cuban Revolution and Caribbean caudillismo; Caribbean architecture and urban history; and paleography and archival research. He is the author of Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (University of Minnesota Press). His current book project titled, "Perils in the Pursuit of Happiness," includes a carefully documented and annotated translation of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's "Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez," published in Mexico City in 1690.
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Greg Dimitriadis Graduate School of Education |
A prolific writer, Greg Dimitriadis is the author of Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice (Peter Lang) and Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs: Young Black Men Coming of Age in Urban America (Teachers College Press, Columbia University). He is the co-author of Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial: From Baldwin to Basquiat and Beyond (Teachers College Press), On Qualitative Inquiry (Teachers College Press), and Theory for Education (Routledge). He is also the co-editor of Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life (Routledge), Learning to Labor in New Times (Routledge), Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (Second Edition) (Routledge), and Ideology, Curriculum, and the New Sociology of Education (Routledge). Professor Dimitriadis edits the Routledge book series on Critical Youth Studies, and he is a member of the SUNY Press editorial board.
Sarah Elder
Professor of Visual Studies
Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Email: selder@buffalo.edu
Sarah Elder is an award-winning documentary film director whose career is concerned with the practices of filming across cultural and social boundaries. She has filmed with Alaska Native communities for over 25 years, receiving national and international prizes for her productions. She currently teaches Documentary Film and Video in the Department of Media Study, where she directs the Documentary Program. She also teaches courses in nonfiction theory, digital documentary, visual anthropology, ethnographic media, editing, ethics and story-telling. She is an adjunct professor in the Anthropology Department and currently serves on the Board of the Society for Visual Anthropology.
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Michael Frisch Senior Research Scholar Associate Director of AMS Graduate Studies, PhD Advisor |
Michael Frisch specializes in urban, oral, and public history. A former Chair of the Department, he was President of the American Studies Association (2000-2001) and currently chairs the ASA's International Committee. He also served as editor of the Oral History Review.
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Keith Griffler Email: griffler@buffalo.edu |
Keith Griffler's research interests are in African American and African Diaspora history. His most recent book is Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (University Press of Kentucky). His first book, What Price Alliance? Black Radicals Confront White Labor, 1918-1938 (Garland), traces the formation of the historic African American-labor alliance that took shape during the Great Depression. He is currently working on the transnational history of race and class in the modern world economy. Dr. Griffler is also completing a documentary on the Underground Railroad, co-produced with Kevin Burke of the University of Cincinnati. Their documentary short film on the topic, Wade in the Water, won four national awards, including first place from the National Broadcasting Society in 2002. Dr. Griffler has been involved in other public history projects on the Underground Railroad, including serving on the Board of Governors of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, which opened in August 2004.
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Donald A. Grinde, Jr. |
Don Grinde's research and teaching focuses on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) history, U.S. Indian policy since 1871, Native American thought, and environmental history. Grinde is Co-Principal Investigator for a $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation that promotes Ecological Restoration and trains graduate students and faculty to collaborate through interdisciplinary conversation on solving environmental problems in Western New York. He also received (Summer 2009) a $5,000 collaborative pilot grant from the Mellon and the Luce Foundations to initiate a study of the 16th and 17th century ecological history of the Susquehanna River (Prof. Grinde's portion of the Susquehanna study was from north of the New York state line to the source of the Susquehanna River at Lake Otsego). In addition, he has authored several books including the Encyclopedia of Native American Biography (Da Capo), Apocalypse of Chiokoyhikoy, Chief of the Iroquois (Presses de l'Universite Laval), and The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation (Indian Historian Press). A Japanese translation of his book Exemplar of Liberty (co-authored with Bruce Johansen, University of California Press) was published in 2006.
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Oren R. Lyons |
Oren Lyons is the Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee, of the Onondaga Nation of the Haudenosaunee. He is also the publisher of Daybreak Magazine and the co-editor of Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations & the U.S. Constitution (Clear Light). His interests include Native American history, international indigenous affairs, contemporary indigenous issues, and international environmental issues.
Theresa McCarthy
Assistant Professor of American Studies
Email: tm59@buffalo.edu
Read more about Theresa McCarthy
Theresa McCarthy's work focuses on the continuity of Haudenosaunee traditionalism and languages within contemporary Six Nations/Haudenosaunee communities, especially Six Nations of Grand River in Ontario, Canada. Her scholarly, teaching, and activist interests reside in the areas of Haudenosaunee citizenship/clans, the social meanings of Haudenosaunee unity and diversity, Six Nations/Haudenosaunee land rights, the historiography of anthropological research on the Iroquois, Iroquois factionalism, Indigenous women and anti-violence initiatives, linguistic research methodologies, and community-based/applied research initiatives. Professor McCarthy has worked as a consultant for research projects broadly addressing issues of health (Aboriginal Healing and Wellness Strategy, IHRDP), education (Native University Access Program Evaluation), and the environment (EAGLE Project, NRDA-Akwesasne) in numerous First Nations communities. She is a citizen (Beaver clan) of the Onondaga nation of Six Nations of Grand River.
Ruth Meyerowitz
Associate Professor of American Studies
Director of AMS Graduate and Undergraduate Studies
Email: rsm@buffalo.edu
Read more about Ruth Meyerowitz
Ruth Meyerowitz's research and teaching focuses on U.S. women's social and labor history, work and family, and multicultural education and curriculum development at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She also researches community and labor coalitions.
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Carl Nightingale |
Carl Nightingale's interests lie at the intersections of the history of race, world history, and urban history. His first book, On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (Basic), combined ethnographic and archival research to show how broader currents in global popular and political culture affected low-income children's collective experiences in black Philadelphia. More recently he has been working on a project called "Segregation is Everywhere: A World History of Urban Color Lines," which looks at urban racial segregation as a global historical phenomenon. His work on this topic has appeared in several journals and edited collections. He teaches classes on race in the United States and in a global perspective, World history, and the history of urban inequality. He is the founder and co-convener of the Buffalo Seminar on Racial Justice, a working group of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.
Jolene Rickard
Associate Professor of Art and Art History
Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Email: jrickard@acsu.buffalo.edu
Read more about Jolene Rickard
Jolene Rickard specializes in the arts of Indigenous peoples, art theory, aesthetics, and critical and cultural theory. She is renowned both as an art historian and as a practicing artist (photographer). Her exhibitions include Iroquois Beadwork: Crossing Borders, Keepers of the Western Door and In the Shadow of the Eagle.
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Theresa Runstedtler |
A former professional dancer/actress from Canada, Theresa Runstedtler chose to shift her passion for popular culture from the stage to the classroom. She is currently revising a book project titled, “Journeyman: Race, Boxing, and the Transnational World of Jack Johnson” for the University of California Press. “Journeyman” explores the role of commercial sporting culture in the rise of modern ideas about race, manhood, imperial control, and the body from a global perspective. Her publications appear in Canadian Issues (Fall 2005), In the Game: Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan), the Encyclopedia of World History, the Radical History Review (Winter 2009) and the Journal of World History (Forthcoming 2010). Her research interests include the intersection of race, gender, and resistance in popular culture, black transnationalism, imperialism and globalization, multiracial and multicultural histories, European race relations, and black Canada. She teaches courses on race and popular culture, African American studies, U.S. Imperialism, and World history. The UB Reporter published a feature on Dr. Runstedtler's work.
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Ramón Soto-Crespo |
Ramón Soto-Crespo holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Purdue University. His areas of interest include Latina/o and Caribbean literature, Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer studies. He recently published a book titled, Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico (University of Minnesota Press).
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Dennis Tedlock |
Dennis Tedlock's research and teaching focuses on the Indigenous languages, verbal arts, writing systems, and religions of the Western Hemisphere. He received the prestigious American Anthropological Association President's Award in 1977.
Camilo Trumper
Assistant Professor of American Studies
Email: ctrumper@buffalo.edu
Read more about Camilo Trumper
Camilo Trumper completed his PhD at Berkeley in 2008. He is interested in the connection between urban history, politics, and visual and material culture. He is currently revising his dissertation, a cultural history of political change in late twentieth-century Chile, for publication. This is a study of the myriad ways in which traditionally marginalized individuals claimed city spaces as a means of entering into political debates. His investigation of urban politics extends to protests, marches, strikes, as well as public art, street photography and documentary film, which he understands as part of a broader attempt to challenge the limits of the public sphere in post-war Chile. His future research plans take him into the 19th and 20th centuries through a study of the Chilean port city of Valparaiso in the context of a wider "Pacific World." He has taught courses in Latin American urban history, visual culture and material culture, and historical methods.
Barry White
Lecturer in American Studies
Email: bwhite@acsu.buffalo.edu
A member of the Seneca Turtle Clan, Barry White's teaching and activism centers on cultural diversity training, implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act, contemporary representations of Indigenous peoples in films, and the repatriation of Haudenosaunee sacred objects and remains.
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Kari J. Winter Director of Undergraduate Studies |
Kari Winter's work broadly addresses literature, history, and critical theory from the eighteenth century to the present. Although most of her books and articles focus on the history and literature of transatlantic slavery, resistance, dissent, and revolution. she also teaches and researches transnational women's literature, African American cultural studies, contemporary American Indian literature, auto/biography studies, Revolutionary America, antebellum America, the politics of food, gardening, and various other topics. The thread that connects her many interests is a commitment to illuminating how oppressed peoples have experienced, analyzed, and resisted dominant constructions of race, gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class.
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Cynthia Wu Assistant Professor of American Studies Email: cw229@buffalo.edu |
Cynthia Wu specializes in Asian American and comparative ethnic cultural studies. Her primary research focuses on the convergences of race and disability in American cultures, and she has secondary interests in the intellectual history of critical race theory and queer theory. Her book manuscript, "Conjoining the Republic: The Siamese Twins in American Literature and Culture," examines how freak show celebrities Chang and Eng Bunker operate as figurative devices for nation-building and citizenship from the nineteenth century to the present. Her articles and reviews have appeared in a/b, American Literature, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Asian American Studies, MELUS, and The Southern Literary Journal. She taught in the English and American studies departments at Macalester College before coming to UB. Prior to entering academia, she did HIV outreach in Asian American communities and cultural history museum work. Dr. Wu appeared in an issue of the UB Reporter.