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 |
Research Interests:
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; paleography and archival research. He is the author of Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). His current book project is entitled Perils in the Pursuit of Happiness. The book 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 |
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 co-author of Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial: From Baldwin to Basquiat and Beyond (Teachers College Press, Columbia University), On Qualitative Inquiry (Teachers College Press, Columbia University), 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's book series on Critical Youth Studies, and he is a member of the SUNY Press editorial board.
Sarah Elder
Professor of Media Study
Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Email: selder@buffalo.edu
Read more about Sarah Elder.....
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 |
Michael Frisch specializes in urban, oral, and public history. A former Chair of the Department, he was President of the American Studies Association in 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.
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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. He is the author of The Encyclopedia of Native American Biography, Apocalypse of Chiokoyhikiu, Chief of the Iroquois, and The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation, among other texts. A Japanese translation of his book Exemplar of Liberty (co-authored with Bruce Johansen) was published in 2006.
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Oren R. Lyons |
Faithkeeper Turtle Clan Onondaga Nation, Haudenosaunee,
Six Nations - Iroquois Confederacy
Publisher:
Daybreak - A national Native American magazine
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 main 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 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: How the Invention of Urban Residential Color Lines Changed World History," 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 founded and coordinates 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 an 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. Her current book project, entitled Journeymen: Race, Boxing, and the Transnational World of Jack Johnson, explores the role of commercial sporting culture in the rise of modern ideas about race, manhood, imperial control, and the body. Her publications appear in Canadian Issues and In the Game: Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan). Her research interests include the intersection of race, gender, and resistance in popular culture; transnational Black history encompassing English, French, and Spanish destinations; multiracial and multicultural histories; the history of empire and globalization; European race relations; and Black Canada. She teaches courses on race and popular culture, African American Studies, U.S. Imperialism, and World History. She also co-founded a small business specializing in diversity training called Tri & Can Consulting.
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Scott Manning Stevens |
Scott Stevens teaches and publishes in the areas of early modern transatlantic literature, particularly the literature of New World encounter, seventeenth-century British culture, and Native American literatures.
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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.
Barry White
Lecturer in American Studies
Email: bwhite@acsu.buffalo.edu
Read more about Barry White.....
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 |
Kari Winter's work broadly addresses literature, history, and critical theory from the eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on the history and literature of transatlantic slavery, resistance, dissent, and revolution. The thread that connects her various interests is a commitment to illuminating how oppressed peoples have experienced, analyzed, and resisted social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. She is the editor of the 2005 edition of The Blind African Slave; or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, a slave narrative originally published in 1810, and the author of Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (University of Georgia). She has published articles on slavery and race in New England, Barbadian history, Louise Erdrich, Joseph Bruchac, Ann Petry, Alberta Hunter, gothic literature, feminist film, and other interdisciplinary topics.
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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, 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.