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American Studies Conference 2012

Honors Projects

Dean for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

Urban Faculty Colloquium
August 10-12, 16-17, 2010

Department Conception (5/7/2003)

Department of Multicultural Life

Student Organizations

Guidelines for First-Year Students

Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Liberal Arts Colleges

Digital Commons at Macalester

Mahmoud El-Kati Distinguished Lectureship in American Studies

About the Faculty

Core Faculty

Jane Rhodes, Dean for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Professor, and Department Chair

Dr. Rhodes is Dean for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and Professor and Chair of American Studies at Macalester College. She earned B.S. and M.A. degrees from Syracuse University, and a Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rhodes specializes in the study of race, gender and mass media; the black press; and media and social movements. Prior to joining the Macalester faculty, Rhodes taught in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego.  She has also been on the faculties of Indiana University and S.U.N.Y. Cortland. Rhodes’ first book Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press, 1998), was named the best book in mass communication history by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Her new book, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (The New Press) was published in Fall 2007. Rhodes was featured in the award-winning documentary The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords (California Newsreel), and has been the recipient of a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of California, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a research fellowship from the University of London. Her writing has been published in numerous book and journals including The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Feminist Media Studies, The Canadian Review of American Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Media History.

Duchess Harris, Associate Professor and Chair,
2003-05

Harris is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in American Studies. Her general area of interest is Twentieth Century African American political history. She received her B.A. in American History and Afro-American Studies with an English minor from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and her Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1997. She has conducted research for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and was a Constituent Advocate for the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone. Harris was a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship during the 2001-02 academic year. She joined the faculty in 1998.

Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Associate Professor

Aguilar-San Juan is an urban sociologist who also teaches and publishes in Asian American Studies. She is the editor of  The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s (South End Press, 1994). Her article, “Staying Vietnamese: Place and Community in Orange County and Boston” appeared in the March 2005 issue of City and Community. Her book manuscript of the same name is being prepared for publication. She had a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship during 2003-4 and is a Next Generation Leadership Fellow (a program sponsored by New York University, Wagner School of Public Policy). Aguilar-San Juan received her B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College in 1984, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University in 1995 and 2000. She joined the faculty in 1999.

Daniel Gilbert, Visiting Assistant Professor

Gilbert is a cultural historian of the modern United States, with special interests in transnational mass culture, labor and working-class history, cities and urban space, and social movements. He received his B.A. in music from Wesleyan University in 1998, and his Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University in 2008. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Massachusetts Historical Review, the Labor Studies Journal, and the Journal of Sport History. His current book project, Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency, examines the political economy and cultural meaning of baseball in the second half of the twentieth century.

Affiliated Faculty n alphabetical order)

Kendrick Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology, teaches courses on racial prejudice and stereotyping, multiculturalism, and research methodology. He is a social psychologist whose research addresses the mental health consequences of misidentification of ethnicity, the influence of physical appearance on psychological well-being for people of color, and skin tone bias experienced by African Americans. Dr. Brown has a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Mount Union College."

Andrea Cremer received her doctorate from the history department at the University of Minnesota in May 2007. Her dissertation “Enemies Incarnate: Religion, Sex, Violence, and Contests for Power in New England, 1636-1638” examined the political function of religious belief and its affect on the construction of race, gender and sexuality in colonial New England. She teaches courses on early American cultural and social history, women’s and gender history, the history of sexuality, Native American history, and the history of the early modern Atlantic world.

Marceline DuBose, instructor, teaches Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Education; Experiences in Education; and Education, Family and Community. Her research interest and professional experience have focused on desegregation history, policy and practices. She has additional interest in multi-cultural education and economics education at the secondary level.

Daylanne English, Associate Professor of English, received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and her B.A. from Oberlin College (Major: English; Minor: Women's Studies). She has held visiting appointments in African American Literature at Brown University and in Caribbean Literature at Brandeis University. Most recently, she was an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at Bowie State University, a campus in the University System of Maryland and one of the oldest historically black colleges in the nation (founded 1865). Prior to entering graduate school in English at the University of Virginia, she worked in the public health field.

Galo F. González , Professor and Chair of Hispanic and Latin American Studies, teaches and researches primarily twentieth century Latin American literatures and cultures. His research and teaching interests include the literature of social protest movements in Latin America. He is also interested in race relations and Mestizo cultures through the study of Latin American narrative fiction, the literature of subversion in the Andean Region as well as the literature of subaltern cultures, which is an approach to the study of Latino literature in the U.S.

Lynn Hudson, Associate Professor of History, joined the faculty in Fall 2005 and teaches courses on slavery and abolition in the U.S., western history, social movements, and the history of gender and sexuality. She is a specialist in African American history and has been active in women's studies and ethnic studies programs. Her publications examine the lives of free black men and women during the age of slavery, and the possibilities for freedom in the U.S. West. Her recent research investigates the legal, cultural, and social manifestations of Jim Crow discrimination in California in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Leola Johnson, Associate Professor of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies has a Ph.D. in mass communication and teaches about race, television, the press, and other mass media as social and cultural institutions.She is completing a book about Iceberg Slim, the pimp writer whose 1968 autobiography is being produced as a Hollywood film. She also is a regular commentator on the PBS show, Mental Engineering.

Teresa Mesa Adamuz, Visiting Instructor of Hispanic and Latin American studies. She has been a graduate student instructor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Peter Rachleff, Professor of History, is a labor historian with expertise in race, immigration, and ethnicity in the composition and recomposition of the U.S. working class. He offers classes in African American History, Immigration and Ethnicity in U.S. History, and Racial Formations in U.S. History and Culture as well as theme-focused courses between the Civil War and World War II. Professor Rachleff conducts research in U.S. labor, immigration and African American history. He is a frequent sponsor of internships and student research projects.

Harry Waters, Jr., Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance, has been an accomplished actor for over 25 years. He has appeared in numerous theater productions, including the world premiere before Broadway of Angels in America . In film, he appeared as Marvin Berry in Back to the Future , where he received a Gold Record singing "Earth Angel". Professor Waters has appeared on numerous television programs, including creating Tweedle Dee in Adventures in Wonderland for the Disney Channel. In the Twin Cities, he assisted Tim Bond on Directing Crowns for the Guthrie Theater; he acted with the Ten Thousand Things Theater Co. in The Good Person of Szechuan ; he acted in the Mixed Blood Theater's Bill of Wrights .

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