Honors Program
American Studies encourages majors to undertake an honors project–-also referred to as “a thesis”– by offering the opportunity to pursue advanced research and writing in the field. Ideally, the desire to take on an honors project will be expressed during the summer before junior year via the formal application process. With the guidance and support of American Studies faculty, majors working on honors projects will develop a path of inquiry which demonstrates the capacity to form and to explore relevant and rigorous academic questions that speak to and go beyond existing scholarship. The faculty will serve as the final arbiters regarding the quality of a completed honors project, including its relevance and rigor. Students who successfully complete an honors project will receive the designation of “Honors” on their Macalester College transcript and diploma.
The Thesis
An honors project in American Studies typically takes the form of a substantive academic paper, or thesis, reflecting several months of independent reading, original research, thinking, writing, and revising. In the past, successful projects have spanned between 30-50 pages, not including endnotes and citations. The thesis often originates in work done in elective or core courses for the American Studies major, and deploys methods appropriate to the question and topic. In general, the thesis generated for an honors project is the product of focused and sustained research; often, students enroll in an “independent study” during which they confer on a weekly or bi-weekly with the faculty to report progress and talk through details of the writing and research. Any use of AI should be discussed with the faculty to ensure that the scholarship produced adheres to the highest standards of critical and independent thought.
Ultimately, the faculty sponsor will decide if the thesis is sufficiently developed to move forward into the final stage of “oral defense.” This meeting with a committee of three faculty drawn from across campus (with at least one from American Studies) is a time for the student to present and explain their work. Together, the committee will decide whether or not to recognize the project as successful.
In American Studies, majors submit their senior capstone to Tapestries, the digital journal that is produced in Senior Seminar. The senior capstone is not eligible for submission as an honors project, although the two may be related in some way.
Please fill out an Honors application here.
Honors Projects
You can read these projects in Macalester’s Digital Commons.
2022
Ginanaandawi’idizomin: Anishinaabe Intergenerational Healing Models of Resistance — Zoe V. Allen
2020
Justice, Prevention, Respect: A Critical Investigation of Sexual Violence on College Campuses; And a Denunciation of Carceral Feminism — Naomi Strait
2016
Racial Uplift in a Jim Crow Local: Black Union Organizing in Minneapolis Hotels 1930-1940 — Luke Mielke
2015
Decolonizing Healing, Decolonizing Mental Health: The Impacts of Settler-colonialism on Blackfeet Youth Suicide — Abaki Beck
Queering the “Comfort Women”: Coming Out Testimonials and Public Collective Memories — Elisa My Lee
Ways We Remember: Rethinking Symbols of Italian American History and Imagining Alternative Narratives — Kathryn N. Anastasi
Haunted: Three Generations of Black Feminism(s) — Lucy Short
Blood Diamonds: The Recovery of Black Unification Amidst White Hegemony — Christine E. Ohenewah
2014
Genocidal Silences: The Politics of Cambodian Memory in a United States Context — David Rao
2013
Warped Foundations: The Creation of Home and the Spatial Realities of Homelessness — Eric Goldfischer
Eating Spaces and Places: Examining the Latin@ Barrio, Chinatown, and Black Urban Space as Sites of Collective and Social Imagination — Kathlynn E. Hinkfuss
A Dividing City and Limited Education: An Analysis of School Segregation in Chicago, Illinois and Seattle, Washington — Ricardo J. Millhouse
2012
Trans(nacional) Bodies in Motion: Reframing Violence and Resistance in Mexicana Performance and Chicana Theater — Gabriella Deal-Márquez
The RED Revolution from the Perspective of Visual Cultural Studies: A New Chapter in Art, Commerce and Corporate Social Responsibility — Caroline Karanja
Faces of the Future: Race, Beauty and the Mixed Race Beauty Myth — Clara Younge
2011
Can We Laugh? Jewish American Comedy’s Expression of Anxiety in a Time of Change, 1965-1973 — Emily Schorr Lesnick
2010
What Lies Beneath? Contemporary Notions of Multiculturalism and Their Impact on Irish and American Immigrant Communities — Amanda Nelson
2007
A Piece of Land: Black Women and Land in South Africa and the United States of America — Alessandra Williams
2006
Eugenicism: The Construction of Queer Space in the Works of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany — Freda Fair
Civil Rights in Black and Green: Towards a Transatlantic Understanding of the Civil Rights Movements in the United States and Northern Ireland — Mollie Gabrys