PhD Students

Rochelle Raineri Zuck successfully defended her dissertation, "Imagined Citizens: Ethnic Nationalisms and Crises of Culture in the United States, 1816-1856," in November, 2007. Her PhD will be awarded in May, 2008. Her project examines competing visions of ethnic and racial nationalism in nineteenth-century America, showing the various strategies of identity formation employed by disparate peoples as they sought to renegotiate their political relationship to the U.S. nation. She argues that people of color and several immigrant groups were able to exert pressure on the political hegemony of the United States nation by forming ethnic and racial "nationalities" so as to renegotiate the geopolitical positions that they were forced to occupy by members of the dominant culture. Dr. Zuck received her BA from the College of William and Mary in 2001 and her MA from the Pennsylvania State University in 2003.

Steven Thomas's dissertation, "Cultures of Liberty and Mercantilist Poetics, 1690-1765," centers on the instability of the meanings of "liberty" in writings from and about the colonies of British America during the crucial years in the struggle toward capital culture. Dr. Thomas received his BA in 1994 from Brown University and his MA in 2001 from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2003 he organized an interdisciplinary graduate student conference at Penn State called "The Emergence of Globalization and the Americas, 1492-2002." The success of the conference prompted him to create, as a co-editor, a CD-ROM offering the conference proceedings. He is Assistant Professor of English at the College of St. Benedict / St. John's University in Minnesota, where he teaches a variety of courses in early American and world literatures.

Youngsuk Chae completed and defended her dissertation, titled "Critical Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference in Asian American Literature" in 2005. Since then, she published her dissertation as Politicizing Asian American Literature: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism (Routledge, 2008). Chae examines the alignment between the institutionalization of U.S. multiculturalism and the often sentimental interpretations of Asian American literary works, demystifying the commonly available but ambivalent position of Asian immigrants as middlemen in the cultural brokering among the differing racial and ethnic groups. Dr. Chae received her BA degree in 1990 and her MA in 1992 from Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. In 1998, she earned a second MA in English in 1998 from the Indiana State University. She worked as a researcher for The Korean Women's Research Institute and as a Visiting Instructor of Asian American Studies at George Mason University prior to becoming Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where she specializes in postcolonial studies and Asian American literature.

Cedrick May is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. May's dissertation, "Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1840," took up the seemingly conflicted discourses adapted by African Americans in their efforts to speak about – and to – the imperialist problems of slavery. By examining the liberatory ideology undergirding African Americans' views of Christianity, May uncovered a discourse that worked to assist in the formation and expression of African American identities. The thesis became his first book, published by the University of Georgia Press under the same title, in 2008. Dr. May received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 2003, and his MA in 1998 and BA from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Elizabeth Archuleta is Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, where she specializes in a range of issues related to indigenous cultures and women's and family issues. Her PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University (2002) was in contemporary Native American literature. Her dissertation, "'A Well-Traveled Coyote': Pueblo Cultural Narratives and Twentieth Century American Indian Law," was supported in part by a dissertation grant she received from the Ford Foundation. Dr. Archuleta's dissertation examined the complicated legal entanglements between Pueblo peoples and the people who came to their lands, especially as these are evident in Pueblo peoples' traditional narratives, told in writing and pottery, during the early part of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book, under contract with the University of Arizona Press, tentatively titled "Grandmothers' Voices Hold Me: Articulating Indigenous Feminisms." She received her BA degree, summa cum laude, from Westminster College in 1994, and her MA in 1996 from Penn State.

Angela Vietto is Associate Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, in Charleston, Illinois. Dr. Vietto completed her BA and MA degrees at the Pennsylvania State University, where she earned her PhD in the year 2000. She was an assistant editor and collaborator on the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume, American Women Prose Writers to 1820 (Bruccoli-Clark-Layman, 1998) and and Associate Editor of Early American Writings (Oxford University Press, 2002). Her dissertation, "Sisters and Citizens: Women Writing Identity in the Early American Republic," examined the ways women writers intervened in the cultural formation of the early republic of British America, roughly from the conclusion of the American Revolution to the 1820s. She has published her revised dissertation as Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America (Ashgate, 2006) and continues to research in the areas of women and gender studies and the history of the book.

Amy E. Winans is Associate Professor of English at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Before taking that post, she taught for two years (while writing her dissertation) as a full-time Instructor at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Dr. Winans earned her AB degree from Duke University in 1988 and her MA from the University of Michigan in 1990. She earned her PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. With Angela Vietto and me, Dr. Winans edited American Women Prose Writers to 1820 (Bruccoli-Clark-Layman, 1998) and Early American Writings (Oxford University Press, 2002). Amy Winans's dissertation, "Slaves and Citizens: Early African America and the Discourse of Nations," treated freedom petitions, periodical fiction, abolitionist tracts, criminal narratives, freedom-day orations, and religious writings of Africans and those of African descent in the early republican era.

Nicholas Rombes is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Detroit Mercy, in Detroit, Michigan, where he founded a journal, Post-Identity, and developed a program in electronic criticism. His interests in Enlightenment and critique of Enlightenment are evident in his dissertation, "Dark Reflections: The Terrors of the Enlightenment in Early American Fiction," but his expertise is wide-ranging, as he always held the fascination for contemporary culture evidenced in his two books, The Ramones (Continuum, 2005) and New Punk Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Dr. Rombes earned his BS in 1987 from Bowling Green State University, and his MA (1990) and PhD (1994) degrees from the Pennsylvania State University.