Summer 2014

Letter from the Chair, Dr. Vera Norwood

Dear American Studies Faculty, Students and
Community,
Last year I was enjoying retirement including
visiting vineyards along the coast when
Gabriel Melndez bought me lunch and asked
if I would serve as Interim Chair for the 2013-
14 year. He had a sabbatical planned and Alex
Lubin, incoming Chair, needed one more year
to finish out a term as Director of the Center for American Studies and
Research at the American University of Beirut. It has been a great opportunity
for me to reconnect with our faculty and students and provide useful service to
the Department.

As the newsletter details, American Studies continues to grow and thrive.
Faculty earned important awards, including J ennifer Nez Denetdales selection
for UNMs Sarah Belle Brown award for community service and a Fulbright
senior teaching award in Hungary to Gabriel Melndez. Our graduate students
again earned some of the top UNM fellowship awards, including a Mellon
Foundation Dissertation Completion award to Melanie Yazzie and the
Regents Winrock Minority Doctoral Fellowship to incoming student Bianca
Paiz Foppert. As the year ended, all the faculty up for promotions were
notified by the Provost they had earned positive reviews. Assistant Professors
Antonio Tiongson and Kathleen Holscher were given second mid-probationary
contracts and will stand for tenure in 2015-16. David Correia received tenure
and was promoted to associate professor. Alex Lubin was promoted to full
professor. Gabriel Melndez was awarded the universitys highest professorial
title, joining the ranks of our finest faculty as a Distinguished Professor.

The Department began planning for the required 10-year Academic Program
Review which will be carried out in the 2014-15 academic year. Graduates of
the program since 2004 have been sent surveys to help us in assessing our
strengths and weaknesses and plan for the future. I urge everyone who
received the surveys to take a moment to fill them out and return them.

It has been a privilege and honor to serve as the Interim Chair this year. The Department is very strong in
terms of faculty numbers, stability and reputation, and student achievements. Thank you all for the
opportunity to be a part of this community this year and I am most pleased to welcome Alex Lubin back!
In this issue:

*Letter from the Chair
*Faculty News
*Faculty Publication
*Bravo Graduates
*Senior Thesis Symposium
*Graduate Student News
*ASGSA
*Graduate Program News
*Lecture Series
*Alumni News




Edited by Darcy Brazen



AMERICAN STUDIES
MSC03 2110
425 HUMANITIES
ALBUQUERQUE, NM
87131-0001
PHONE: (505) 277-3929
FAX: 505-277-1208

Department Administrator:
Sandy Rodrigue
amstudy@unm.edu

american studies | university of new mexico
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Summer 2014

Faculty News
Dr. Amy Brandzel
In the Fall of 2013 I had the pleasure of co-teaching the ACS
Proseminar with Dr. David Correia and getting to know our new cohort
of wonderful graduate students. I also taught a graduate seminar on the
politics of academic knowledge production in
Decolonial/Feminist/Queer Studies, which gave me an opportunity to
start thinking through the next book project tentatively titled, Queer
Knowledge: Law, Academe, and US Empire. I am also happy to report
that my book manuscript, Against Citizenship: Queer Intersections and
the Violence of the Normative, is now under review and moving along
nicely. Due to continuing medical struggles, I took medical leave this Spring and very much
appreciate the support and patience of my peers and students during these trying times and recovery
periods. But throughout this semester leave Ive still had the pleasure of stewarding through various
students in their MA Thesis, PhD Comps, and dissertation prospectus defenses. Congratulations to
Eileen Shaughnessy, Gina Diaz, Rachel Levitt, and J essica Harkins for fantastic work! I look
forward to coming back this Summer to teach Queer Activisms, and this Fall for another round of
ACS Proseminar (co-taught with Dr. Antonio Tiongson), and an undergraduate class in Women
Studies on Contemporary Feminist Theory: Transfeminisms. It looks like 2014-2015 will be a
fantastic and exciting year for American Studies at UNM!

Dr. Jennifer Denetdale
Another busy and fulfilling school year for me! I am pleased that I
was able to teach one of my favorite graduate seminars on Critical
Indigenous Studies and plan to teach it again in the fall. I also taught three
undergraduate courses that promote an interdisciplinary approach to Native
Studies. In addition to teaching, I also worked with graduate students as an
advisor, and chair or member of their thesis or dissertation committees. Im
really pleased that we have several Native students with whom I work,
including Melanie Yazzie, Nick Estes, and Marcella Ernest. I continue to
encourage Native students and others to apply to our American Studies
programs.
An important dimension of promoting Indigenous Studies in American Studies includes
working with the Institute of American Indian Research (IFAIR) and the Newberry Consortium of
American Indian Studies (NCAIS). This year IFAIR hosted the Indigenous Book Festival in
February. Over twenty-five nationally prominent Native writers and our allies came to UNM to talk
about Indigenous scholarship. It was a great event that exposed the UNM community to Native
scholarship. NCAIS also provided our graduate students and faculty opportunities to work with the
Newberry Library in Chicago. Next school year promises to be more opportunities to promote
Indigenous Studies in our department.
As far as my scholarship goes, I have articles and essays in various stages of publication. I
published The Value of Oral History on the Path to Din/Navajo Sovereignty in Din
Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, edited by Lloyd L. Lee (Tucson:
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University of Arizona Press, 2014). I have in the works three other essays: Naal Tsoos Sn: The
Navajo Treaty of 1868, Nation -Building, and Self-Determination in Nation to Nation: Treaties
between the United States and American Indians, edited by Suzan Shown Harjo (Washington, D.C.:
NMAI and Smithsonian Books, 2014); Im Not Running on My Gender: The 2010 Navajo
Nation Presidential Race, Gender, and the Politics of Tradition in Formations of United States
Colonialism, edited by Alyosha Goldstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, November
2014); and `You Brought History Alive for Us: Reflections on Nineteenth Century Din Womens
Lives in Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West, edited by Virginia Scharff (University
of California Press, 2015). I am also revising an essay titled Return to The Uprising at Beautiful
Mountain in 1913: Marriage and Sexuality in the Making of the Modern Navajo Nation, a chapter
that I have submitted for an anthology, Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and
Feminist Studies, edited by J oanne Barker.
I am currently conducting research for a book chapter on the photographs of Milton Snow.
Snow worked for the Navajo Service during the livestock reduction era and into the 1950s. He took
fascinating portraits of Navajo life. I hope to get further along on my book project this coming
summer. I presented my initial research on Snows photographs of the Navajo people at the Native
and Indigenous Studies Association conference (NAISA) in Austin, Texas, in May. I am also
presenting at the International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Palm
Springs, California, in J une. My presentations rely on the lens of Indigenous feminisms and queer
Indigenous studies to study issues about Navajo women and gender.
Throughout the school year I delivered several lectures and presentations, including one at
the Critical Ethnic Studies Association conference in Chicago, on Navajo history at the UNM
IFAIR Indigenous Book Festival, and on Navajo women and leadership for the Navajo Head Start
program. I delivered a keynote for the 2
nd
Navajo LGBTQ conference at Din College in Shiprock,
NM. I was very pleased when two Navajo elders came up to me after my address and told me that I
was correct about how Navajo principles of kinship affirm our relations to each other, including
LGBTQ. I delivered the commencement address for Native students at Columbia University in
May.
I continue to provide service outside of my university obligations to Navajo and Native
communities. As a commissioner who sits on the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission
(NNHRC), I organized a two day hearing on Navajo traditional gender roles in partnership with the
Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission and participated in three public hearings on Navajo
women, gender, and violence in order to discover the amount and nature of gender violence within
Navajo communities. We hope to produce a report that will support revisions of laws and legislation
that addresses the needs of women and LGBTQ. I look forward to another fruitful school year at
UNM and my summer is already looking pretty busy!

Dr. Kathleen Holscher
Dr. Kathleen Holscher was one of ten junior scholars from across the
nation selected as a 2013-15 Young Scholar of American Religion.
During the 2013-14 academic year, she attended the first two meetings of
this group, which is sponsored by the Center for Religion and American
Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. In
November 2013, Holscher attended the annual meeting of the American
Academy of Religion in Baltimore, where she responded to a panel
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exploring New Paradigms in Roman Catholic Studies. Holscher has also been at work on a local
history of the Second Vatican Council, with a focus on how the Councils reforms were received
and put into practice by rural Catholic New Mexicans. The study is part of a three-year working
group on the global experience of Vatican II. The Lived History of Vatican II project is sponsored
by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. In
April 2014, Holscher delivered this research at an international conference on Vatican II held at
Notre Dame, and she is currently wrapping up work on a paper that will be part of the edited
volume produced by the working group.

Dr. Alyosha Goldstein
Its been a busy but generative year. Two of my students completed
their degrees: Sam Markwell successfully defended his MA thesis and
will enter the doctoral program at NYU in the fall; and the department
nominated Clare Daniels amazing dissertation on the neoliberal politics
of teenage pregnancy and parenthood for the American Studies
Associations Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize. My time working
with Sam goes back to his undergraduate studies and supervising his
American Studies honors thesis. I began working with Clare when she
entered the program in 2006, first as an MA student and then to pursue
the PhD. It has been a pleasure to work with them from beginning to end, and its both bittersweet
and exciting to see them moving on to the next step in their lives. Students this year in my graduate
seminars The Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism and Research Methods were engaged and
inspiring interlocutors, and undergraduates in my AMST 185 and the BA/MD Program class
Population Health and Community Engagement (co-taught with the incredible Sally Bachofer)
were lively and challenging in all the best ways.
This year has been an exciting year in terms of my research and writing. My essay Finance
and Foreclosure in the Colonial Present was published in Radical History Review in J anuary. I
contributed Colonialism, Constituent Power, and Popular Sovereignty to a special forum on
Indigeneitys Difference: Methodology and the Structures of Sovereignty, edited by J odi Byrd for
J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, published this spring. A Tenth Anniversary
edition of Sandy Grandes Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought to be
published this summer will include my essay Colonialism Undone: Pedagogies of Entanglement.
In the meanwhile, the collection Ive been editing Formations of United States Colonialism has
been moving through the production process and will be out next fall from Duke University Press. I
very much enjoyed collaborating with J odi Byrd, J odi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy on a series of
panels on Economies of Dispossession for the American Studies Association meeting in
November, which were now coediting as a special issue for Social Text. I also organized panels
and presented papers at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and Native American and
Indigenous Studies Association conferences. As well, I had the opportunity to present my new
research at invited talks at Harvard Law School, University of California San Diego, University of
California Santa Barbara, and University of California Los Angeles.
Various forms of service outside the department have likewise kept me busy. I currently
serve as the chair of the American Studies Associations Committee on Graduate Education, which
organized three panels for the upcoming ASA conference in Los Angeles. As well, this year I
served as a reader for five book manuscripts (for Duke University Press, Oxford University Press,
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University of Arizona Press, University of California Press, and University of Minnesota Press), as
well as reviewing manuscript submissions for the journals American Indian Culture and Research
Journal, Aztln: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies
Journal. All in all its been a great year, and Im looking forward to our incoming cohort, as well as
continuing to work with our wonderful graduate and undergraduate students, next year!

Dr. Alex Lubin
I have been on-leave from UNM for the last three years while serving as director of the
Center for American Studies (CASAR) and Research at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
During the period of my leave I developed an MA program in Transnational American Studies at
AUB that focused on the cultural, political, and economic relationship between the United States
and the Arab world. The MA program will eventually include an exchange program and its my
hope that UNMs American Studies Department will participate, allowing graduate students at
UNM and AUB to transit between both institutions, while helping to foster research on areas of
shared interest.
Directing an American Studies center in the Arab world has allowed me to study the ways
that America circulates across the Middle East, and especially the ways that American geopolitical
power shapes the reception and consumption of American culture. Moreover, for the last three years
I have watched closely and upfront the massive transformations occurring in the Middle East as a
result of the Arab uprisings and various counter-revolutionary processes. This has allowed me to
better understand the changing ability of the United States to influence geopolitical events in the
Middle East, especially in the wake of the Egyptian uprisings.
Over the last year my book Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab
Political Imaginary was published by University of North Carolina Press. Geographies of
Liberation explores the geopolitical conditions within which the U.S. Black freedom movement
engaged the Arab world. I am also completing a co-edited (with Dr. Marwan Kraidy) volume titled
American Studies Between the American Century and the Arab Spring. This collection models a
transnational American Studies methodology during a geopolitical moment characterized by
declining American geopolitical power combined with enduring cultural and economic global
hegemony.
I had the opportunity to visit friends and colleagues at UNM in Fall 2013, when I delivered a
lecture titled, Black Panther Palestine. I look forward to my return to UNM this Fall, where I
hope to begin a new project focused on the infrastructure required for 19
th
century U.S. territorial
and market expansion.

Dr. A. Gabriel Melndez
First, my box-by-box move to a new office this year happened over several
months but I can report that it was successful! I shudder to think that 2013-
2014 was the pinnacle year in my career, since I am not quite ready to face
the slope down, but a lot of things did happen. In the fall, I taught my
Seminar on Race, Culture and Cinema (510) a course made vibrant by a
stellar group of graduate students that I thank for all the great interventions
they made in the class. I also taught Chicano/Latino Cinema to a small,
but equally poised group of undergraduate and graduate students. Here too
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the students made the class. One young man in class was the grandson of the famous Medenles,
New Mexico weaver and wisdom keeper, doa Agueda Martnez whose life was documented in the
Emmy-awarding winning documentary Agueda Martnez (1977), and it turns out our very own
Patricia Roybal Caballero lived the events we screened in the famous movement film Requiem 29
about the Chicano Moratorium. Classroom teaching doesnt get better than this!
Last fall, I did several readings and book-signings for Hidden Chicano Cinema (Rutgers,
2013) and The Legend of Ponciano Gutirrez and the Mountain Thieves (UNM, 2013) along with a
radio interview on Espejos de Aztln with George Luna-Pea (congratulations to George on
completing the MA in the department this spring!). In November I attended ASA in Washington to
represent the department at the meeting of American Studies Chairs and Program Directors. While
in D.C. I met with Eduardo Daz, the Director of the Smithsonian Latino Center. Eduardo was kind
enough to share information on a number of excellent projects under his direction including the
Centers program of internships for graduate students and researchers. Id be happy to assist any of
our graduate students in helping them to learn more about these opportunities. Also in the fall, I was
invited by the Office of Equity and Diversity at Northern New Mexico College and gave the talk,
Chicano Borderlands Cinema and the Proxemics of Encounter. It was great to see and visit with
two American Studies graduates on faculty at NNMC: Patricia Perea (PhD, 2010) and Annette
Rodrguez (MA, 2008).
In the spring the four entries I did for the Encyclopedia of Latino Culture edited by Charles
Tatum for Oxford University Press became available and can be accessed on-line. In J anuary I
visited the Philippines to study the impact of the famous Manila-Acapulco Galleon route as part of
a transnational Mexico-Philippines-New Mexico research project. I delivered a first installment of
this new research at the invitation of the InterDisciplinary Experimental Arts Program at Colorado
College and through a paper I delivered in March at CCs Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center titled
Diasporic Christ: Cristo Negro and Esquipula Venerations from Chimay to Manila. In April, I
was invited to take part in the 2
nd
Latino Film Festival and Conference sponsored by the Latino
Studies Program and Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington. Drawing on my recent book, I
delivered the paper "Red Sky at Morning, And Now Miguel and Bless Me Ultima: Latino-Themed
Representations in Book and On-Screen. A highlight of the conference was attending a session
with Chon Noriega interviewing acclaimed actor, Edward J ames Olmos whom I was honored to
meet.

Dr. Rebecca Schreiber
This year I continued to present work from my book manuscript
Migrant Lives and the Promise of Documentation, including a talk at LAII
"Refusing Disposability: Collaboration and Representational Strategies in
Maquilapolis: City of Factories on November 7, 2013, and
Reconfiguring Documentation: Immigration, Activism and Practices of
Visibility at the American Studies Associations Annual Conference,
November 20 24, 2013. I also submitted an essay for publication in The
Latino Midwest edited by Claire F. Fox, Santiago Vaquera Vsquez and
Omar Valerio-J imenez, (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). I have
started to develop an article on the work of filmmaker Alex Rivera for the
anthology Remaking Reality edited by Sara Blair (University of Michigan), J oseph Entin (Brooklyn
College) and Franny Nudelman (Carleton), which is currently under review at UNC Press.
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I also applied for a number of grants for research and course development this academic
year. The Research Allocations Committee awarded me a travel grant to conduct research at the
INSITE archives housed in Special Collections at Mandeville Library (UCSD). In addition I
received a grant from LAII to develop a graduate course on Contemporary Issues of Migration in
the Americas.
Irene Vasquez and I co-organized an on-campus visit with filmmaker Alex Rivera on April
9 and 10, 2014. In addition to visiting classes, Rivera presented a talk entitled Engineering the
Border: Imagining America, during which he discussed his films Sleep Dealer, Why
Cybraceros?, The Sixth Section, and The Borders Trilogy. This event was sponsored by the
American Studies Department, Chicana/o Studies Program, SHRI, the Office of Student Affairs, the
Maxwell Museum, FLL, C&J , LAII, Art and Art History, and El Centro de la Raza.

Dr. Antonio Tiongson
The past year has been very busy but ultimately productive and
gratifying. My book titled Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity,
and the Hip-hop Nation was published last Summer. It explores how
Filipin@ DJ s go about establishing legitimacy in an expressive form
historically configured as African American. I'm particularly interested in
the authenticating strategies Filipin@ DJ s rely on and what this reveals
about the nature of cultural boundaries and claims of cultural ownership. I
also taught a graduate seminar that examined the challenges and
complications of engaging in comparative critique. Facilitating the
seminar was such a great experience given the outstanding group of
graduate students who took the class as well as the way the seminar
enabled me to sharpen my ideas for my next book project. Moreover, I continued to be involved
with the Friday Forum Series, facilitating a couple of workshops. I also served on several graduate
MA thesis committees as well as a couple of departmental committees. This upcoming year, I'm
looking forward to co-facilitating the ACS pro-seminar course with Professor Amy Brandzel in the
Fall and further working on delineating the scope of my next book project during my research
semester in the Spring.

Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls
I joined the department in fall 2013 as an Assistant
Professor. I taught Introduction to Gender (with an emphasis on the
intersection of race and sexuality) and a 300-level course on hip hop
in the fall, and Introduction to Popular Culture and a grad/undergrad
hybrid seminar called Race & Speculation in the spring. American
Studies has some of the sharpest and most thoughtful undergraduate
and graduate students, and it has been a pleasure to get to know
them. I was able to bring two local artists and scholars to my hip
hop class Hakim Bellamy, Albuquerques first poet laureate and
musician and scholar Raquel Z. Rivera. Throughout the academic
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year, my various classes had fantastic Skype visits with trans* artist and actor DLo, science fiction
and fantasy author and professor Nalo Hopkinson, and author Ytasha Womack.
This was a productive research year for me, and I presented at Performance Studies
International at Stanford University, ASA, Modern Languages Association (MLA), the Kennedy
Center/University of DC One Mic Festival, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I also
gave talks at Occidental College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the latter as a part of a
new queer theory working group for early-career faculty called Sexual Politics, Sexual Poetics
(queerandnow.tumblr.com). My talks and presentations ranged from a panel on the film Pariah to
work on Marvel comics character Bloodstorm to Black aesthetics and Black camp to work on the
relationship between queer hip hop and chattel slavery. I also had the pleasure of interviewing
author J unot Diaz in Santa Fe and helping to bring him to UNM for a talk which American Studies
co-sponsored.
I co-edited a special issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory titled
All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop, which came out in May 2014. I
also had an article published in Lateral: A Journal of the Cultural Studies Association in Spring
2014, and one published in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts in Summer 2014.
Now the focus is on finishing my first book manuscript Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New
York City.
Finally a bit of sad news: even though I only joined the faculty in the fall of 2013, I made
the tough decision to head back east and will join the faculty at St. J ohns University in Queens, NY
as an Assistant Professor of African American Literature & Culture in the English Department.
Please feel free to stay in touch: shanteparadigm.tumblr.com

Faculty Publication
Making Aztlan: Ideology and Culture of the Chicana and
Chicano Movement, 1966-1977
Irene Vasquez, University of New Mexico Press, April, 2014
This book provides a long-needed overview of the Chicana and Chicano
movement's social history as it grew, flourished, and then slowly fragmented.
The authors examine the movement's origins in the 1960s and 1970s,
showing how it evolved from a variety of organizations and activities united
in their quest for basic equities for Mexican Americans in U.S. society.
Within this matrix of agendas, objectives, strategies, approaches, ideologies,
and identities, numerous electrifying moments stitched together the struggle
for civil and human rights. Gmez-Quiones and Vsquez show how these
convergences underscored tensions among diverse individuals and organizations at every level.
Their narrative offers an assessment of U.S. society and the Mexican American community at a
critical time, offering a unique understanding of its civic progress toward a more equitable social
order.




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Bravo Graduates!

The American Studies Department at UNM extends its most sincere congratulations
and gratitude to this amazing group of ten graduating seniors receiving a Bachelor of
Arts in American Studies. Best wishes for all your future endeavors.

James Ardis (Spring)
Joshuah Blea (Spring)
Jacob Chavez (Spring)
Neal Clawson (Spring)
Patrick Looney (Fall)
Rachael Maestas (Fall)
Benjamin Martinez (Fall)
Jessica Parker (Spring)
Carolina Rudy (Fall)
Brittany Sanchez (Spring)


The American Studies Senior Thesis Symposium

On Monday April 28, 2014, the
American Studies Senior Thesis
Symposium was held in the Luminaria
Room at UNMs Student Union
Building. The students presenting
papers at the symposium included:
J ames Ardis, Body of Controversy;
J oshua Blea, This is New Country
Music; J acob Chavez, Punks Not
Dead: The Evolution of Punk in
American Youth Culture; Neal
Clawson, The Effects of the Consumer
Mentality in the Deregulated Financial
System: Wall Street, the Recession, and
the Inflated American Dream; Bertha Gomez, Human Trafficking and US-Mexico Binational
Relations; Alexis Laube-Manigault, Community Based Schools as Sites of Social
Transformation?; J essie Parker, Engaging Whiteness in Critical Multicultural Education; and,
Brittany Sanchez, Lara Croft: A Heroine, Icon and Sexual Symbol. The Department of American
Studies would like to commend these seniors for participating in this years symposium.




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Summer 2014

2013-2014 Graduate Student News
Dina Barajas
American Studies PhD student Dina Barajas presented the paper "Doa Tules: Pioneer of Mestiza
Agency" at the University of New Mexico's Shared Knowledge Conference on April 10, 2014. This
paper contributes to her dissertation research, which explores the ways in which Mestizas negotiate
their identity. She will also present various aspects of this paper and dissertation research at the
MALCS, "Mapping Geographies of Self: Woman as the First Environment" Conference J uly 30 --
August 2, 2014 at El Rito College in Northern New Mexico.

Tita Berger
PhD Candidate Tita Berger is currently writing her dissertation, Welcome to Truth or
Consequences, Place and Place Making in Modern New Mexico. Tita created a blog about
her fieldwork in order to promote more dialogue as a scholar and community researcher. To date,
she has had over 3000 people visit her blog about place ethnography, place making and the town of
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The following excerpt is from the first post:



Hello There! I am starting this blog as a part of my dissertation work. My dissertation, Welcome to
Truth or Consequences: Place and Place Making in Modern New Mexico, explores
contemporary ideas about places from the turn of the 19th century to the present through a place
study of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. My purpose here is to create an online place where I
can share some writing and research on the town in the next year as I do my fieldwork. My ultimate
goal is to be compelling, useful and lively enough to generate readers and feedback.

Tita extends an invitation to visit her research blog, leave comments or send an email. She also
extends an invitation to come by and see her in person at the downtown Albuquerque growers
market at her flower stand, mason jar flowers, every Saturday from 7-noon this summer to talk
about place, place making, methods and the many ways we engage as scholars and community
members. You can read her blog at http://titaberger.blogspot.com/.



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Summer 2014

Clare Daniel
Clare Daniel successfully defended her dissertation, Reproducing Prevention: Teen
Pregnancy and Intimate Citizenship in the Post-Welfare Era, in March of 2014. Her article,
"'Taming the Media Monster:' Teen Pregnancy and the Neoliberal Safety (Inter)Net," is forthcoming
in the Summer 2014 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She also coauthored
an article with Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections Associate Director Claire-Lise
Bnaud that appeared in the October 2013 issue of the peer-reviewed library journal Collection
Building. She presented aspects of her dissertation research at the 2013 meetings of the Critical
Ethnic Studies Association, the American Studies Association, and the National Women's Studies
Association. She is grateful to the American Studies Association, the National Women's Studies
Association, the Graduate and Professional Student Association, the American Studies Graduate
Student Association, and the Department of American Studies for providing assistance with the
costs of attending these meetings. Clare held the 2013-2014 Clinton P. Anderson Fellowship at the
Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections and was the recipient of the Office of
Graduate Studies' 2013-2014 Graduate Student Success Scholarship for dissertation completion and
a 2013-2014 Graduate Dean's Dissertation Scholarship.
Upon leaving the American Studies Department at UNM after 8 years of graduate work, she
is thankful for all of the support she has received from faculty, especially her advisor, Alyosha
Goldstein, as well as from fellow graduate students and Department Administrator, Sandy
Rodrigue. She and her family are relocating to New Orleans this summer, but she is looking
forward to seeing her UNM colleagues at the American Studies Association meeting in Los Angeles
this November.

Linda Eleshuk Roybal
PhD candidate Linda Eleshuk Roybal spoke at the War, Memory and Gender Conference hosted by
the Center for the Study of War and Memory and the Gender Studies Program at the University of
South Alabama in March, 2014. The title of her talk was J oan of Arcs Daughter: a Memoir.

Stephen Spence
This year, PhD student Stephen Spence made significant progress on his dissertation on cinematic
realism and nationalism in recent Asian film. He is also proud to report the publication of one of its
chapters in an anthology from Routledge titled Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance.

American Studies Graduate Student Association
The American Studies Graduate Student Association (ASGSA) had an
amazing year full of scholarly conversations, community building, and
social justice organizing. Thanks to the hard work of Lissie Perkal, Rachel
Levitt, Nick Estes, Darcy Brazen, and Marthia Fuller ASGSA was able to
offer several modest grants to help support students presenting at
conferences and conducting research.

In addition to financially supporting graduate students, ASGSA was
involved in co-sponsoring several talks by visiting scholars including Dear
Indigenous Studies, It's Not Me, It's You: Why I Left and What Needs to
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Summer 2014

Change by Kim Tallbear, and Indigenous Governance and the Critique of Queer Settler
Colonialism by Scott Morgensen. Both Dr. Tallbear and Dr. Morgensens visits presented unique
opportunities for students doing queer Native studies as well as critical ethnic studies both within
American Studies and from across the university to connect and build a community of scholars
invested in challenging settler colonialism.

Within the department, ASGSA worked with faculty to increase professional support for graduate
students by co-sponsoring the departments First Friday Forums professionalization workshops.
Thanks to the labor of several faculty members, these workshops have continued to build and
expand on conversations about how to apply for funding, dealing with the complexities of graduate
school, job applications, CV construction, postdoc applications, and thanks to the thoughtful
feedback at the Fall research symposium provided by faculty, students were better prepared to
present their work at the myriad conferences graduate students attended this year. We also
participated in the departments Welcome Week events for prospective graduate students, and we
are very excited by the work of our in-coming colleagues.

This year ASGSA was also part of a University wide coalition of
students working to make the investments UNM makes with our
tuition dollars more transparent and ethical. We had some initial
success in passing a resolution through the Graduate and
Professional Student Association, our graduate student
government, which called for divestment from corporations that
profit off of human rights abuses. Unfortunately, the resolution
was overturned in a last minute rescission, however, we look
forward to continuing to oppose the use of our tuition dollars,
which we are going into substantial debt to pay, being used to deport, imprison, and oppress our
families, friends, and colleagues.

As the departments graduate student association, ASGSA hopes to continue working with and for
American Studies graduate students to increase support for graduate students as well as increase
transparency at all levels of the University. We are especially looking forward to seeing everyone at
next years First Friday Forums! To get involved with ASGSA and network with other American
Studies graduate students contact: Rachel Levitt at relevitt@unm.edu


Graduate Program News
Letter from Director of Graduate Studies, Rebecca Schreiber
This year the American Studies Department held numerous professionalization workshops
for graduate students. In the fall of 2013 there were three workshops: How to Survive and Thrive
in Graduate School, which was led by Tony Tiongson, Shant Smalls, Clare Daniel and Eileen
Shaughnessy; a conference presentation workshop with Amy Brandzel; and a funding workshop
that included a panel of faculty and staff including Shant Smalls, Elly Van Mil and myself. In the
spring of 2014 there were two workshops. Alyosha Goldstein led the first on publishing, and Tony
Tiongson and Katie Holscher organized the second on the process of applying for an academic job.
These events were well attended by current graduate students.
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Summer 2014

The Open House for prospective graduate students, which was held on April 4, was a
success. I would like to thank Ben George, Tania Garcia and members of ASGSA for helping with
the event, including current graduate students who hosted prospective graduate students. My
appreciation also goes to Adriana Ramirez de Arellano, Elly Van Mil, and Suzanne Schadl who
participated on a panel about funding and research opportunities at UNM, and to OGS for a grant
that enabled us to bring prospective graduate students to campus.
In addition, the Office of Graduate Studies generously supplied us with funds to produce a
brochure for the graduate program. Tony Tiongson, Michael Trujillo and I would like to thank
George Luna-Pea who designed the brochure, which will be sent out this summer.
I would like to congratulate all of our graduate students who completed the MA or PhD
program during the 2013-2014 academic year:

Doctor of Philosophy
Clare Daniel (Spring)
Reproducing Prevention: Teen Pregnancy and Intimate
Citizenship in the Post-Welfare Era

Andrew Marcum (Summer)
Material Embodiment, Queer Visualities: Presenting Disability
in American Public History

Andrea Mays (Summer)
Normative Disruptions and Representational Politics in the
Works of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Nella Larsen
and Allan Rohan Crite: 1915-1945

Jane Sinclair (Summer)
Graduating with distinction
No Admission Required: Sovereignty, Slots and Native
American Art
Master of Arts
Tania Garca (Summer)
Transnational Perspectives on Representation, Authenticity and
Expressions of Visual Memory in J ewish Women and Childrens
Holocaust Narratives

George Luna-Pea (Summer)
Graduating with distinction
Intimate Gestures: Race, Photography, and Spectatorship in
Tijuanas Dumps and Irregular Settlements

Samuel Markwell (Fall)
Unsettling Accounts: Life, Debt and Development in the
Middle Rio Grande

Rafael Martnez (Spring)
Counter-Culture Youth: The Undocumented Youth Movement
from1986 to the Present

Trisha Martinez (Spring)
Evalution in Fandangos, Fiestas, and Flamenco: Adding to the
Repertoire of Chicano Expressive Arts

Eileen Shaughnessy (Spring)
The Un-Exceptional Bomb: Settler Nuclearism, Feminism, and
Atomic Tourismin New Mexico


2013-2014 American Studies Lecture Series
During the 2013-14 academic year, the American Studies Department hosted or co-hosted #
speakers on the UNM campus as part of the Lecture Series. The Department is grateful to the other
campus departments and organizations that helped to sponsor these speakers. These include: the
Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies; the Feminist Research Institute; the Institute for
American Indian Research; the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute; the American Studies
Graduate Student Association; Out Queer Grads; the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and
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Summer 2014

Questioning Resource Center; and the UNM Anthropology Department, Chicano and Chicana
Studies Program, Communication and J ournalism Department, English Department, Peace Studies
Program, Religious Studies Program, Spanish and Portuguese Department, and Women Studies
Program;

On October 8, Dr. KimTallbear presented the lecture entitled Dear
Indigenous Studies, Its Not Me, Its You: Why I Left and What Needs to
Change. Tallbear is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Native
American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas-
Austin. In her lecture, she discussed her self-professed on-again, off-again
relationship with Indigenous Studies. She argues that Indigenous Studies
must throw off its Eurocentric old-school bonds to the humanities in
recognition of Indigenous ontologies that acknowledge and engage
multiple academic disciplinary relationships in order to not alienate the very indigenous
communities who need more from Indigenous Studies if they are to self-govern and thrive in the
21
st
century.

On November 7, Dr. Mishuana Goeman presented the lecture entitled
(Re)Mapping Our Nations: Gendered Geographies and Native Narrative
Markings. Goeman is the Vice Chair and Associate Professor of Gender
Studies at UCLA. In her lecture, she addressed concepts of spatial justice
by asking the question, whose land is it that is deemed public by interests
that have always been about the privatization of land and bodies? She
argues that we might (re)map the social, historical, political, and
economical in these moments to include a critique of colonialism and
imperialism. In her words, The geographic language employed in our
work toward spatial justice has potential potency of unpacking neo-liberal
accumulations of private wealth, but recognition of colonial restructuring of land and bodies must
be recognized in this process.

On November 18, UNM American Studies Professor Alex Lubin presented a
lecture entitled Black Panther Palestine. Based on material in his latest
book publication, Geographies of Liberation, Professor Lubin discussed the
transnational politics of intercommunalism that linked the U.S. Black
Panther Party to the emerging anti-colonial politics of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization following the J une-1967, Six Day War in Palestine.
More than providing an analysis of how Palestine circulated in the Black
freedom movement Black Panther Palestine documented the overlooked history of how the
Palestinian national movement engaged the Black radical tradition and influenced groups like the
Panthers. Moreover, Black Panther Palestine located Arab Israeli J ews within the context of
Black anti-colonialism by recalling the formation of the Israeli Black Panthers at the critical nexus
of Afro-Arab political imaginaries.


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Summer 2014

On J anuary 31, Dr. J oshua Dubler presented a lecture entitled The Rise,
Fall, and Rise of Radical Prison Religion. Dubler is Assistant Professor of
Religious Studies at the University of Rochester. Drawing from his new book
Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison, Dubler looked at
the period between 1960 and 1980 when incarcerated Americans used
religion to issue direct challenges to the fundamental legitimacy of the
American nation state. He asked the questions, Whate were the social, legal
and administrative logics that made such politically-minded religious
radicalism possible? What changed to make such religious radicalism
impossible? And how might this past help us make sense of whats happening today with American
prisoners standing together to protest the conditions of and the preconditions for their incarceration?

On April 4, Dr. J os E. Limn presented his lecture entitled Hispanic Self-
Fashioning: The Making of a Mexican-American Middle Class Identity. Limn
is a J ulian Samora Professor and Director of the Institute of Latino Studies at
Notre Dame. His presentation explored the socio-economic but also discursive
emergence of a Mexican-American middle class against a rhetorical reassure
stemming from a long held antipathy toward the middle class by Western
intellectuals including the Chicano intelligentsia of the 1960s and 70s. His
analysis drew on historical and contemporary socio-economic data as well as
paintings, literature, popular culture and ethnography.

On April 10, esteemed filmmaker Alex Rivera presented
his lecture entitled Engineering the Border: Reimagining
America. In his presentation, Rivera detailed the ways in
which science, technology, and the law have been used
during the first one hundred years of American border
enforcement to grow the border, transforming it from a
line in the sand to a vast legal matrix that now covers the
entire country. As a new techno-legal network of border
enforcement has emerged, so have new forms of
resistance to it. The lecture included clips from Riveras
films, including Sleep Dealer, Why Cyberbraceros?, The Sixth Section, and The Borders Trilogy,
and addressed themes of immigration, globalization, and technology.

On May 1, Dr. Scott Morgensen presented a lecture entitled Indigenous
Governance and the Critique of Queer Settler Colonialism. Morgensen is
Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at Queens
University. In his work, Morgensen engages in new scholarship in queer
Indigenous studies and advances the critique of queer settler colonialism. In
his lecture, he asked the questions, When do non-Natives invoke critically
queer affinities precisely to evade their landed responsibilities to Indigenous
governance? How can gestures to queer anti-colonialism still invest in the
work of occupying, incorporating, and replacing Indigenous peoples? In
response, he argues that these acts are directly disrupted today when queer Indigenous criticism
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Summer 2014

turns to highlight the decolonization of nationhood, genealogy, and sovereignty within resurgent
Indigenous governance.

Alumni News

Former PhD student J ames F. Ruddle announces the recent publication of his novel My Name is
Luke by Amika Press in Chicago. After spending time in academics, he had a lengthy and
successful broadcasting career in Chicago. Upon leaving the broadcasting industry, Ruddle
followed his passion and lived on his custom built boat full time. The novel follows from Ruddles
love of sailing.

In a recent message to the Department, J im said I was a student back when the glaciers were
moving north out of Wisconsin and gained the knowledge and background for the career I later
pursued in broadcasting. I was a news anchor in Chicago for many years, and an NBC
correspondent, retiring to go sailing.

http://www.robertfeder.com/2014/05/11/ex-anchorman-ruddle-sets-sail-as-novelist/

Of course, this is a minor matter in the scheme of things, however, when fifty years after leaving
UNM (and not a dewy-eyed youngster then) a former student is still able to put sentences together
to form a novel set in mid-Nineteenth Century America, and have it published (not SELF), the
American Studies Department gets my thanks.


On a quiet day in 1858, two desperate men hijack a schooner from the
Marblehead, Massachusetts harbor. Trapped aboard his grandfathers boat is
fifteen-year-old Luke Constance. He is a normal kid who plays pranks on the
townsfolk and has a crush on Agatha, his classmate. But Luke is not
ordinaryvery well versed himself, he reads aloud to workers in small, local
shoemaking shops. And he knows more about sailing schooners than most
seasoned seamen. Told by Luke with wry humor and a teenagers sense of
fun, this extraordinary adventure confronts the seas wrath and mens foibles
and the violent rage of both. In the end, Luke needs every bit of his wit,
learning, and resourcefulness to survive. (description from Amazon.com)






We would love to hear from more of our alumni. If you have news youd like to share (a new
book, new appointment, an adventure that studying with us may have helped prepare you for,
etc.), please let us know. You can send your news in an email to amstudy@unm.edu and well
be sure to include it in our next newsletter.
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