J. Kehaulani Kauanui (President), Wesleyan University

J. Kehaulani Kauanui is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on critical race studies, indigenous sovereignty rights, nationalism, and gender & sexuality. She earned her doctorate in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity is newly released from Duke University Press (2008). Her work appears in the following journals: American Quarterly, American Indian Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Mississippi Review, Comparative American Studies, American Studies, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Pacific Studies, The Contemporary Pacific, Social Text, Women's Studies International Forum, The Hawaiian Journal of History, and SAQ – South Atlantic Quarterly. Along with Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Kauanui is the co-editor of a new e-journal Critical Indigenous Studies, which will be launched in December 2008. She is also the producer and host of a public affairs radio program, "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond," on WESU, Middletown, CT, which is archived online at: www.indigenouspolitics.com. In April 2008, she co-founded the Association for Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Recently, J. Kehaulani Kauanui co-edited a special forum of American Quarterly (Volume 60, Number 2, June 2008) on Native Feminisms with Andrea Smith. Besides the co-written introduction, Kauanui authored a solo piece, “Native Hawaiian Decolonization and the Politics of Gender.” More recently, Kauanui had an article published in SAQ called, "Colonialism in Equality: Hawaiian Sovereignty and the Question of US Civil Rights,” in a special issue on Settler Colonialism, edited by Aloysha Goldstein and Alex Lubin.

Mary Battenfeld, Wheelock College

Mary Battenfeld divides her teaching duties at Wheelock College between “straight” literature courses and her true love, interdisciplinary offerings in American Studies.  She came to Wheelock in 1993, after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland , and spending a year as a Fulbright Professor in Indonesia . She is the editor of the 2001 edition of Helen Doss’s 1954 memoir of life as an adoptive mother of twelve, The Family Nobody Wanted.  Interests in the history of adoption continue to motivate her current research project on the evolution of adoption law in the nineteenth century

Eve Raimon (President), University of Southern Maine

Eve Raimon received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University in 1995. Her book, The "Tragic Mulatta" Revisted: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Antislavery Literature, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2004. She teaches courses in ethnic studies, gender studies, popular culture, critical thinking, literary theory, critical race theory, and expository writing. Her research interests intersect American studies and cultural studies. She also teaches in the Women's Studies program in Portland. She has published on the political history of U.S. miscegenation, on service learning and adult students, on the interdisciplinary teaching of race, and on student transference and resistance in the feminist classroom. She is currently co-editing a collection on Harriet Wilson, author of Our Nig: Or Sketches in the Life of a Free Black in relation to issues of race and region. She currently holds the position of faculty chair at USM Lewiston-Auburn College.

Veronica Savory McComb (Secretary 2008), Boston University

Veronica Savory McComb graduated as a Senior Fellow with Honors from Dartmouth College in 2004 where she studied Film and Television theory and production. Ms. McComb is an advanced graduate student in Boston University's American and New England Studies Program. Her areas of interest include American cultural history; race, ethnicity, and immigration; film and television studies; and African American popular culture . Her current research project is a comparative study of Muslim and Christian Nigerian immigrant groups their relationships with other groups of African descent via religious worship.

Elif Armbruster (Treasurer 2008), Suffolk University

Elif Armbruster is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses in American Realism, Women Writers, and Women Studies. Her research and teaching probe the intersection between American Realism and American Domestic Architecture in the late nineteenth century and emphasize the literary authority and domestic designs of William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Armbruster is currently revising her doctoral dissertation, Reading in Three Dimensions: Authorship, Architecture, and American Realism, for book publication. She received her PhD in American Studies from Boston University in 2005.

Nirmal Trivedi (Webmaster 2008), Boston College

Nirmal is a doctoral student at Boston College working in American Studies, 19th century American literature, and postcolonial theory. He received a B.A. from the University of California at Irvine in Comparative Literature. He has published articles and reviews in borderlands e-journal , Journal for Asian American Studies, H-Net and teaches courses in World LIterature, Non-Fiction, Cultures of Imperialism, and Composition. His dissertation is on the figure of the war correspondent in American culture, from the Mexican War until the Spanish-American War. He blogs periodically at http://bostoncoop.net/~ntrivedi/wordpress/ and be contacted at trivedni AT bc DOT edu.

Betsy Klimasmith (ASA Representative), University of Massachusetts, Boston

Betsy Klimasmith is an Assistant Professor teaching in the American Studies and English departments at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research and teaching center on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and culture, particularly urban culture. Her new book, At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930, examines the changing ways in which Americans made their urban homes—in boarding houses, row houses, tenements, apartments, and hotels—and imagined, largely through novels, how these homes might shape a new sort of American subject. She coedited Exploring Lost Borders (U of Nevada P, 2000), a collection of criticism on fiction, drama, and poetry by Mary Austin. She is currently at work on a new project, Taboo Textualities, that examines scientific, legal, and literary constructions of marriage, desire and sexuality in the antebellum U.S.

Anthony J Antonucci, University of Connecticut

Anthony Antonucci received a B.A. from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. More recently, he received an M.A. from the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME. He is currently a Ph.D student in the History department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. Anthony's current research interests include the social and cultural history of eighteenth and nineteenth century North America, comparative regional identities and the History of the Book.

Stephanie Dunson, University of Rhode Island

As a scholar of African-American literature who situates herself within the larger discipline of American Studies, Professor Dunson cultivates a broad range of interests, including art history, music history, nineteenth-century American literature, gender studies, material culture studies, ethnic studies, and popular culture studies. Her primary literary interest is in slave literature; her critical focus is to examine means by which each generation of American writers gives voice to the unarticulated trauma of early slave narratives. Her accompanying interest in exploring non-literary ways black people in America have given voice to their experiences (through art, artifact, motion, music, etc.) has led her to the broad interdisciplinarity afforded in American Studies. In her work, she is drawn to odd-angled questions, unexplored connections, and surprising relationships because she believes that to explore the full richness and diversity of African-American culture and history requires no less. Her most recent project has been to study the cover illustrations, lyrics, and melodies of sheet music from the blackface minstrel tradition to gain insight into the racial attitudes of middle-class women in nineteenth-century America.

Al Flynn (Secondary School Representative), Stoughton High School

I retired from active teaching in June, 2007 after nearly thirty years in Massachusetts High Schools. In addition to American studies and traditional American history, I taught modern world history, and electives on sociology, law, Vietnam, economics, business and accounting. My proudest achievements are actually extra-curricular, having started both a leadership program and a gay-straight alliance at our high school. I hold an undergraduate degree in business from Northeastern University and a Masters degree in History from Bridgewater State College. I am currently a member of the Joiner Center (UMASS-Boston) web project team. Our responsibility is to provide web access to the rich Vietnam-related archive held by the Center. I am also a U.S.Army – Vietnam veteran. I also served as a program reviewer for the Massachusetts Department of Education, evaluating teacher-training programs in universities and colleges in Massachusetts, and have been part of a team of teachers who assisted the Museum of African American History in Boston to develop its educational programs and redesign its interactive museum. We also assisted Anthony Cromwell Hill in designing the educational component to the WCVB production of "Return To Glory". I served as a founding member of the Secondary Education committee of the American Studies Association.

Caroline Frank (Secretary), Brown University

Caroline Frank received a Ph.D. from the Department of American Civilization at Brown University in May, 2008, and is teaching history at the Rhode Island School of Design. She co-directs an archaeology on a coastal Rhode Island farm. Her dissertation on Chinese porcelain in 18th-century British America and her interests are thoroughly interdisciplinary, pulling her in the directions of history, art history, anthropology, and public humanities. While she is committed to surmounting the barriers that divide these academic disciplines, she has found bridging the distance between public and private spheres of knowledge and object collection to be a greater challenge. Whose history is this anyway? At a time when the stories and material culture of early America are being ambitiously reclaimed by a growing number of dominant institutions and individuals, she believes in a scholarly calling to steer the uncomfortable course. She expects and has found support for this work in NEASA and, as a council member, endeavors to maintain the viability and vitality of this locally based resource for all Americanists working in or on New England.

Mishuana Goeman, Dartmouth College

Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca): Goeman's PhD work in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford lead to an introspection into the way that social, political, economical and cultural geographies inform various aspects of stories and communities in a twentieth-century history of spatial restructuring. She is particularly interested in the project of Native nation building as a spatial project that must consider the ways that colonialism has constructed race and gender for Native people in order to create healthy communities. She held fellowships at Stanford's Research Center on Race and Ethnicity as well as the Institute for Research in Women and Gender Studies at Stanford and a Newberry Library Fellowship. After a stint as a University of California Post-doctoral Fellow at Berkeley in Ethnic Studies, she managed to find her way back to New England. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College in English and Native American Studies and also teaches in Women and Gender Studies. She is at work on her Manuscript entitled, Unconquered Nations, Unconquered Women: Native Women (Re)mapping Race, Gender, Nation. She co-authored a chapter, "Achieving Gender Equity for Native Americans," in the Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity Through Education, for which she was a winner of the Groves Conference on Marriage and Family 2005 Feldman Award. Single author article and book chapters are forthcoming in American Quarterly and in the Native Feminisms Without Apology anthology.

Dayo F. Gore, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Dayo F. Gore is an Assistant Professor in the Women's Studies Program and associated faculty in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She received her B.A. from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2003. Her areas of interest include African American History and 20th Century U.S. Political and Cultural Activism and she regularly teaches course on feminist theory, U.S. Radicalism and African American Women's History. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript titled The Work of Radicals: Black Women's Political Thought and Activism in Postwar America. Integrating the study of Cold War politics, U.S. feminism, and African American history, the study examines the intellectual work and activism of black women radicals operating within the U.S. left during the 1940s and 1950s.

Rich Holtzman, Bryant University

Rich Holtzman has been an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bryant University in Smithfield, RI, since receiving his doctorate in Government from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. He regularly teaches courses on American Government, the Modern Presidency, Government & Business, Campaigns & Elections, and Political Ideologies. Drawing on various influences in political and social science as well as the humanities, Holtzman's research focuses on the power, influence, and constructed meanings of contemporary presidential rhetoric. Current research projects involve the rhetoric of George W. Bush's Compassionate Conservatism and the rhetoric of national service in the 2008 presidential election.

Mike Millner, University of Massachusetts-Lowell

I have been assistant professor of American Studies and English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell since 2005. I teach "Introducing American Studies," "Debating Values in U.S. Culture," "Representations of War in U.S. Culture," "Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Culture and Theory," and other courses in American and comparative American cultural history. I am working on a book about the emergence of the sensational public sphere in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which brings together my interests in book history, journalism history, public-sphere theory, and social-movement history. I have also been involved recently in two collaborative projects on "post-identity politics" and "depression" (economic/social and psychological). My primary institutional goal is to build the American Studies program at UMass Lowell, in part by connecting it to the long history of the city of Lowell, to other American Studies programs in the region, and to programs abroad. I did my Ph.D. work at the University of Virginia and post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago

Marta Rivera Paczynska, Tufts University

Marta Rivera Paczynska is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Tufts University. Her dissertation, entitled "Nuyorican Writers Resisting the Rhetoric of Respectability" explores intersections of family, sexuality, race, and nationality in 20th/21st century anglophone Puerto Rican literature. Her research interests include queer studies, literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, and ethnic studies.

Ben Railton is Assistant Professor of American and Ethnic Literature at Fitchburg State College; if the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education approves FSC's new American Studies Major, he will also in September 2009 be its first Director of American Studies. His first book, Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893 (Alabama, 2007) analyzes constructions of history in American culture and literature in the years between the Centennial and Columbian Expositions. His current project seeks to redefine American identity through close examination of five personal narratives (from the first five centuries of post-contact American existence) of cross-cultural conversation and transformation, and concludes by reading Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father as a particularly eloquent engagement with the ways in which we, as 21st century Americnas, are descended from that history.

Renee Romano, Wesleyan University

Renee Romano is an Associate Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on modern African American history, civil rights, sexuality, World War II, and historical memory. She received a PhD in History from Stanford University in 1996. Her first book, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Harvard University Press, 2003), examined the political, cultural, and social history of black-white marriages in the United States from 1940 to the present. She co-edited the anthology, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia, 2006), which explores the significance of portrayals of the modern black freedom struggle in different sites of memory. She is currently working on a new project about recent efforts by southern states to prosecute unpunished crimes from the civil rights era.

Sara Sikes, Massachusetts Historical Society

Sara Sikes is currently employed with the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she contributed to the publication of Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 8 and Papers of John Adams, vol. 14. Her professional background also includes five years employment as an education outreach coordinator in museums and special collections. She currently serves as the Chair of the NEASA Secondary Education Committee. Sara completed her MA in American Studies at the University of Southern Maine in 2005.

Gretchen Sinnett, Salem State College

Gretchen Sinnett is a Visiting Lecturer in Art at Salem State College, where she teaches courses on American and contemporary art. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and her M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in 1996. She approaches images from a socio-historical perspective and is currently working on an article about turn-of-the-century portraits of mothers and adolescent daughters. Her research interests include exploring how visual representations help shape cultural conceptions about gender, life stage (particularly childhood and adolescence) and family roles. She was a co-recipient of the 2007 Mary Kelley Prize for her paper analyzing late nineteenth-century visualizations of female adolescent sexuality.