American Studies

Past Honors Theses

Breadcrumb

Past Honors Theses

Individuals with asterisks (*) next to their names are annual American Studies Thesis award recipients.

2024

  • Naomi Gutiérrez

    Title "Ella fue mi maestra": The Intergenerational Understandings of Traditional Gendered Knowledge Among Mexican Immigrant Mothers and Mexican-American Daughters
    Thesis Advisor Dr. Mark Ocegueda

  • Charlotte Haq

    Title Dancing Through the Diaspora: Romani History, Performance and Peoplehood
    Thesis Advisors Dr. Andre Willis and Dr. Emily A. Owens

2023

  • Alexa De La Fuente

    Title The Messy In-Between: Representations of Latina Survivors of Gender-Based Violence in Television Shows (2013-2022)
    Thesis Advisor Dr. Iván Ramos

  • Béatrice Duchastel de Montrouge

    Title Painting a Picture of Providence: Contemporary Murals and the Development of the Creative Capital's Identity
    Thesis Advisor Dietrich Neumann

  • Noah Glickman

    Title Inscribed on Skin and Bark, An Originary Violence: Unraveling the Human-Nature Binary
    Thesis Advisor Ravit Reichman

  • Miya Kazuko Matsuishi

    Title Red-Pilled: An Ornamentalist Reappraisal of The Matrix
    Thesis Advisor Daniel Kim

  • Ren L[i]u

    Title Towards a Trans Crip of Color Erotics: Poetic Practices in 'Imagining a Totally Inverted World'
    Thesis Advisor Emily Lim Rogers

2022

  • Abigail Barton

    Title 400 Years of Dispossession: Emergency and Austerity in the Rhode Island Welfare State
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

  • Sofia Boracci

    Title "Not A Walk In The Rain": On The Making and Breaking of Archival Silences Around Childhood Sexual Abuse
    Thesis Advisor Beverly Haviland

  • Audrey Therese Cabrera Buhain

    Title At The Moment of Capture: cross disciplinary poems
    Thesis Advisor Mary-Kim Arnold

  • Abigail Chun

    Title Sites That Bind: Mapping Intersecting Native and Japanese/American Histories of Settler Colonial Incarceration On The Gila River Relocation Center Site
    Thesis Advisor Naoko Shibusawa

  • Jane Freiman

    Title Loitering Looks, New York's Anti-Mask Law
    Thesis Advisor Sophie Abramowitz

  • Jamila Hanifa Beesley

    Title "The Architects of the Solutions They Need": Dalit Feminism in the U.S. Caste Abolition Movement
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

  • Nicole Kim

    Title Nonlinear Temporalities: Ocean Vuong, Embodied Memory, and Queer Desire
    Thesis Advisor Daniel Kim

  • Arianna Lunow-Luke

    Title Asian Settler Aloha 'Āina, Envisioning Solidarities through Relationships to Place in Hawai'i
    Thesis Advisor Kevin A. Escudero

  • Anna Maria Aguto

    Title Complicating Hope: Climate Change, Technology, and the Future in Philippine Speculative Fiction
    Thesis Advisor Susan Sumlyan

  • Mara Marques Cavallaro

    Title "More Than Just A Class": An Oral History of Ethnic Studies in the Sequoia Union High School District
    Thesis Advisor Matthew Pratt Guterl

  • Kelly Nurataaq O'Brien

    Title "These Spaces Weren't Meant For Us": Indigenous Students Navigating Mental Health in College
    Thesis Advisor Adrienne Keene

  • Lillian Pickett

    Title (En)gendering Violence, Imagining Safety: Carceral Politics in Rhode Island's Feminist Movement, 1970-2009
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

2019

  • Aya Wen-Sim Anna Chiong-Bisbee

    Title Moving and Being in Community: Narratives of Asian American Dancers from Seattle
    Thesis Advisor Patricia Ybarra

  • Victoria Huynh

    Title Resilient Roots: Vietnamese Refugee Gardening in Camden, New Jersey
    Thesis Advisor Naoko Shibusawa

  • Nnamdi Jogwe

    Title Igbo Tribal Identity in Tokyo: Traditional Japanese Exclusion, American anti-Black Racism, and Biafran Activism
    Thesis Advisor José Itzigsohn

  • Jeremy Lee Wolin

    Title Against Bronzewashing: Contemporary Artists and The Remaking of Monuments
    Thesis Advisor Samuel Zipp

  • Andy M.T. Pham

    Title (Re)configuring Dirty Bodies: Early AIDS, Melodramas, and the Work of Remembering and Reimagining
    Thesis Advisor Deborah Weinstein

  • Kevin Mynor Morales Quintero

    Title Becoming (Visible): Queer Central American-Americans in the K-12 Context
    Thesis Advisor Kevin A. Escudero

  • Sean R. Briody

    Title Ever True: The Traditions of the Brown University Band
    Thesis Advisor Robert P. Emelen

  • Shanze Tahir

    Title The Resilience in the Health Journeys of Pregnant Patients of Color and Low-Income Patients
    Thesis Advisor Elizabeth Hoover

  • Dayana Tavarez

    Title Bad Neighbor: Tracing U.S. Benevolent Governance, Neo-Colonialism, and Anti-Trafficking Initiatives in Latin America and the Latinx Diaspora
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

2018

  • Amani Ariel

    Title It Is Alchemy That We Are: Visions of Black Mothering
    Thesis Advisor Emily A. Owens

  • Lena Bodham

    Title The Dead and The Living: How Do We Do Public Programming in Rural Cemeteries?
    Thesis Advisor Steve Lubar

  • Bethlehem D. Desta

    Title "Y'all Better Quiet Down", Considering How to Tell Those Stories of Transgender, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex People Incarcerated in Rhode Island
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

  • Sierra Edd

    Title Unsettling Borders: Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples in the Borderlands
    Thesis Advisor Monica Muñoz-Martinez

  • Emma Galvin

    Title A Working Education; Student Labor, Class Solidarity, and Neoliberalism in Brown University Dining Services
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

  • Natalia Ginsburg

    Title In The Care of The State: Deinstitutionalization and the Remapping of Mental Health Care in California
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

  • Mitchell Johnson

    Title Written on the Land; Whiteness, Property, and Historical Production in a Settler-Colony
    Thesis Advisor Ralph E. Rodriguez

  • Nikkolette Lee

    Title The Body Multitudinous: Exploring Fat Embodiment and Racialization at Brown University
    Thesis Advisor Elizabeth Hoover

  • Natalie Lerner

    Title "Gentrification is a Decision Society is Choosing to Make": White Supremacy, Housing Injustice, and Maternal-Child Health Disparities in Portland, Oregon
    Thesis Advisor Dannie Ritchie

  • Deborah Pomeranz

    Title Policing the City: How Discourses of Public Safety Reshaped New York
    Thesis Advisor Matthew Pratt Guterl

  • Kara Roanhorse

    Title Dimensions of Native and Indigenous Youth Resistance; Online and Beyond
    Thesis Advisor Adrienne Keene

  • Liliana Sampedro

    Title Somos Brillantes: Alternative Educational Strategies for the Survival and Resistance of Mexican Americans and Mexican Immigrants in Lane County, Oregon
    Thesis Advisor Monica Muñoz-Martinez

2017

  • Sage Fanucchi-Funes

    Title "Can we just have the babies?": An Analysis of Midwifery in Rhode Island and the Treatment of Low Income Patients and Patients of Colors
    Thesis Advisor Deborah Weinstein

  • Samuel Lin-Sommer

    Title Rewriting Memory: Essays on Memories of Colonialism in Providence
    Thesis Advisor Colleen Kim Daniher

  • Payton Smith

    Title #Girlpower in the Age of Digital Beauty Pageants: A Study of Collegiate Women's Perception of the Representation of Fitness Celebrities on Instagram
    Thesis Advisor Hilary Levey-Friedman

  • Nancy Truong

    Title This Is How We Win, A Qualitative Study on Vietnamese Nail Salon Workers in the Bay Area
    Thesis Advisor Elena Shih

  • Phoebe Young

    Title (Re)Imagining Brown 250+: Histories of Violence in the Making of An American University
    Thesis Advisor Monica Muñoz-Martinez

2016

  • Mollie Forman *

    Title Children of (wo)Men: Motherhood in Apocalypse Film and Television
    Thesis Advisor Beverly Haviland

  • Brian Semel

    Title "Tell me everything": Towers, Trauma and Television in a Tense-less 9/11
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

2015

  • Olutoye Adegboro

    Title Give Me Your American, Your Multicultural, Your Hilarious Masses; Examining Immigrant and Ethnic Humor in the Stand-Up Comedy of Margret Cho, Maz Jobrani and Trevor Noah
    Thesis Advisor Robert G. Lee

  • Hannah Duron

    Title Culture, Kids, and Conversations: How Three Providence Out of School Programs Teach Tolerance and Identity
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • Patricia Ekpo *

    Title Let’s be Very Public with our Suffering: Tumblr’s Online Depression and Its Queer Possibilities
    Thesis Advisor Leticia Alvarado

  • Daniel O'Donnell

    Title Everything Good That I See Comes from White Folks”: A Critique of Brown University Service-Learning
    Thesis Advisor Elizabeth Hoover

2014

  • Margaret Hanson *

    Title Remaking American Girl(hood): Fan Reuse, Reinterpretation, Alteration and Expansion of the American Girl Brand
    Thesis Advisor Steven Lubar

  • Haruko Hashimoto

    Title Magical Girl Transformed: How the Feminist Origins and Agency of the Japanese Shojo in Pop Culture Are Imported and Consumed in America Through Orientalism
    Thesis Advisor Liza Cariaga-Lo

  • Evelyn Sanchez *

    Title The Language of Motherhood: The Story of an Adoption Agency
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • Nathaniel Wardwell

    Title Monopolizing Reading:An Analysis of Scholastic Book Clubs’ Place in American Education and Commerce
    Thesis Advisor Laura Snyder

2013

  • Brendan DeWolf *

    Title Owning Slavery: Cultural Memory, Community Identity, and Brown's Slavery and Justice Initiative
    Thesis Advisor Matthew Pratt Guterl

  • Leah Douglas

    Title Politics of Pop: Soda Regulation and How We Talk About Obesity
    Thesis Advisor Kathryn DeMaster

  • Lucy Kissel

    Title Care at the Close of Life: Factors that Motivate, Reward, Challenge, and Sustain Hospice Nurses
    Thesis Advisor Joan M. Teno

  • Mary Laski *

    Title Gracie for President: Women and American Comedy
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • Jennifer Lawrence

    Title Looking In / Breaking Out: The Transformative Influence of Prison Art Objects
    Thesis Advisor Anne M. Valk

  • Anna Tifft

    Title The Object as Emotional Vessel: George and Jessie Gardner, their Collection, and the Gardner House at Brown University
    Thesis Advisor Robert P. Emlen

2012

  • Ria T. DiLullo *

    Title Spokesduck: Donald Duck's World War II Cartoons from 1942 through 1944: An Intersection between Propaganda and Animated Shorts
    Thesis Advisor Beverly Haviland

  • Julian A. Jimarez Howard

    Title Biggie and Bateman: Contemporary Effects of the American Dream as a Consumer Ideology
    Thesis Advisor Ralph E. Rodriguez

  • Alyssa Kichula

    Title Platforms for Art: Examining the Goals and Impacts of Public Transit Art Programs
    Thesis Advisor Anne M. Valk

  • Tanmay Misra

    Title Essays in Contemporary American Film: Youth Culture and Politics between 9/11 and Obama
    Thesis Advisor B. Anthony Bogues

  • Kelly J. Schryver

    Title Keeping Up Appearances: Examining Teen Girls' Self-Presentation and Social Comparison on Facebook
    Thesis Advisor Maureen Sigler

  • Rebecca Soules

    Title Being Shaker in the Twentieth Century: Canterbury Shaker Village, 1905-1939
    Thesis Advisor Robert P. Emlen

2010

  • Molly Mills

    Title In Their Own Words: Discourse, Decision-Making and Creativity of Young Immigrant Women in Northern California
    Thesis Advisor Matthew Garcia

  • Chelsea Miro

    Title Kingdom of God: The Political Agenda of Conservative Evangelical Christians from 1940 through 2010
    Thesis Advisor Beverly Haviland

  • Jung Wook Suh *

    Title Writing A New Deal: The Federal Writer's Project in New York City
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • Alex Tudela

    Title The Other Youth: Post-Second World War Constructions of Latino Youth
    Thesis Advisor Richard Meckel

2008

  • Stephen John Babish

    Title Lions or Lambs?"; Hollywood Cinema in the Post-9/11 era
    Thesis Advisor James T. Campbell

  • Hannah Furst

    Title Loud Voices: Three Second-Generation Jewish Immigrant Women Writers and the Quest to be Heard
    Thesis Advisor Richard Meckel

  • Monica Raquel Pelayo

    Title Cultural Intersections: The Development of Olvera Street and China City
    Thesis Advisor Ralph E. Rodriguez

  • Robin Marie Perenchio

    Title Connecting and Expanding Communities: Contemporary Native Radio
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • Rebecca Michelle Silverman

    Title Bubbie's Secrets' Unwrapped: Cooking up Culture in an American Jewish Sisterhood
    Thesis Advisor Marcy Brink-Danan

2007

  • John Sydney Butler

    Title You Diplomacy: New Strategies for American Public Diplomacy

  • Arminda Elizabeth Smith

    Title Round and Round They Go: The Rise and Fall of Rocky Point Park

2006

  • Ashley Elizabeth Harness

    Title Liberation Incarnate: A Study of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York 1972 - 1990
    Thesis Advisor Mari Jo Buhle

  • Amita Manghnani

    Title Rhythm Nation: South Asian America Performs Race Onstage
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • Kate Maxwell

    Title Constructing a Creative Urban Space: The Development of AC220 in Providence, RI.
    Thesis Advisor Paul Buhle

  • Julia Wolfson

    Title My Experiences with Oral History and Industrial Evolutions: Voices of Pawtucket's Workers
    Thesis Advisor Paul Buhle

2005

  • Heather Velez

    Title Lurkers at the Threshold: Fans of H.P. Lovecraft
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

2004

  • Elizabeth J. Ault

    Title Why Would A Fellow Want a Girl Like Her?": Cinderella Stories on Film and the Reinscription of the Status Quo, 1950-2003
    Thesis Advisor Lewis Seifert

  • Alina Engelman

    Title Revolutionary Signs: Sandinistas and the Deaf Nicaraguan Experience
    Thesis Advisor David Lewis

  • Ilana Friedman

    Title Tom Levin and Polly Greenberg's Reflections on the Rise and Demise of the Child Development Group of Mississippi
    Thesis Advisor Paul Buhle

  • Caroline Staudt

    Title Elbowing into a Man's World: the Effect of Athletics on the Women's Movement at Brown University and in America in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century
    Thesis Advisor Brian Casey

2003

  • Jennifer Hahn

    Title Feminist Magazines of the Third Wave
    Thesis Advisor Jane Gerhard

  • Moye Ishimoto

    Title Anime in America and The American Otaku
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • Anna Purinton

    Title Sí, se puede (yes, it can be done): The Movement for Living Wages and Accountable Development
    Thesis Advisor Paul Buhle

  • Daniel Weber

    Title Rock and Roll Reconnections: Mobilizing the Organic Intellectual Voice
    Thesis Advisor Jane Gerhard

2002

  • Katherine Chavez

    Title Powerful Places: The Santuario de Chimayó and Loretto Chapel of Santa Fe
    Thesis Advisor Susan Smulyan

  • César Cuauhtémoc García H.

    Title In the Shadow of the River: McAllen, Edinburg, and Mission in the Post-NAFTA Economy
    Thesis Advisor Suzanne Oboler

  • Benjamin David Healy

    Title Visitor with a Deadline in Mind: Privacy, Publicity, and the Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
    Thesis Advisor James Cullen

  • Katharine Malinowski

    Title Standards-Based Reform: The Chicago Experience and its Implications for the New Federal Role in Education Reform
    Thesis Advisor Luther Spoehr

  • Jason Michael McGill

    Title Power, Race, Culture: Postwar Jazz as Fruit and Seed
    Thesis Advisor Paul Buhle

  • Elizabeth Singer More

    Title Bodies of Writing: Changing Feminist Ideas of the Body and Expertise in Our Bodies, Ourselves 1971-1976
    Thesis Advisor Richard Meckel

  • Hannah Ruth Thompson

    Title Immigrant Life in Large Town New England: The Ways in which Church, Jobs, and Leisure Shape the Brazilian Community in Framingham, Massachusetts
    Thesis Advisor Richard Meckel