Senior Symposium

The culmination of the American Studies Program is the completion and  presentation of the students' Senior project at the end of their Senior year.  Each May the Program hosts a Senior Symposium where each senior presents their research.   Each senior presents their research to an audience of faculty, cohort classmates, friends and even families fly in to celebrate their student's hard work!  This event is a highlight of the Program and a tremendous accomplishment for each student.  This year the event was held on May 16th.

2025 Senior Symposium 

Mariam Adesiji

Advisor:  Megan Geigner

American Mass Incarceration's Impact on Women of Color:  A Cross-Cultural and Auto-Ethnographic Exploration of Incarceration-Adjacency

Audrey Bannister

Advisor:  Ivy Wilson

Reimagining Interracial Interactions:  Jazz Clubs as Sites of Social Formation in Mid-20th Century Chicago

Vivian Bui

Advisor:  Michelle Huang

Exceptional Spaces, Manufactured Enemies:  How the U.S. Empire Sustains Itself

Garrison Guzzeau

Advisor:  Ivy Wilson

Anyone Can Wear the Mask:  Re-Spinning American Identity in the Spider-Verse

MC Hall

Advisor:  Susan Pearson

Undercover for the Working Class:  Eva Gay and Nell Nelson's Gilded Age Investigative Reporting as a Response to the Labor Question

Liliana Jurado

Advisor:  Sarah McFarland Taylor

To Embrace or Erase:  The Impact of Social Media and Reality Television on the Relationship Between the Mormon Church and its Peculiarities

Jessica Ma

Advisor: Reuel Rogers

The Geography of Race:  How Racialization Affected Asian American and Black Housing Experiences in San Francisco

Ben Meyer

Advisor: Andrew L. Roberts

The Minimal State:  Meditations on Christopher Lasch

Elliot Oppenheim

Advisor:  Geraldo Cadava

Pecan Trees and Picket Lines:  Koinonia Farm and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Southwest Georgia

Kara Peeler

Advisor: Geraldo Cadava and Joanna Grisinger

No Safe Spaces:  Understanding Discrimination Against LGBTQ+ Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in Domestic Violence Shelters Post-Obergefell

Camilla Pelliccia

Advisor: Peter Fenves

Between Heaven and Earth in Kafka

Gracie Schecter

Advisor:  Anthony Chen

The Wartime Use of Dr. Seuss and the Racial Tropes He Could Not Cut Loose:  An Analysis of Dr. Seuss' Liberalism, Political Cartoons, and Children's Authorship

Ellie Solomon

Advisor:  Robert Orsi and Phillip Davis

U.S. Evangelicals and Efrain Rios Montt's Guatemala:  A Spiritual Justification of Genocide

Mia Xia

Advisor:  Nitasha Sharma

Equalizer No More:  Intersections of Chinese, Black, and Choctaw Education in the Age of Separate and Unequal Policies