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American Studies Faculty

The distinguished faculty in Saint Louis University’s American Studies Department are trained specifically in our discipline. Most have earned a Ph.D. in American studies and all have worked extensively in the field as scholars, teachers, curators or creative artists.

Heidi Ardizzone, Ph.D., interim department chair
Racial identity and constructions of race and ethnicities, race and citizenship in the Midwest and St. Louis, African American history and culture, activism and protest movements, women's and gender history.

Faculty

  • Flannery Burke, Ph.D.
    American regional cultures, environmental humanities, borderlands, and the intersection of art, literature, and public policy.
  • Benjamin Looker, Ph.D., undergraduate program coordinator and internship coordinator
    Urban studies and urban representational politics, jazz and other American musics, cultural studies, the performing arts in social movements, politics of culture in the post-war U.S.
  • Kate Moran, Ph.D., graduate program coordinator
    Late 19th- and early 20th-century American history and religion, transnationalism.
  • Corinne Wohlford, Ph.D.
    Collective memory, race, medical humanities, St. Louis, transnational American studies, poetry writing. 

Emeriti Faculty

Faculty In the News

Benjamin Looker, Ph.D. (American Studies), gave a lecture at Kalamazoo College in Michigan titled “The Past and Possible City: How St. Louis Urban History Can Help Us Interpret Neighborhood Landscapes of Today." The May lecture was jointly sponsored by the institution’s Mellon-funded Humanities Integrated Locational Learning project and its American Studies Program.

Kendyl Schmidt (Ph.D. candidate, American Studies) was invited to present a dissertation chapter to the Missouri Regional Seminar on Early American History at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. Schmidt also presented research at the Midwest Junto for the History of Science held at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri.

Zackary Davis (Ph.D. candidate, American Studies) presented a paper titled “King Sacrifice: Hero Worship and Individualism in US Chess Culture” at the Popular Culture Association’s national conference in San Antonio.

Emily Dodson Quartarone (Ph.D. candidate, American Studies) presented a paper titled “Obscuring the Blame and Shifting the Other: The Americanization of Godzilla” at the Midwest Popular Culture Association (MPCA) conference in Chicago. Quartarone won one of the MPCA’s four Gary Burns Travel Grants based on the paper.

Darby Ratliff (Ph.D. candidate, American Studies) received a competitively awarded Hilltop Fellowship for research at Georgetown University’s special collections in Summer 2023 for a proposal titled “Education, Empire, and Americanization: Native American Boarding Schools & Catholic Education in the 19th Century.” Ratliff also gave the conference paper “Divergence & Development: Thinking Expansively about School Archives and Native American Boarding Schools” at the NEH-Sharp Grant Conference of the American Catholic Historical Association, held in Tuscon, Arizona.

Amelia Flood (Ph.D. candidate, American Studies) held a competitively awarded Margaret W. Moore and John M. Moore Research Fellowship this year for archival research at the Swarthmore College library in Pennsylvania.

Bryonie Carter (Ph.D. candidate, American Studies) was promoted to full professor in English at St. Charles Community College in St. Charles, Missouri.

Michael Brickey (Ph.D. candidate, American Studies) became editor of the new St. Louis–based journal Informal History, which aims to “promote the study of history through collective discovery and individual creative expression.” St. Louis Magazine featured Brickey with other editorial team members in September 2022.