Honors College Faculty
Dr. Benjamin Alpers received his PhD in history from Princeton University in 1994. He joined the faculty of the Honors College in 1998. His primary teaching and research interests concern twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural history, with special interests in political culture and film history. Among the courses he offers in the Honors College are colloquia on World War II in history and memory and film noir, and Perspectives courses on American social thought and politics and culture in the Great Depression. Ben is also affiliated with the History Department and the Film and Video Studies Program.
Ben is currently working on a book on Leo Strauss, Straussianism, and American academic and political life.
He has received grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in support of his research. He is also completing a shorter project on anti-Nazism in the films of Frank Borzage.
Ben’s other interests include cooking, politics (local, national, and beyond), and playing the piano. His wife, Karin Schutjer, is an Associate Professor of German in OU’s Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. Karin and Ben have two children who have been known to put in the occasional appearance at the Honors College.
Publications include
Book:
Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
Article:
“This is the Army: Imagining a Democratic Military in World War II,” Journal of American History 85: 129-63.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain, a native of Chicago, holds and A.M. and Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University (2008). She is also a proud graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism (2001, Magazine Journalism) Chatelain's research focuses on African-American girls in the 20th century. Her dissertation "The Most Interesting Girl of this Country is the Colored Girls: Girls and Racial Uplift in Great Migration Chicago, 1899-1950" examined Chicago’s African-American women's groups and their outreach initiatives to girls during the mass movement of African-Americans from the South to the North. Chatelain has presented papers at the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History conference, the Biennial Meeting of the Women and Gender Historians of the Midwest and the American Culture/ Popular Culture Association meeting. Chatelain's teaching interests include girls' studies, popular culture, African-American women's history and ethnic studies. Prior to moving to Oklahoma, Chatelain was the University of California-Santa Barbara's Black Studies Dissertation Fellow, where she taught a seminar on African-American girls in the United States. Prior to studying at Brown, Chatelain served as the Harry S Truman Scholarship Foundation's Resident Truman Scholar in Washington, D.C. At the Truman Foundation, Chatelain served as deputy director of leadership programs and lead editor/designer for Truman publications. A Truman Scholarship alum, Chatelain has served the Foundation as a Senior Scholar at the annual Truman Scholars Leadership Week.
Julia Ehrhardt, Associate Professor of Honors and Women's Studies, earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1998. Her scholarly work focuses on middlebrow women authors from the turn of the twentieth century through World War Two, and she is currently she is working on a book about dieting in Jazz Age literature.
Professor Ehrhardt's classes reflect her wide-ranging interests in American Studies and Women's Studies. In addition to teaching the Perspectives classes "Food, Culture, and Society" and "Race and Ethnicity in America," she offers upper-level colloquia on
women's literature, issues in American identity, and the body in American culture. With Professor Randolph Lewis, she co-teaches classes on the American documentary tradition and the artist in America.
Professor Ehrhardt is a co-faculty advisor of THURJ (The Honors Undergraduate Research Journal) and is the faculty advisor to OUtdoor Adventure, the student group that organizes pre-orientation backpacking trips to New Mexico for incoming students.
Publications:
Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Josephine Herbst, and Rose Wilder Lane. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.
"Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature." Food and
Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment 14 (2006): 91-109.
"Meeting at a Barbecue: Dorothy Allison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Literary Miscegenation." Critical Essays on the Works of American Author Dorothy Allison. Ed. Christine Blouch and Laurie Vickroy. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. 71-90.
"Tourists Accommodated-With Reservations: Dorothy Canfield's Writings, Tourism,
and the Eugenics Movement in Vermont." Evolution and Eugenics in American
Literature and Culture, 1880-1940: Essays on Ideological Conflict and Complicity. Ed.
Lois A. Cuddy and Claire M. Roche. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003. 187-
202.
"`To read these pages is to live again': The Historical Accuracy of The Age of
Innocence." The Norton Critical Edition of The Age of Innocence, ed. Candace Waid.
New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002. 401-12.
Dr. Steven Gillon graduated from Brown University with a Ph.D. in American History in 1985. His research and teaching interests span topics in American history and culture ranging from the Presidency, Congress, and the function of government. His recent books include The Democrat’s Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (1992 Columbia Univ. press), Boomer Nation (Free Press 2004), The American Experiment: A History of the United States (2004 Houghton Mifflin), and 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America (2006 Crown). Dr. Gillon has taught at both Yale University and Oxford University and is currently professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. He is Resident Historian at the History Channel, where he hosts a Sunday morning show, HistoryCenter, and Movies in Time. He also appears in numerous TV specials and on National Public Radio.
Dr. Richard Hamerla completed his Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University in 2000. He also has degrees from the University of Akron and Kent State University. His research interests vary widely, as his C.V. suggests. Dr. Hamerla has worked on topics dealing with the history of American chemistry and physics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientific apparatus, and science on the “American research frontier.” Recently, Hamerla’s areas of concentration have shifted to more contemporary scientific issues, including the development, history, use, and importance of weapons and weapon systems. Dr. Hamerla has received many academic honors including the Edlestein International Studentship and the Carl Ubbelohde Prize for Teaching. His book, Two Centuries of Progress; A Bicentenial History of the Chemical Industry inCleveland, 1796-1996 was published in 1996. His recent book, An American Scientist on the Research Frontier; Edward Morley, Community, and Radical Ideas in Nineteenth-Century Science is scheduled for release in the spring of 2006.
Select Publications:
Two Centuries of Progress, A Bicentennial History of the Chemical Industry in Cleveland, 1796-1996. American Chemical Society. 1996.
An American Scientist on the Research Frontier; Edward Morley, Community, and Radical Ideas in Nineteenth-Century American Science. Springer Academic Publishing. 2006.
“History of Bioweapons Development and Deployment,” in Biodefense; Principles and Pathogens. Horizion Science, 2005.
“Edward Williams Morley and the Atomic Weight of Oxygen: The Death of Prout’s Hypothesis Revisited.” Annals of Science, 60 (October, 2003), 351-372.
I am an interdisciplinary scholar trained in American Studies. I write about the politics of creative expression in film, video, and art.
In 2000, I published Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America. De Antonio (1919-1989) was the most important political filmmaker in the US during the Cold War, with a list of classic documentaries to his name: Point of Order (1963), In the Year of the Pig (1969), Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), and Mr. Hoover and I (1989). He also was crucial to the early careers of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg, John Cage, and Andy Warhol. Blending an exploration of his unique cinema with critical insights about art, literature, and media, I tried to offer de Antonio as a lens to focus on the complex terrain of post-World War II America. My next book, Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker, appeared in Spring 2006, and was the first book devoted to an indigenous filmmaker.
I have also written about art and literature. I published an article on Cherokee painter Leon Polk Smith in American Indian Quarterly, while my article on the relationship between American Studies and Cultural Studies was the lead article in the Canadian Review of American Studies in Fall 1998. I also co-edited (with Thomas F. Staley) a book on the writer Stuart Gilbert, who was part of James Joyce’s circle of intellectuals in Paris in the late 1920s. It's called Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal.
As of late 2007, I am writing articles on various subjects: Italian photography; the cinema of Alex Cox; the idea of intent in nonfiction film; even the ethics of Borat. I am also continuing to write about indigenous media and have been working on a project called Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native Ground which examines the intersection of cinema and Navajo culture over the past hundred years.
I have been in the OU Honors College since 2001 and have enjoyed teaching a wide variety of courses in Media Studies and American Studies: ‘Cinema/Culture,’ ‘American Visions,’ 'American Social Thought', 'Documenting America,' 'Cinema of Subversion,' 'Introduction to Visual Culture,' as well as courses in the Film and Video Studies Program where I am also a faculty member. In Spring 2006 I was a Senior Lecturer in the Fulbright Program, where I taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the Universita degli Studi di Catania, Italy. Since then I have taught a new course called "Imagining Italy," in the Honors in Italy program in Arezzo, Italy.
In addition to teaching and writing, I also have a strong interest in film production. In 2003, LivingArts Gallery exhibited my 65 experimental video, Red Dream, for a six week period; Muleskinner Blues, my 52 minute documentary about the East Texas logging industry in the 1930s, was shown in several regional film festivals; and my short video, View, was shown at Independent Artists of Oklahoma Gallery in Oklahoma City in 2004. With Circe Sturm, I am co-producing a documentary about Sicilians in Texas called Texas Tavola: A Taste of Sicily in the Lone Star State which should premiere in late 2007.
Feel free to give me a call if you would like to learn more about what I do. I can be reached at rlewis@ou.edu and am always happy to have visitors at my office in David Boren Hall 153.
Dr. Robert Lifset
Robert Lifset is the Donald Keith Jones Assistant Professor of Honors. Educated at the University of Chicago (A.B.) and Columbia University (Ph.D.), Lifset’s research and teaching interests focus on energy history broadly defined. His dissertation, a narrative of an environmental struggle in New York’s Hudson River Valley in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, explores how rising energy production and consumption played a powerful role in sparking an increase in environmental activism in post-war America. He is currently working on a history of the energy crisis of the 1970’s and is preparing an edited volume of essays on American energy policy in the 1970’s.
Robert Lifset is also the founding web and list editor of H-Energy (http://www.h-net.org/~energy/), an online, interdisciplinary website devoted to the study of energy history.
Professor Lifset has taught at Barnard, Columbia, the University of North Florida and the University of Houston. He looks forward to offering a wide range of courses examining the history of energy. They include: A Survey of American Energy History, The Atom in American Society, The History of the American Petroleum Industry, 1859-1973, The Oil Curse in 20th Century World History and Readings in the Energy Crisis of the 1970’s.
Amanda Minks is Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor in the Honors College and is affiliated with the Anthropology and Musicology Departments at OU. Her work on expressive practices is interdisciplinary, with theoretical and methodological frameworks drawn from linguistic anthropology, ethnomusicology, and Latin American cultural studies. She carried out her doctoral research on Corn Island, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, focusing on indigenous Miskitu children’s peer-group activities. Her dissertation is entitled Interculturality in Play and Performance: Miskitu Children’s Expressive Practices on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (Columbia University, 2006). Her current interests include indigenism, revolution and social movements, music and nationalism, gender and sexuality, and intellectual property. Dr. Minks has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Institute of International Education.
Selected Publications:
“Performing Gender in Song Games among Nicaraguan Miskitu Children.” Language and Communication 28:36-56. 2008.
“‘Goblins Like to Hear Stories’: Miskitu Children’s Narratives of Spirit Encounters.” In Selves and Identity in Narratives and Discourse, ed. M. Bamberg et al., pp. 9-40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2007.
Guest editor of World of Music, special issue on children’s expressive practices. 2006.
“Mediated Intertextuality in Pretend Play among Nicaraguan Miskitu Children.” Texas Linguistic Forum (SALSA) 49:117-127. 2006.
"Afterword." Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth. Ed. Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. 2006.
"From Children's Song to Expressive Practices: Old and New Directions in the Ethnomusicological Study of Children." Ethnomusicology 46(3):379-408. 2002.
"Growing and Grooving to a Steady Beat: Pop Music in Fifth-Graders' Social Lives." Yearbook
for Traditional Music 31:77-101. 1999.
I am a cultural geographer with a keen interest in the geopolitics of representations mediated by visual technologies. My research focuses on authoritative scientific, lucrative commercial and oppositional ‘popular’ visualizations of indigenous peoples, places, and practices in the Americas. Favorite frameworks for analysis include post-colonial cultural theory, critical geopolitics, and feminist studies of technoscience.
Most recently I spent four years undertaking ethnographic inquiry into the production of videos made by, with, and for indigenous individuals and organizations in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. I examined the intersections among indigenous activism,
academic advocacy, and neo-liberal restructuring. This project provided insight into 1) the transnational geographies of access and collaboration that facilitate indigenous video production, and 2) the oppositional cultural politics that characterize contemporary indigenous movements in Latin America.
Currently I am drawing on this research to write articles that (among other things) critique the geographic metaphor of network, explore the gendered geographies of indigenous development initiatives, and highlight the potential of video technologies to amplify historically-marginalized actors’ articulations and assessments. I am also transforming my dissertation into a monograph titled Advocating Indigenous Video in Oaxaca, Mexico. And I am also formulating a follow-up project that will take me back to Mexico in order to explore audience reception of the oppositional cultural politics that distinguish most indigenous videos.
I am delighted to be part of the Honors College (I am also faculty in OU’s Geography Department (http://geography.ou.edu/). With Professor Hammerla, I am co-teaching the “What is Science?” course, which comprises an exciting, multi-faceted return for me since I earned a MA in the History of Science from the University of Oklahoma before embarking on a PhD in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Geography. While I have a list of courses I would like to teach in the near future (examples include classes concerned with cities, development aid & advocacy, and indigenous media), I would like to hear from Honors College students whose curiosity was piqued by any the above. What would you like to learn about? Kindly contact me at laurel@ou.edu
Publications
Mobilizing indigenous video: The Mexican Case. The Journal of Latin American Geography vol. 5(1): 113-128 (2006).
The Search for Well Being: Placing Development with Indigenous Identity. pp. 87-107, In Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World. eds., Tim Cresswell and Ginette Verstraete. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003). Reprinted in the forthcoming volume Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Practices, and Politics, eds., Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart. Durham: Duke University Press.
The “cultural turn” in the classroom: Two examples of pedagogy and the politics of representation. The Journal of Geography vol. 101: 240-249 (2002).
Chips off the old ice block: Nanook of the North and the relocation of cultural identity. pp. 94-122, In Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, eds., Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Dr. Sarah Tracy began teaching at the Honors College in the Fall of 1999. Her primary field of expertise is the history of medicine, but she studies a wide variety of related subjects. Tracy teaches courses on historical and ethical issues in American medicine and public health, the history of alcohol and drug use in the United States, the sociology of science, and food in American culture. Sarah Tracy received her Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania; she taught at Penn, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale before starting at OU. Tracy has received numerous awards and fellowships, including those of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institute for Mental Health, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the American Association of University Women. She is Chair-Elect of the Association of American Medical Colleges Group on Combined BA/MD Programs.
Tracy is co-editor with Caroline Jean Acker of a collection of essays entitled ALTERING AMERICAN CONSCIOUSNESS: THE HISTORY OF ALCOHOL AND DRUG USE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1800 TO 2000 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Tracy’s monograph ALCOHOLISM IN AMERICA FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO PROHIBITION was published in 2005 (paperback in 2007) by The Johns Hopkins University Press. She is currently writing a biography of nutritional physiologist and cardiovascular epidemiologist Ancel Keys, who organized the International High Altitude Expedition of 1935, developed the U.S. Army’s K-Ration, conducted the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, first demonstrated the link between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, and popularized the Mediterranean Diet through his bestselling cookbooks. This project grew out of Tracy’s long-standing interest in the evolution of human taxonomies or body typing schemes and their changing political significance for science, industry, and popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. During the Spring 2008 semester, she will be a visiting professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard University.
Selected Publications
“Medicalizing Alcoholism 100 Years Ago,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 15, (2), March/April 2007.
“Alcoholism,” in Social Issues: An Encyclopedia of Controversies, History, and Debates, M.E. Sharpe, 2006.
“Why Addiction is a Disease,” Christian Networks Journal, (addiction issue) Summer 2005.
Alcoholism in America From Reconstruction to Prohibition, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005 (pb. in 2007)
"Days of Recurring Desire: Inebriety and Alcoholism in Patient Narratives, 1900-1920," The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Newsletter, Fall 2005, Vol. XV No.2, 1, 7-9.
Co-editor (with Caroline Jean Acker) and contributor, Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800-2000, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
“Contesting Habitual Drunkenness: State Medical Reform for Iowa’s Inebriates, 1902- 1920,” The Annals of Iowa, Summer 2002, 241-85.
“Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse" in The Oxford Companion to United States History, Paul Boyer, ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
“Exercise and Mood” letter to the editor, Science Times, New York Times, 17 October 2000, D3.
Medical Humanities
In 2000, the University of Oklahoma Honors College and the College of Medicine
created a partnership to further the study of humanities in relationship to medicine.
Today, at the Honors College there are two programs for students interested in pursuing
study in the medical humanities: the Medical Humanities Scholars Program (a highly
competitive academic and extracurricular program for graduating high school seniors
who know they wish to attend medical school; this is a joint venture with the OU College
of Medicine) and the Medical Humanities Minor (a stimulating and flexible
interdisciplinary curriculum open to any honors-eligible student at OU; the minor is
administered by the Honors College alone). The first three classes of Medical Humanities
Scholars are now attending the OU College of Medicine, where the opportunities to explore the art, as well as the science, of medicine are growing. Likewise, dozens of students have taken advantage of the Medical Humanities Minor, focusing on topics such as the politics of AIDS vaccine development in Africa, the bioethics of cross-cultural medical practice, music therapy, and the history of sports medicine. Please take a moment to learn more about the exciting venues for studying “the art of medicine” at OU and at other institutions by exploring our new web site:
http://www.ou.edu/honors/MedicalHumanities
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