News
New Director of Undergraduate Studies
The Department of America Studies welcomes Annie Coleman as new Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Annie Gilbert Coleman is a 20th century American historian, whose work combines cultural studies, social history, and ethnic studies with environmental history. She is interested in the intersection between consumer culture and landscape, especially in the American West. Her first book, Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies (2004), argued that skiing has always been tied to issues of place and identity, and that the ski industry transformed resort towns and their people in powerful, strange, and important ways. Her first article, "The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing" (1996), won an award at the Pacific Historical Review, and she has published other articles on tourism and gender. Her current project is a book on the history of professional outdoor guides that examines their role as intermediaries between local landscapes and paying clients. Annie lives with her husband Jon, kids Harry and Louise, and assorted animals in South Bend.
Contact Information
Annie Coleman
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
319 Decio
574-631-0389
acolema3@nd.edu
Congratulations to Jason Ruiz
Jason Ruiz won the Latin American Studies Association’s Best Dissertation in Latino Studies Award for his dissertation, “Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Mexico in the Popular Imagination of the United States, 1876-1920”
Ruiz’s research examines representations of travel to Mexico that circulated in the United States during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910, known as the “Porfiriato”), a period marked by massive foreign investment and Mexico’s rapid—though incomplete—modernization. It argues that travel was an important practice for the popular conceptualization of Mexico as a place in which to extend the Western frontier, famously lamented as “closed” by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1893. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript.
Contact Information
Jason Ruiz
Department of American Studies
314 O'Shaughnessy Hall
574-631-2168
"Making Words dance" will be published in April 2010
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"Making Words Dance: Reflections on Red Smith, Journalism, and Writing" features lectures by fifteen of the country’s most respected journalists and writers given as part of the lecture series at the University of Notre Dame honoring award-winning columnist Red Smith. Edited by Robert Schmuhl, director of the Red Smith Lecture since its inception in 1983, the collection offers assessments of the news business and writing by Ted Koppel, Frank McCourt, Jim Lehrer, Judy Woodruff, David Remnick and James Reston, among others. Notably, the book also includes the final lecture on journalism given by Tim Russert before his untimely death in 2008.
The collected lectures are complemented by sixteen articles and columns by Smith, a stylist and reporter whose writing always danced and taught lessons about the craft. Both an entertaining tutorial on the writer’s art and an incisive commentary on the state of contemporary media, "Making Words Dance" is a fitting celebration of the life and work of one of American journalism’s most notable figures.
"Making Words dance" will be published in April 2010 by Andrews McMeel Publishing.
American Studies Major Awarded Urop Grant
American Studies senior Sarah Rodts was recently awarded an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program grant to support her senior honors thesis research. Sarah will travel Colonial Williamsburg over Fall Break to investigate how the nation's preeminent living history museum represents interracial contact in Colonial America. Her project specifically focuses on how museums narrate (or remain silent about) African-American and American Indian history. Sarah began this research as part of a senior seminar, titled American Travels, taught by Professor Jason Ruiz.
For more information about the UROP program, please see the program's website: http://isla.nd.edu/undergraduate-research/about/
New book examines gender and American Catholicism 
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, assistant professor of American studies and associate director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of “New Women of the Old Faith,” an examination of female roles in the Catholic church in the Progressive Era, recently released by the University of North Carolina Press.
In the book, Cummings places Catholic women at the forefront of two defining developments of the Progressive Era: the emergence of the “New Woman” and Catholics’ struggle to define their places in American culture.
Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, S.N.D., founder of Trinity College; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, S.S.J.; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure and anti-suffragist. Each story emphasizes that women who were faithful members of a patriarchal church were capable of trailblazing work on behalf of women, but regarded themselves as marginalized Catholics.
Although many opportunities were presented to women in the 20th century as a result of the battle for equality, Cummings’ subjects said they pursued goals not as “New Women” but as daughters of the “Old Faith.” Cummings presents a strong argument for the need to devote more attention to religious identity as a factor in interpreting women’s lives and building their character.
Cummings’ research and teaching interests center on the study of American religion, with a particular focus in the history of gender and Catholicism. She is a regular contributor to Commonweal, America and American Catholic Studies.
